{"id":7640,"date":"2012-06-17T22:51:43","date_gmt":"2012-06-18T02:51:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/?p=7640"},"modified":"2012-06-17T22:51:43","modified_gmt":"2012-06-18T02:51:43","slug":"one-year-of-amateur-radio-what-works","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/2012\/06\/17\/one-year-of-amateur-radio-what-works\/","title":{"rendered":"One year of amateur radio: what works"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>So I&#8217;ve just got my digital mode setup working again. It seems that somewhere, somehow, a driver for the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tigertronics.com\/slusbmain.htm\">SignaLink USB<\/a> decided to stop working, and at best I got no signal on transmit and a very very quiet one on receive. Now my mind&#8217;s back in radio mode, I realise there&#8217;s a ton of stuff I&#8217;ve bought and found to be of variable utility. This is the good stuff:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.westmountainradio.com\/product_info.php?products_id=pro_comp_usb\">Rigblaster Pro<\/a>: this audio interface is far larger and far more expensive than it needs to be, but I got it used for a good price. Coupled with a $3 (!) USB sound card, it makes a sensitive and controllable sound device. I think I now prefer serial PTT-controlled audio interfaces to the SignaLink&#8217;s vox-style &#8220;Make a noise and I&#8217;ll transmit it&#8221; mode. It means you won&#8217;t accidentally tx system noises. That&#8217;s worth having another USB cable lurking about.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.ldgelectronics.com\/c\/252\/products\/18\/52\/1\">LDG autotuner<\/a>: because of the wild and pointless diversity in radio interfacing, LDG makes a bunch of autotuners for specific radio models. Mine just works, and will tune my mini-G5RV from 10 to 80(ish) metres.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.ldgelectronics.com\/c\/252\/products\/3\/16\/1\">Big external meter<\/a>: a cheap LDG meter is way better than the fiddly bar graph on the front of my FT-857D. I have it set up for signal on receive, and perhaps slightly unusually, AGC on transmit. Since I have a tuner and run almost entirely digital modes, it&#8217;s important that my signal doesn&#8217;t distort, so seeing AGC and being able to tweak it is important.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/heilsound.com\/amateur\/products\/prosetmicrosingle\/\">Heil Pro-Micro<\/a> headset: this is comfy, and keeps the family sane. I have the footswitch too, which really helps to run nets.<\/li>\n<li>Quarter-wave dual-bander HT antenna: The rubber ducks that all my HTs have are a bit rubbish. A simple replacement antenna allows me to talk through fairly distant repeaters from my sheltered back garden.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.k1el.com\/\">WinKeyer USB<\/a>: I&#8217;m just starting morse. The WinKeyer kit was so well put together it was a delight to build, and seems to be an utterly sound keyer.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.w1hkj.com\/\">Fldigi<\/a>: the digital mode program. Reliable, full-featured and free. It basically runs all the time on my shack computer.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/chirp.danplanet.com\/\">Chirp<\/a>: I can program all my HTs and my HF rig with this. It&#8217;s truly great, and miles better than proprietary programming software.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/pskreporter.info\/\">PSKReporter<\/a>: a few minutes after calling CQ, I can see where in the world I&#8217;ve been heard. This automatic reverse-beaconing site is magic, and I&#8217;m amazed that a lot of digital users don&#8217;t even know it&#8217;s there.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>My one annoyance about having a Linux-based shack is that ham radio is still very stuck in using serial ports. None of my computers have hard-wired RS232 ports, so I rely on USB serial adapters. These mostly work well, but Linux has a habit of shuffling the allocations around, so what was \/dev\/ttyUSB0 controlling your rig today might be ttyUSB1 tomorrow. You can get around this (if the software supports it) buy using long serial device names from <em>\/dev\/serial\/by-id\/<\/em>, which don&#8217;t change. They don&#8217;t change, that is, unless you have two Prolific serial interfaces that don&#8217;t have serial numbers set, so I can only have one attached at a time. Annoying.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So I&#8217;ve just got my digital mode setup working again. It seems that somewhere, somehow, a driver for the SignaLink USB decided to stop working, and at best I got no signal on transmit and a very very quiet one on receive. Now my mind&#8217;s back in radio mode, I realise there&#8217;s a ton of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2290],"tags":[2284,2364,270,629],"class_list":["post-7640","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-amateur-radio","tag-amateur","tag-hamradio","tag-linux","tag-stuff"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pQNZZ-1Ze","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7640","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7640"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7640\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7641,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7640\/revisions\/7641"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7640"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7640"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scruss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7640"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}