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Sunday, March 3, 2024

Upgrade to the Ham Station is Much Closer to Done

As you can probably tell by that lead-in, the rest of that phrase is "but not fully Done done."

I'm down to getting the software running that will allow me to monitor several places across any ham band simultaneously.  The software, called SDR Console, is a very full featured application that has to connect to various pieces of hardware and software in your computer; "down to the metal" as they say (or used to say).  There's about 109 things I need to mess with. My last update to this project was two weeks ago, Sunday Feb. 24th and I hadn't even installed the software until I finished getting all the hardware in place. That was this Friday, March 1.

In that article, and the one I started out with in December, I showed a screen capture of SDR Console running seven receivers across the 6 meter ham band.  After watching an hour long video and going over parts of it a few more times, this is mine.   I deliberately settled for six.  I was going to start with three and look at how much it loaded my computer, but decided to go with six and measure that. 

The problem I'm having is that while all the receivers seem to be working - I can see the noise fluctuating in each receiver and I can listen to that noise - I never see any signals on the computer. I've experimented by removing everything else from the SDR and connecting it directly to my outdoor antenna. Parts of the HF spectrum with a ton of signals easily audible on my station transceiver show nothing on the SDRPlay. 

The experimenting will continue.  Next is to pull the SDR out here, where I tested it when I first bought it, and assuming the radio works, it's a software configuration thing. 



4 comments:

  1. What happened to the Sterling?

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  2. Since noise is noise is noise, I often try to inject a tone of known freq/amplitude and see how that moves around in the receive band(s). Hope that helps.
    - Rob Muir
    - I am not a HAM (maybe soon), but I am a digital signal processing spirit guide.

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  3. Having been a ham for (ummm, need more fingers and toes) 54 years, I find I spent most of my time (too much in fact) dealing with software, drivers, menus and settings. I have a great HF rig (TS-890S) with a million or so settings; fortunately the defaults on most are good enough. A fine receiver (R8600) has too many settings and some are fine out of the box, but not all. A couple of dual band VHF / UHF rigs, which seem to be two radios in one box, and different interfaces for each. Add to that com port settings - a pox on whoever set up com ports as the standard for hooking radios to PCs. (I would much prefer ethernet, which unlike com ports keeps settings despite Microsoft's updates.)

    So - I'm feeling your pain! Good luck OM.

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