On Sep 29, 2024, at 6:50?PM, david todd via groups.io <ac9xh@...> wrote:
hello,
Anyone trying PSK? you can do keyboard to keyboard comms with the Author.I made contacts the other day with my ubitx v6 on PSK and i was on 20 meters.Didnt overheat the finals and purred like a kitten. qsos lasted about 20 minutes for each contact. exchanged antenna,inof rigs,ages, weather, and exchanged conversations about some new antenna builds involving the TAK-TENNA.Pretty cool.
All the way to India? I’m in Norway now, and I saw on pskreporter.info that my signals were heard in India once, but so far I’m not making contacts that far away. Just around Europe mostly. I usually get by with a 20m EFHW wire on the balcony, but have gone hiking with the sbitx a couple of times with a portable vertical; the range and noise level are way better that way, no comparison. Maybe next year will get around to a dipole to hang on the trees, or some other way to get some gain. 11.1v lipo batteries were recommended… well I have an old laptop that no longer works (Acer… not recommended), but is still capable of charging its batteries; so I got the 7-pin laptop battery contacts on AliExpress, 3d-printed a battery holder, and they run the sbitx for portable use. 4000 mAh each (in theory, but they are old); I can get a couple hours of FT8 out of each of them. (Even longer than the laptop used to last, when it was working.) I watch the voltage; the power goes out suddenly when the battery gets down a little over 8V, so it would be better to shut down a bit before that and switch batteries. I got my first SOTA activation that way:
.Virginia, Nebraska,California. Canada ......Not bad for a homebrewed vertical from a $35 dollar extendable paintpole 3 ft off the ground being fed with rg6u quad shield cable.Not bad for a few watts the ubitxx puts out on 20.
PSK is underused so lets get out and use PSK. I know some will say whats the use when we have ft8, but i get tired of zombie contacts.
Yeah I agree; FT8 is new to me, but it will get boring after a while. What’s the point if you can’t have a real conversation. I can’t even fit “CQ LA/K7IHZ SOTA LA/AH-00x” in one message; so I was sending free text between calls and hoping that somebody sees it. It will be a little easier when I get a Norwegian call sign and don’t need a prefix.
I also tried RTTY for the first time over the weekend; lots of activity for the contest. I made quite a fool of myself too. First time I transmitted, it splattered like crazy… there is that attenuator at the bottom, and I found that I need to set it all the way down, -30db, to get the sbitx transmit level to look reasonable (judging from the size of the yellow bar). (Or should I be adjusting the audio level some other way?) Then it took a while to figure out how to modify fldigi’s macros to the short form they were using; etc.
Anyone for PSK? Plenty of freeware software out there. one of my old windows xp laptops which i dug out 2 weeks ago to play with it, im using digipan. very easy to run.100% easy to install.
Sure, I see fldigi can do that too. But there are lots of others that seem to be little-used. Olivia sounds good from what I read?
I run fldigi on the pi in the sbitx. (It's great that it came pre-installed.) I have a 7” external touchscreen that I found on AE a few years ago, 1024x768, just big enough for some of those “desktop” programs to fit, so that I can see sbitx at the same time on the internal screen. It doesn’t run down the battery much faster either, when I go portable. And I started hacking on the main ui file on wsjt-x to get the main window to resize smaller when I want to shrink it down. Reducing margins, minimum sizes and so on… it’s possible to have all the same stuff fit within 800x480, I think, but I didn’t try it on the sbitx yet. Soon.
I see we seem to be running the audio through pipewire-pulse on the pi. So I think it should be possible to configure it to send audio streams across the network; then when I’m at home, I ought to be able to connect from fldigi, wsjt-x or whatever on my Linux machine to the sbitx, including the audio stream. Is anybody doing that yet, or you’re just running analog mic/line connections when you want to use a separate PC?
