FUNcube Dongle

I've been spending a few hours playing around with a FUNcube Dongle Pro. There was a lot of excitement about this project a couple of years ago when it started. In order to get one you had to be quick off the mark on Ebay. I never succeeded, then I got ill and then I forgot about it. This one was passed on to me by a friend who successfully purchased one but never used it.

I started off by following the instructions in the user manual. I followed this by installing and setting up a complicated-looking SDR program called Spectravue. I was baffled by most of this program's settings and I wasn't sure if it worked.

What I should have done was try some of the SDR programs I installed when I was playing about with USB TV dongles at the beginning of the year. I started SDR#, selected the FUNcube Dongle from a pull-down list, clicked Start and it just worked!

Simon Brown's SDR-Radio worked as well, and with equal ease, though as luck would have it I tried it on the very day that the (free) licence key for the program expired. This appeared to come as much of a surprise to Simon as everyone else. As I type, Simon has just uploaded a fix which I have yet to install.

I thought I would try using the FCD as an ADS-B receiver which I did with the TV dongles but I soon discovered that I can't. The FCD looks like a budget USB sound card to the SDR software, so its bandwidth is restricted to 2 x 48kHz. The digital TV dongles can transfer a much wider bandwidth. This is noticeable if you try to receive Band 2 FM radio - through the FCD the signal sounds distorted on peaks because the bandwidth isn't quite wide enough for FM stereo which needs a full 100kHz..

It will be interesting to use the dongle with the FUNcube 1 satellite when it gets off the ground later this year (we hope!) In the meantime I'll use it to watch for Sporadic-E in the VHF band.

A virtual impossibility

If you have been following my attempts to set up beacon monitoring using a software defined radio (SDR) then you may remember that I had found that Omni-Rig, the radio control software used by Faros, the beacon monitoring software, would not talk to the virtual serial port created using VSPE in order to control the SDR-Radio software. I thought there was a problem with SDR-Radio's emulation of the Kenwood control protocol. In fact, that turned out not to be the case at all.

A reader asked if I had tried DDUtil, a.k.a. VSP_Manager, a program by K5FR so I got hold of a copy. The instructions made my hair stand on end as it seemed very complicated. But I managed to set up a virtual port pair between COM8, the control port that SDR-Radio was using, and COM9 which would be used by Faros. VSP_Manager threw up a few error boxes but it still seemed to have done what I asked. I then tried setting up Omni-Rig. The first attempt failed, but I decided to try again as the help files actually showed VSP Manager being used with Omni-Rig and sure enough I had Faros changing bands and frequencies of SDR-Radio.

My joy was boundless, but not for long. I fell at the next hurdle which was using a Virtual Audio Cable (VAC) to pipe the audio from SDR-Radio into Faros. VAC also looked complicated to set up, but what I was attempting to do was the simplest application of it. I created a virtual audio port and set the SDR-Radio output to use it. As soon as I connected this to Faros' input Faros began spitting out "divide by zero" message boxes so fast that I couldn't close them quick enough to get back to the Settings window to change it back again. Another brick wall.

A separate issue was that of creating a serial port splitter to allow two applications to connect to physical port COM3 used by my Elecraft K3. VSPE could do that easily, but yesterday I discovered that WSPR would not talk to the virtual port created by VSPE. However, VSP_Manager does not seem to enable you to split a real port into a pair of virtual ones anyway, so I did not pursue this avenue any further.

If you are confused trying to follow all this you are not the only one! I have abandoned the idea of using an SDR for beacon monitoring and am breathing a sigh of relief that I never decided to go down the road of buying a Flex or other software defined transceiver. SDR will never catch on until connecting the software defined radio to logging programs or digimode software becomes as simple as plugging in a real cable.

SDR-Radio and Omni-Rig

Yesterday I thought I would set up my Cross Country Wireless SDR-4+ receiver to use for IBP beacon monitoring using Faros. The purpose of this was mainly to reduce the wear and tear on my Elecraft K3 which otherise would have to be on 24 hours a day.

I established that Simon Brown's SDR-Radio software supported external program control by emulating a Kenwood transceiver. I therefore needed to see if SDR-Radio could be controlled using Omni-Rig, the control mechanism used by Faros.

SDR-Radio supports CAT control using a virtual serial port.

I created a linked pair of virtual serial ports, COM8 and COM9, using VSPE, a virtual serial port emulator. Using the serial ports option of SDR-Radio, I assigned the control port to COM8. Then I used a serial port emulator connected to COM9 (I use RealTerm) to verify that SDR-Radio 'spoke' Kenwood. It did. In fact it emulated the Kenwood protocol well enough to fool KComm into thinking it was talking to an Elecraft K2. So far so good.

Now to see if Omni-Rig could control SDR-Radio. Omni-Rig uses "rig files" to define the command set of different radios and it includes one for generic Kenwood. Unfortunately it did not work with SDR-Radio: the receiver indicator of Faros turned red to indicate a fault.

I downloaded the rig file documentation and debug tools from Omni-Rig's site and tried hacking the Kenwood rig file to get it to work with Omni-Rig by trial and error. But no luck. Whatever I did, the program reported an error with the inscrutable message: "RIG1 Status commands already in queue".

Error messages reported by Omni-Rig

So it looks as if I've hit a brick wall. Clearly there is something in SDR-Radio's emulation of the Kenwood protocol that Omni-Rig doesn't like. If anyone else would like to have a go solving this problem, be my guest.

Airborne!

I told Tim, G4VXE, about the trouble I was having getting a USB TV dongle to work as a VHF/UHF SDR and he emailed me a couple of files. One of those was an installation script which I suspect is the same one mentioned in the article "Cheap and Easy SDR" in the January 2013 QST which a couple of people mentioned. I had read this article at least twice and then forgotten all about it, which is a shame as it would probably have saved me several hours of abortive messing about.

I ran the script once and it seemed to work but I still could not get anything out of my ezcap dongle. I then used MagiCure to turn back the clock a few days to before I started messing about, and then ran the script again. This time it worked. I ran SDR# and it appeared to be working. I set the frequency to somewhere in the FM broadcast band and within a couple of minutes I was listening to Classic FM on 99.9MHz in stereo.

SDR# receiving BBC Radio 3 in the FM broadcast band

This was all very good, but I have any number of radios able to receive FM radio. I wanted to try receiving ADS-B aircraft beacons. But although both ADSB# and RTL1090 (ADS-B decoders) seemed to work (i.e. didn't display any error messages) they were not decoding any data. I used SDR# to monitor 1090MHz, the ADS-B frequency, and I could not see or hear any signals, though I have no idea what they are supposed to sound like.

I decided to reinstall the second dongle which had worked as a TV receiver. Then, on a whim, I thought I would try running SDR# to see if it would connect with the other dongle. To my great surprise, it did. What's more, it seemed much livelier (more sensitive) than the ezcap dongle. I tried both RTL1090 and ADSB#. Both worked and immediately started decoding packets! I started up ADSBScope and within a few seconds aircraft began to appear on the screen!

ADSBScope plotting aircraft overhead at G4ILO

After a while I got cocky and decided to see if there were any other free aircraft-plotting applications I could try, so I downloaded VirtualRadar. After a bit of trial and error I found the right settings to connect with ADSB# and I was soon seeing the aircraft passing overhead plotted on a Google map.

VirtualRadar plotting aircraft overgead at G4ILO

Strangely enough, both RTL1090 and ADSB# think they are talking to the ezcap dongle! Not surprising I suppose as I have not installed any other drivers. It would be nice to be able to use the equipment as a TV receiver as well but I suspect that would break everything! I should probably quit while I am still ahead.

Both ADSBScope and VirtualRadar are nice applications, and I couldn't say one is better than the other. VirtualRadar runs as a web server and you have to point a web browser at it to see the display. It shows more information such as the starting and destination locations of many aircraft, which is interesting. But curiously VirtualRadar does not display aircraft callsigns (like G-ADSB) while ADSBScope does.

This is looking to be an academic question as this morning ADSBScope has decided to stop working. It won't talk to either RTL1090 or ADSB# but complains repeatedly about a "comm error." Ah well, at least VirtualRadar and SDR# are still working.

Grounded

I hope all of you had a very good Christmas. I was not very well a couple of days before the holiday. Nothing to do with my cancer, I'm glad to say, but possibly a result of all the treatment for it. I'm feeling a lot better now, but have got to have more tests and may have to go into hospital for removal of gallstones or kidney stones - I'm not sure which as I've been told I have gallstones but I have had some sharp pain in the kidney area. As a consequence of this I haven't felt much like getting up at a reasonable hour to start the beacon monitor or HF APRS gateway.

Creative Design New FM+DAB USB DVB-T RTL2832U+R820T

Before Christmas my interest was piqued by Tim G4VXE's adventures using cheap digital TV dongles as receivers for, amongst other things, aircraft spotting. The first dongle I ordered was described as a Creative Design New FM+DAB USB DVB-T RTL2832U+R820T with antenna, and cost just over six quid!

EZCAP eztv645 RTL2832U / FC0013 USB DVB-T Digital TV Dongle

After a bit more reading up on the subject I began to doubt that this would be compatible with the software everyone was using so I ordered a second one, described as an EZCAP eztv645 RTL2832U / FC0013 USB DVB-T Digital TV Dongle for WIN7 LINUX SDR which was a massive £8.68 including postage from Hong Kong.

Both arrived yesterday. I tried the ezcap first, but my shack PC didn't like the mini-disc that came with it so I was unable to test it as a TV receiver. Following the instructions for the aircraft decoders I installed the driver using zadig_xp, then downloaded and ran rtl1090 which is a decoder for the ADSB packets. This seemed to work - no error messages appeared - but nothing else happened. To display the aircraft data that I hoped to receive I downloaded ADSBScope and installed it. I then spent a lot of time trying various options to connect ADSBScope with rtl1090 but got nowhere. I also tried SDRSharp in the hope that I could use the dongle as a VHF/UHF SDR, and ADSBSharp as an alterntive to rtl1090. But neither of them received anything.

After a while I gave up, disappointed. I then installed the Creative Design dongle and its software. A scan for channels found about 55 TV channels with its quarter wave antenna hung in the window. So it was obviously working. Just not with any of the SDR or ADSB software, as I had suspected.

This morning I tried installing the ezcap software CD that my shack PC couldn't read on another computer. The software installed perfectly on this laptop so I plugged in the dongle and hung the antenna in the window. The software scanned for channels and found precisely nothing. I think this proves conclusively that I have a duff ezcap dongle. Ah, eBay!

SDR Radio

An early Christmas present to myself is this SDR-4 HF receiver from Cross Country Wireless. Actually, it wasn't intended to be a Christmas present. I decided to get one a couple of months ago when I first found out about it.

I think the SDR-4 is the lowest cost ready built HF bands software defined radio on the market (£150 or about $250 US). Unless you know different, of course. However it seems that a lot of other people thought so too, as there is a waiting list - people are ordering them faster than the designer Chris G4HYG can make them!

The SDR-4 works with the usual free SDR applications. But it also works with the free version of Simon Brown HB9DRV's SDR-Radio.com application. This is the best SDR software by a mile, though due to all the treatment and medication I am receiving for my brain tumour my mind is a bit slow at the moment and I find figuring out how to do what I want with it a bit challenging.

As you might expect from the author of Ham Radio Deluxe, SDR-Radio.com has built-in support for decoding digital modes. Unfortunately I haven't managed to work out yet how to get the digital decoder waterfall to be a reasonable size: At the moment it's a small window on the left hand side which is trying to display 15kHz worth of spectrum and although I'm hearing PSK31 I can't find a trace to click on! I'm also still trying to discover if there is a PSK Browser in the program that sends reports to the PSK Reporter reverse beacon site. Hopefully someone will enlighten me.

I'm sure I'll be writing more about the SDR-4 receiver and SDR-Radio.com in due course, but in the meantime if you want more information or to ask questions about the receiver there is a Cross Country Wireless Yahoo! group. You can even try an SDR-4 out over the Internet if you follow the instructions posted by Chris. I did and it worked perfectly - and it was so nice to hear the amateur bands without the awful frying noise I have to endure here.

Yahoo! is also the place to go for information and support of SDR-Radio.com (the software.) I look forward to seeing some comments and experiences of any of my readers who are tempted into trying this software defined radio.

Cross Country Wireless SDR update

Cross Country Wireless has just announced an updated version 2 of its low cost SDR Receiver. The new version has an RF preamplifier using a power MOSFET after the RF bandpass filter which is claimed to improve sensitivity - which was a criticism of the earlier version - and reduce local oscillator output at the antenna port.

The designer Chris, G4HYG, claims that the receiver will now display a CW carrier at a level of -135 dBm on the waterfall of SDR-Radio using a 48 kHz sound card. The level of the local oscillator at the antenna port is now specified as -65 dBm, though a more typical measurement is -70 dBm. This should make it an ideal choice as a panadapter for radios such as the Elecraft K3. In fact, Chris recently stated that most orders for the receiver have been for use as panadapters, in conjunction with a sound card and suitable software such as PowerSDR-IF.

The cost of the standard SDR is £49.95. For panadapter use you will need a custom crystal for your radio's IF which increases the price to £59.95. The SDR has two (switched) local oscillators so the other one could be specified to cover 40m or 30m for use as a conventional receiver. It's also available as a built and tested board for assembly into your own case (at a significant saving.) If you built a USB sound device into the same box then it would be rather neat.

Another K3 panadapter option?

Cross Country Wireless recently introduced a new product, a built, boxed and ready to use SDR receiver that is optimized to work with the bog standard sound card provided with every computer. It covers two 48kHz segments which may be on one or two bands using a switched local oscillator. At £49.95 it looks like something of a bargain.

I was looking at the product's web page this evening and the thought occurred to me that this might make a rather good inexpensive option for a panadapter for the Elecraft K3. It would need a different crystal to cover the K3 IF output frequency which is 8.215MHz, but that shouldn't be a problem. CCW might even offer this as a stock option if there was a demand for it.

As the receiver covers 40m and 30m everything else should work OK unmodified. The key point would be whether there is adequate isolation to prevent the local oscillator leaking into the K3 IF and desensitizing the receiver - the reason why most people use a buffer amplifier when using SoftRock boards for this purpose.

I don't have a great urge to have a panadapter display and I already have three sound cards (well, one and two USB sound modules) in use with my shack computer so this isn't something I'm planning on trying. But I thought it might be worth mentioning the possibility for other K3 users. Even if the idea is a non-runner, the Cross Country Wireless receiver still looks like a very nice product.

Scratching the SDR itch

One of the blogs I regularly read is that of Larry W2LJ. Larry has been watching some of the streamed video presentations about software defined radio (SDR) coming out of Dayton and believes that SDR is now mainstream and the shape of things to come.

I would be dishonest if I said that I have never looked at some of the SDR products and wished that I had one to try. SDR is becoming an itch that many of us would like to scratch. But I suspect that, in my case at least, it is an itch that once scratched would go away. Although I'm sure that software defined radio technology will find increasing use in tomorrow's radios - as it already does in the Elecraft K3 - I hope that "black boxes" controlled via a computer console never completely usurp standalone hardware radios.

Dedicated hardware "just works". General purpose computers are just too much hassle. There are the security issues, the updates, the driver incompatibilities, the crashes, the unfathomable problems. You switch on a radio and it is ready to use. You switch on an SDR and you must then start the computer and wait for it to boot, then start the SDR application and wait for it to load. Is this progress?

Dedicated hardware works until it dies. Computer based devices only work until a new version of Windows comes out that doesn't support it. How many perfectly good printers and scanners have you had to throw away because they wouldn't work with your new computer?

Real radios have an aesthetic and provide a sensory experience that simply cannot be matched by a computer interface. Isn't turning a knob preferable to moving a slider with a mouse? Isn't making a real audio cable easier than trying to configure a virtual one? Many of us prefer a real S-meter to a graphical simulation. Most of us spend far too much time staring at computer screens already.

With real radios you can look at the schematic and get in there with your soldering iron and make modifications or fix faults. With SDR you are dependent on somebody else unless you are a skilled programmer and have access to the source code and development tools.

I can't see myself swapping any of my radios for a black box and a computer application interface any time soon. I'll still work the same bands and the same modes, so what benefits would an SDR give me? A hardware radio is instant-on, intuitive, virus-proof and crash-proof, can't be broken by some application I install on my PC, doesn't lock me into using a particular brand of operating system and won't be made obsolete by the next version.

Why SDR doesn't excite me

In his latest blog post Dave Richards, AA7EE writes: "I have an interest in SDR. At this stage in the game, I would imagine that almost anyone with an interest in radio, whether amateur radio or any other kind of serious listening, would find SDR very compelling." I'm afraid I don't. In fact I find the idea of SDR depressing, even repelling. And that isn't just because I prefer the look and feel of a real radio with buttons and knobs to a computer screen.

I say this even though I am a programmer of sorts. I have tried to learn how SDR works with the idea that if I could write my own SDR software it might become an aspect of the hobby I could get interested in. But I can't. The math is totally beyond me and I just can't understand how it works at all. The majority of radio amateurs without any knowledge of programming don't have a chance. Which makes the limit of most people's technical challenge in an SDR future that of getting somebody else's SDR software to work. And after a lifetime working with computers frankly I don't find faffing about with PCs very much fun.

A basic understanding of electronics is one of the prerequisites of getting a ham radio license. Although most of us could not design an Elecraft K3 and many of us choose never to design or even build any part of our station, most of us can understand how radio circuits work and quite a few of us can build simple circuits from a schematic. Some of us can even design circuits from scratch - a lot more of us I'd wager than could write their own SDR software.

The reason I don't like SDR is that it reduces the majority of us to the role of appliance operators. That may be fine for those who are happy being appliance operators and just want the best technical solution for working weak DX or amassing the most contest points. But for the tinkerers and builders SDR doesn't leave a lot to experiment with, because most of the interesting stuff happens in software, inside the computer, where we don't have the tools or the knowledge to tinker with it. If you are using a SoftRock or a top of the line Flex you will be looking at the same software user interface. And I don't find that a very enthralling prospect.

Receiving SAQ on VLF

Roger G3XBM has posted a reminder in his blog that the Swedish station SAQ will be making a special Morse transmission today on 17.2KHz VLF to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Nobel Prize award to Guglielmo Marconi and Karl Ferdinand Braun.

As 17.2KHz is in the audio spectrum it should be possible to receive this transmission with nothing more than a computer sound card. And Johan SM6LKM has written a software defined radio (SDR) program that will do just that. All you have to do is download the program from his web page, unzip it to a suitable folder (it's tiny, and there is no installer) and run it.

You need to connect an antenna to the left channel of the sound card microphone input (the program uses the Windows default sound card.) I don't have a long wire or any other VLF antenna so I have just used the outer (screen) of the feeder to my attic multiband dipole. Check that you have enabled the microphone input and increase the volume slider to maximum. The program will tell you if the input level is too high. You should see signals appear that disappear when you disconnect the antenna.

You can then increase the output gain in the program itself until you can hear the background noise. I can hear a few warbly carriers near the top part of the spectrum, as you can see in the screenshot above, and the occasional burst of static, so I'm definitely receiving something off-air and not just locally generated noise. There's a button that will set the correct frequency for the SAQ transmission.

It's too late for the transmission that was sent at 0800UTC today, but another is scheduled for 1600UTC. I have no idea if it will be possible to receive it with such a simple setup and poor antenna but it will be fun to try. If you read this too late for that, then there will be another transmission at 0800UTC on Christmas Eve, December 24th. I'd be interested to hear if anyone manages to receive it using this program, and with what antenna.

Between a SoftRock and a hard place

A couple of weeks ago I posted a message on the Elecraft reflector to the effect that if anyone was using a SoftRock SDR kit as a panadapter for the K3 and was planning on replacing it with the Elecraft P3 panadapter that is shortly going to be available, I was interested in experimenting with it and would give the SoftRock a good home. Craig, VK3HE replied that he had a kit which was mine for free if I would send my address. I thanked him very much, sent my address and a small jiffy bad with an Australian stamp plopped on to my doormat this morning. Thanks again, Craig!


What I hadn't expected, since I'd anticipated that someone would be replacing a SoftRock they'd built and used, was that "kit" meant it was an unbuilt SoftRock 6.2 Lite kit! Inside the jiffy bag was a polythene bag containing one of the most densely packed printed circuit boards I'd ever seen. There hardly seems space for all the components, which include a few SMT parts. This is going to be a baptism of fire for sure!

However, no building instructions were included. I guessed there was a PDF file on the web that can be downloaded and printed out, but so far I have been unable to find it. I went to the SoftRock Radio website and clicked on the Documentation link and bizarrely, it opened some pages about installing WordPress! This reminded me that during a couple of other wet weekends in the last couple of years I had toyed with the idea of building a SoftRock kit and couldn't even find on the website where to order one!

Google found some pages by Jack Smith that describe building a Softrock and even using it as a panadapter which are going to be required reading, but he doesn't mention where he found the instructions on how to build it. Hopefully one of my more savvy blog readers will help me out here. Otherwise I'll probably have to send Jack an email and ask where he found them.

SDR Deluxe

A new post in Dominic, M1KTA's blog about the SoftRock he built for Ham Radio Deluxe author Simon Brown, HB9DRV, provides a link to Simon's latest software project, SDR-RADIO.com.

In one of the last posts he made before leaving the Elecraft reflector, Simon mentioned that his new ambition was to create the world's best software defined radio interface, and that is clearly what SDR-Radio is intended to be. It's certainly a vast improvement over the button-encrusted interface of Power SDR, and could even tempt SDR sceptics like me. But no matter how gorgeous Simon's interface I still have some major reservations to overcome before I could allow a black box and a computer program to replace my K3.

The first, knowing Simon's opinion of Linux is that this new program of his is going to be Windows-only. I hate being tied into Microsoft's proprietary operating system with its high cost, bloat, endless update hassles and contempt for backwards compatibility. Sure, I'm using Windows XP on my shack PC (and my netbook) now, because I found that many of the best programs I needed were available on Windows only. But SDR-Radio is just going to perpetuate this Microsoft indispensability. I develop KComm for Windows and Linux precisely so I have the option to try Linux again and still be able to use it. I just wish more ham radio developers would use cross-platform tools and make their source code open so that, even if they didn't want to make a Linux version themselves, the possibility exists for someone else to do it.

My second reservation is about using software defined radios. For me, the look and feel of radios with their knobs and buttons is one of the pleasures of playing with radio. Interacting with a computer screen, which an increasing number of us spend a large part of our working lives doing already, is not in itself pleasurable. I think our eyes, fingers and mouse arms need a change of activity now and again.

My third reservation concerns the inscrutability of software defined radio, and how it takes away some of the accomplishment of amateur communication. The reason why I, despite owning a K3, still enjoy making contacts with simple QRP radios is that to fully experience the magic of radio communication you need to understand exactly how your voice or your key depressions get from your shack to the other operator. The more hardware or software that you can't design, build, tweak or even comprehend is involved, the more like using a mobile phone or the internet it becomes and the less it is ham radio.

Using SDR is only a true amateur accomplishment if you can build the hardware and write or at least understand the software. And for most of us who lack the skills of Simon Brown, that's an impossibility.