Daffodil to the rescue

My hassles with getting the new shack PC set up and working continue. I lost the configurations for KComm and Fldigi, including all my macro files carefully honed over several years, because I forgot to save them from the old computer. And the eBay seller from whom I ordered a PCI Express sound card yesterday so that I could get going on digimodes again sent an old-fashioned PCI version just like the one I already have. His response to my complaint is "We have sold many of these and you are the first customer to have a complaint" which makes me feel like the mistake was my fault. I really am thoroughly fed up and wish now that I had just struggled along with the old, slow computer.

However it has not all been bad news. At the weekend whilst investigating all the available options I stumbled across this USB Sound Adapter from Digital Daffodil. At a price of £2.49 it seemed worth a gamble, though the post and packing at £3.45 more than doubled the final cost.

This also arrived today. I plugged it in and it "just worked" - Windows didn't even ask to install any drivers. I then hooked it up to the K3 and immediately began decoding digital signals.

The input is only for a microphone, not a line input, so it is very sensitive. This means I have to run the K3 line output at a very low level - 2 or even 1 - which should avoid the problem of distortion harmonics that I have observed at higher settings.

My IMD Meter shows that the transmitted PSK31 IMD is as low as it was when using the old computer and a "real" sound card. In fact, I inadvertently tested at 100W PEP output and the IMD was -28dB which is still pretty acceptable (I normally get -34dB at 25W PEP out on 20 metres.) So despite my initial belief that something this cheap couldn't possibly be any use I'm forced to conclude that it is actually perfectly acceptable.

I don't know what the maximum sample rate of this device is. I doubt that it is high enough to use for SDR decoding such as my project to use a SoftRock as a K3 panadapter, so I suppose I do still need a PCI Express sound card. But I'm not in a position to use it at the moment so the idea of returning the card I was sent and asking for a refund is quite tempting.

Remembering the Belcom LS-202E

I'm not really cut out to be an award chaser. You can too easily end up with the tail wagging the dog, staying in the shack on a fine, sunny day just to be near the radio because you know that someone is going to be activating a rare island or whatever.

This weekend I had hoped to catch some activations of Wainwright summits for SOTA and WOTA. But I had to go out. The activator was using 2m SSB, and an FT-817 was too bulky and conspicuous to carry around with me. So I took to wondering, not for the first time, what a shame it is that the Kenwood TH-F7E (TH-F6A to you Americans) cannot transmit SSB as well as receive it.

Back in the 1980s when, despite the lack of sophistication compared to today's technology, ham radios somehow seemed more exciting and innovative, you could buy radios from small manufacturers like Mizuho, Belcom and Shimizu that offered something out of the ordinary compared to the offerings from Yaesu, Icom and Kenwood.

One such product was the Belcom LS-202E, a 2m hand-held transceiver that worked on both FM and SSB. It was slightly larger than a 2m FM hand-held of the time, with 1.5W output (fairly standard for those days.) The frequency was selectable using thumbwheel encoders as in Icom's highly popular FM hand-held, the IC-2E.

I had one of these radios and had quite a lot of fun with it. I was also trying to break into journalism at that time so I wrote a review of it which was published in the short-lived independent ham radio magazine "Amateur Radio". If you are interested, you can see a copy of the review.

Sadly, the LS-202e wasn't a keeper. The output on SSB was quite low and there appeared to be no speech compression or ALC so you couldn't make the best of that 1.5W. Stations who found you weak on SSB often heard you better when you switched to FM.

Another problem - which I didn't discover until after I'd written the review, so it wasn't mentioned - was that the synthesizer tended to go out of lock if the radio was cold. And it usually is cold out of doors in this country, so several trips out to work SSB from the hilltops proved abortive. The radio went back to the importers two or three times to try to make it work right. But they never really succeeded, so in the end I sold it.

I still think the basic concept was a great idea. And I'm surprised that none of the radio manufacturers have tried again to make something like this using today's much improved technology. A multimode hand-held you could slip in a pocket covering VHF and even HF with a couple of watts output would have me plunking down my money faster than you can say "Mastercard." How about it Yaecomwood?

Sharpening up ClearType

Before disconnecting my old computer, after wiping the hard drive, I installed Ubuntu Linux on it from a DVD I had lying around. When the desktop came up I was amazed how clear and sharp the print was, compared to Windows.

When I got my new computer, running Windows XP, the print at first looked horrible. By default the fonts were unaliased, the edges not smoothed, a reminder of computers in the 1990s. I soon found and enabled the ClearType option to smooth the edges of fonts, but the result made me think there was something wrong with my spectacles - not so much ClearType as BlurredType.

After a couple of days I got to wondering whether there was some alternative to ClearType that would smooth the edges of fonts but look sharper. After all, if Linux can do it surely it is not beyond the abilities of Microsoft? And I eventually stumbled across the ClearType Tuner, one of Microsoft's PowerToys for Windows XP.

The ClearType Tuner is easy to use. Just install it, run it, and then click to select the font samples that look best on your screen. It has made a world of difference. If you think the print on your screen could be sharper, you should give it a try. What I don't understand is why, in an operating system you have to pay for quite handsomely, this essential feature is only offered as an unsupported and unpublicized option.

Well I'm filtered

Just over a month ago I purchased a pair of Medion Multimedia PC Speakers from Aldi and was delighted at both the quality of the sound they produced from my Elecraft K3 and the fact that they were free from any RFI. So when I observed some loud rasping noises in time with my voice while operating 80m SSB a few days ago I was a bit surprised. After a bit of experimentation I discovered that this was due to the fact that I had decided to power the speakers from my Diamond GSV3000 25A shack power supply in order to avoid an extra wall-wart. When I powered the speakers from the provided supply they were free of unwanted noises.

The ability to power the speakers from the same supply as the radio seemed worth pursuing, so I decided to investigate. Another nice aspect of these Medion speakers is that they are held together using easily accessible Phillips screws and can be taken apart in a couple of minutes. All of the other computer speakers I have had were put together in an unfathomable way so I could not even begin to attempt adding RFI suppression.

Once I had the thing apart I was very impressed with the trouble that had been taken to filter all the cables going in to the powered speaker. Both positive and negative lines of the power input are filtered using several turns of wire on opposite sides of a toroidal core. The stereo line input has capacitors across the input, and the output to the other speaker has wire links with a ferrite bead on each one.

Clearly the interference was coming in on the power cable, so I added a 10nF capacitor and a 470uF electrolytic capacitor across the output of the choke filter. To my surprise this did not make the slightest difference. I am puzzled by this, but life is too short to waste trying to find a solution when one already exists, so I am now running the Medion speakers using the unregulated 12V wall-wart the manufacturer provided.

Luna

It is a clear but cold (-4C!) night tonight and a full moon is shining. I thought I would try to take a picture of it using my £29 Aldi spotting scope and £25 eBay bargain digital camera. It made a nice change from trying to figure out how to interface my radio to my new computer.

The digiscoping adapter I got from Scopes'n'Skies certainly helped with holding the camera in position and the infra red remote control I managed to get for the camera meant that I could fire the shutter when everything was steady. It's not bad for a first attempt but I'm sure it ought to be possible to get the image a bit sharper.

My camera tripod is really poor and hard to adjust so you have to point past the object and then hope it settles back with it in the centre. This normally takes a few attempts. But the main thing is that focus is quite critical and it's hard to tell when you have got it exactly right using the little screen on the back of the camera.

There was a bit of colour fringing on the original image - purple at the top and green at the bottom. Well I suppose you can't expect perfection with £29 optics. I eliminated it using the simple expedient of getting IrfanView to convert the image to greyscale.

It would probably be more interesting to photograph a partial moon when you could see detail emphasized by shadows along the terminator. So, weather permitting, I hope to try to take some more Moon photos later.