The Man Said: Give This a Go

This morning I was reading an article called "The Ins and Outs of a Sound Card". The article originally appeared in a well known Ham Radio publication called QST, in October 2003. 

Computer sound cards are a very important part of my new hobby: learning about a digital code, which is sent by radio from computer to computer, using a technique called Phase Shift Keying, or PSK.

For the past week I have been listening to the high pitched warble of PSK transmissions, and I have been able to "see" the transmissions as vertical yellow lines falling, waterfall like, down the blue screen seen above. There are two vertical yellow "lines" visible.

At the very top left of the screen shot is my ham call sign: VK8KMD.  Below that are some gray control buttons and below that in the larger white area there is some text which looks quite garbled, but which makes a good deal of sense once you know how to read it! 

Tonight, I heard a strong signal and saw the callsign, BV100 arrive several times.  Now BV100 is an unusual call sign, but the signal was so strong that I decided it was time to follow the advice of the man who wrote the article on Sound Cards.

As yet I haven't wired the sound card in my computer to my ham radio transmitter; but I have hooked the ham radio receiver to the computer sound card so I have been able to see and hear incoming signals for some days, but I have not sent any.

The smaller white box, underneath the scrambled text, is where text to be transmitted is typed.  There is nothing in that box, as I managed to "clear" it by hitting the wrong control button before taking the screen shot. However, I did type my call sign several times before clicking my mouse on the small box labelled TX, for Transmit.

Imagine my surprise and the thrill I got when I saw my call sign appear in the upper white box.  It was acknowledgement from BV100 that I had been heard.  On the 6th and 7th lines you can see GREETING TO . STRALIA.

PSK is a like that. It requires the granting of a certain degree of latitude, combined with a fair helping of magnanimity of spirit!

The 4th line is my transmission saying NICE TO MEET YOU. SRI OM I HAVE NO INTERFACE. USING MIC ON TX HELD TO COMPUTER SPEAKER.

SRI OM is ham talk for "sorry old man"! "MIC" is the accepted way of spelling what I pronounce as "Mike".

After our short exchange I looked for BV100 on the Web and found out that I had been talking to Taiwan.  BV100 is a special station set up to celebrate Taiwan's Centennial! There is more information about that here: Taiwan Centennial

The person who was operating the BV100 station and sending me PSK messages was Yohn Wang whose personal call sign is BX5AF.  You can see that in the 5th line.

I am very glad I followed the advice of the man who writes about Sound Cards.

He said: Give this a go.

I did.

It worked.

Comments

[fran]

hi greg
heres my new venture, a videoblog....saves on typing and helps me practice my verbal skills. The video is deliberrately faded because i look better that way.

http://youtu.be/n_JLtCCiZME

cheers

[kim]

my brother did radio for 4 or 5 decades. or so. he was going to teach me about that. and flying. but things didn't quite work out. however, other things have.

have you seen the fotos of my suddenly miraculously joyfully expanded family? if not, take a peek at facebook.

and you seem to be carrying on, getting along nicely. that makes me happy to. life s good. be well, stay happy.