NM5DV Softrock SDR Blog

I was so happy I finally got around to fixing up the 40meter paf board. I have developed a bad habit of sticking the boards in while the rig is on. If the board goes in on the wrong pin it will send 12v into the t202 and burn that up as well as burn the trace coming from one of the jumper pins over to the transformer. I wired a piece of magnet wire to replace the printed circuit board trace and rewound t202.

I got home and turned it on. Boy was it working. I had a qso with n5rkd across tow and got some decent signal reports. He said I have some sideband issues but nothing major. Not to mention the band was really open, I was so happy to be back on 80 and 40 because this is generally the time I have to operate.

Another thing I noticed is that on the icom 718 I could see that it was pushing the smeter up to about 23 which is .. 3 s levels over what it does on 30 so I think I might have some issues on 30 or it could just be the antenna matching up on the different frequency.

Here is a screen shot of 40 meters data portion of the band. you can see the full 96 khz of my delta sound card working.

I actually fired up the 718 a few weeks ago to operate some psk on 40 and it was very hard for me to go back to regular operation. By regular operation I mean no sdr operation. You can only view about 10 khz of the spectrum and the desense you get from operating a regular rig is amazing. Here you can see the 96 khz of spectrum and very beautiful signals.

I checked out 80 meters later on in the evening and boy was it hopping. The phone segment of the band was wall to wall signals and the data portion looked like it was just warming up.

I called up k6hx to see if he wanted to try some digi and we both had an unfortunate series of events after that. He erased some source code he had been working on and I forgot how my output lpf board worked.

I forgot that there is a jumper to by pass the attenuator and if its not in bypass mode the antenna doesnt get hooked up.

I hope I didn’t refry my 40 meter board. I couldn’t figure out the problem until I looked at it with fresh eyes in the morning. I’ll test everything out today as I have brought the rig into work. If everything checks out I might take the downtime to install some header type connectors on the rig for its external connections.

I”m taking next week off to spend some time with my boy so heres a list of stuff I want to accomplish today:

• install the header external connectors
• install some sort of amplifier connection point on the antenna and start looking at how I’ll switch that in and out.
• bolt down the lpf output board
• get rid of the two aligator clips for power.
• bolt down the serial connector
• clean up the led connectors (very messy open hot wires)
• build the bpf boards for 160 meters and 10 -15 meters.