I love digital modes....

After quite a few silent months on the radio ive slowly started getting back into our brilliant hobby...

I managed to lose a lot of my electronic log .adif's with the old pc dying but have thankfully got these recovered (and backed up to memory stick now).

I checked in at the 30 metre Digital Modes Club and saw that i had some certificates waiting for me !

Only the starter certificates but it definitely makes me want to complete them all..

So im off and running....These are certificates for digital modes (PSK31, RTTY, JT65HF etc). If yoiu have never tried digital modes i highly recommend them. QSO's will go thru even when conditions are poor !

A quick WSPR run

Okay this morning i ran a quick 30 - 40min 10meter 5watts WSPR run and here are the results :

30m WSPR quick run 06/07/13

As we can see the M0CVo end fed vertical that is strung up along the fence line seems to be working well.

Back in the saddle....

After a little while away i've got back into digital modes after Chris M5AGG put up the new M0CVO LW-20 (80-6m) end fed Longwire the other day. Initial tests (its very early days yet) seem to be favourable over the SRC 360 HF (80-6m) end fed Verticle and its nice to be able to hear stations that are S3-S4 and not only those strong signals that are louder than S8-S9 noise on the vertical.

I came across my 30mdg certificate and loaded up the U30 software it uses for its awards program and started off on getting some of their lovely certificates.. only 26 QSO's left to get for the first award (worked 30 stations on 30m).

Whilst off for my daily sleep to straighten out my spine i decided to leave WSPR running at 5w on the longwire (11:30-14:30 GMT) and here is the trace for 30m.

Virtual Radar Working !

Well i finally got round to trying to sort out Virtual radar using the new dongle and finally ! it works.. well it probably did along along i just missed a setting to not make it work lol. I had a new version of RTL1090 that had a few more options than the last build and a quick click of those to enable them and off it went...

As you can see there are aircraft being tracked but due to not having a BaseStation.sql or OperatorFlags file at the time it only showed the bare minimum info. I later aquired an SBS Basestation.sql file and all is well.

I was blown away by the range of the new dongle from Jetvision.de... it is about 60 miles when using the Miniscan Scannign antenna from Rocket Radio ! I will have to run a comparision with the 4" antenna that came from jetvision.de to see if there is any difference.

The Good, The Bad and the RTL SDR

Well im now about 5-6 days into playing with / learning about RTL SDR's and so far its a lot of fun and fascination.

For the last few days i've been trying to get RTL1090 which is a nifty program that can grab ADS-B info and feed it into other programs like Planeplotter and Virtual Radar up and running so i can watch planes flying and find out information about them..

For about 4 days of leaving it running for a few hours each time i was getting no output and was a little confused as to whay it wasnt owrking.. I'd opened the ports etc but had no joy what so ever.

I loosely looked on the SDR# Yahoo group and saw that some people posted saying they were using a program called ADSB.exe which after reading thru seemed to do the same thing as RTL1090 so i thought id give it go as after all i had no luck with RTL1090.

After downloading it and making sure i had the right dll's in the adsb.exe folder (things like rtlsdr.dll, msvcr100.dll etc) I ran ADSB.exe and it told me that it couldn't see my dongle ! UH oh (gulps) had i blown it up??? So a quick post to SDR# and i was told to run a little tool called rtl_test.exe and post the results..

Now you must remeber that to see airplances on your pc you need to be able to decode ADS-B which is the information sent from planes as they travel the skies. things like Heading, Speed, Flight Level etc as well as aircraft identifying data... this is all recieved on 1090 Mhz down here on earth.

So a run of rtl_test -t in the adsb.exe folder in a command prompt gave the following results...

As you can see from the data output my dongle's tuner range is 

E4K range: 52 - 2171 Mhz. 

Thats fantastic i thought as i had heard that some dongles have a very restricted range.. So a big smile i read on....

E4K L-band gap: 1087 to 1231 Mhz

Oh no... the gap in the tuner is right where i need to be listening for 1090 Mhz ! drat... no ADS-B decoding from me..

So thats why for 4-5 days ive been going mad thinking id either blown the dongle or that my aerial wasnt working correctly... i did think about ordering another "cheapy" off of ebay but as lot of them dont list the tuner they have  i didn't want to risk so i've ordered direct from jetvision.de (the people that do 1090 Mhz software and kits). 

The new dongle is an ezCAP RTL2832  with a RT802 tuner that 100% works on 1090 Mhz.. Hurry up Mr Postman ;)

RTL SDR Success Day 1

Well after getting everything connected I had a little bit of success.

I came across some blips on the spectrum, looked the frequency up on google and found that it was a pager signal (POSCAG). Another quick search on google for some decoding software and I hit on PDW. The picture shows PDW (top) and HDSDR on the bottom).

I'm debating wether or not to put a Diamond X30 2m/70cms co linear up in the loft and use this as my sdr antenna as it basically covers upto about 500mhz. The NewSky TV28T covers from 20mhz to 1800 Ghz) any comments welcome.

NewSky TV28T dongle and antenna

Here is a picture of the Pc USB Tv Dvb dongle that has the RTL2832U chipset and also has the E4000 tuner chip needed to run as a SDR dongle. Also the Miniscan scanner antenna aerial