Sunday 20 May 2012

RTLSDR - Part 3 - CQ CQ Contest

As it's the weekend I have managed to experiment with my new SDR device. I have sorted out an adapter so I can connect it to the loft discone and it has been pulling in some very nice clear signals. I have had to do some tweaking especially of the usb transfer buffer size to get some decent audio out of it. I have also had to learn how to use the HDSDR program which I haven't used much before favouring the SDR-Radio one with the FUNCube Dongle.

One thing that caught me out is that when I last used HDSDR with the FUNCube I had to swap the I and Q signals and I don't need to with the Newsky Tv28t so initially I was very confused as it all seem arse about face! Duh! But now actually growing to quite like it as having a much wider spectrum to see is very nice.

By a pleasant coincidence yesterday saw the start of the RSGB 144MHz May Contest so lots of SSB transmissions to tune in to. The FUNCube definitely has the edge when it comes to quality of audio and sensitivity and being able to tune down the gain helps in preventing out of band signal overloading the front end. With the Newsky device I've had to have the gain right up most of the time, but I suspect there is still more optimising to do.

Just a small video showing some of the SSB Contest signals on the spectrum. Don't you just love the masses of noise? Really must do something about that damn router!


I've also got to discover how to calibrate the Newsky as it shows quite a bit off frequency, I understand I need to discover the actual crystal clock frequency and can feed that into the EXT-IO plugin.

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