Sunday 14 May 2017

Further Adventures in QRSS...


Having decided to buy the Yaesu SCU-17 USB Sound Card Interface for the FT-817, which  provides a dedicated USB sound card, serial port and PTT switching etc.,  I tuned my receiver to 10.13870 MHz and shortly afterwards received an off-air signal from IK2CMN over several minutes (as shown in the WSJT waterfall display below).



Setting my own callsign was a doddle and shortly afterwards I managed to get the OpenBeacon to transmit "G0VRM IO93QT" in QRSS into the dummy load, however it's not quite as clean as the off-air signal.  Following the instructions, I uploaded a WSPR string and it worked first time!






Notice that there are two entries for G0VRM, however one is 35 dB down and is probably some oddity of the radio being so close to the transmitter, although it appears to be very stable!  Looking promising, however connecting the beacon to an external antenna via a Z-match proved to be unsucessful.