Ramblings by K6RJ

My apologies for the delay on this blogging post.  As promised, here is a first look at the SOFT66ADD software defined radio I recently purchased.  The first thing to strike me was just how small this unit really is.  The images on the makers website don’t do a good job of showing the scale of [...]

I recently sent payment for a SOFT66ADD direct conversion software defined receiver that I am anxious to arrive and get to play with.  The SOFT66ADD covers .5MHz to 30MHz  and is supposed to be compatible with Rocky , SDRadio and WinRad software.  It is controlled from the PC via a USB port.  I plan to [...]

The 2010 CW NA QSO Party is in the books.  This was the first large event that I particpated in using  the SDR1K.  I had a great time though I logged only 105 QSOs during the 12 hours of the QP.  I had to take a couple hour break Saturday afternoon and had to knock [...]

This weekend, January 9-10th, is the North American QSO Party on CW.  This will be the first time I will have a chance to “air out” the SDR-1000 during a large event in the CW mode.  I’m excited and am sure I will learn a lot and spend a good deal of time tweaking the [...]

The folks at Genesis Radio in Australia have come up with a great kit that will serve as an excellent introduction for many to the world of software-defined radio.  The Genesis G40 is an all mode 5W SDR transceiver kit.  At 5 watts, the G40 has enough power to get out but still be relatively easy [...]

An excellent piece of software called PowerSDR has been developed specifically for the Flexradio line of SDR radios.  The screen print above is how the standard software appears currently.  The software and it’s myriad of features are detailed here on the Flexradio website.  That page does a much better job of summarizing the software than [...]

Let me pass along a few words of wisdom that I learned the hard way and that may save you a lot of grief on your SDR-1000 installation.  As you know, an SDR-1000 installation has lots of cables.  More than traditional rigs.  These cables exist in a high RF environment and cheap cables will be [...]

Not wanting to irrevocably burn a beta firmware fix into my Presonus Firebox sound card I have decided to take the opportunity to upgrade to an Edirol FA-66 sound card.    Should there be a glitch during the firmware burn I could end up with a useless sound card.  While the dynamic range of the Edirol [...]

It has come to my attention that the Presonus Firebox has a firmware bug or glitch that attenuates the audio response  significantly beyond a 24 KHz bandwidth.  Presonus apparently has provided a beta firmware update that fixes the problem.  However, as this is a beta firmware update, there is no way to rollback to your [...]

When my SDR-1000 arrived it came with everything I needed to install it except for the fact that my PC did not have a Firewire port.  Of course, the resolution wasn’t as simple as installing just any old Fireware card.  The folks at Flexradio recommend that you use a Firewire card that uses a TI [...]