18 Jan
2009
18 Jan
'09
2:50 a.m.
On Sat, 2009-01-17 at 21:10 +0000, Tony Duell wrote:
I should get active, I guess. What's put me off is
that 99% of the hams I
meet seem only interested by buying the latest black-ox transciever. I'm
interested in homebrrwing, restoring boatanchors, tinkering, that sort of
thing. The digital modes looked attractive at first until I realised that
for most of them you use a PC running pre-written (and often not
open-soruce!) software. No thanks. The sort of experimetnation that I am
interested in is not done with black boxes.
Once again, you haven't looked very hard, have you? There are plenty of
open-source implementations of digital modes out there - I use both
fldigi and gmfsk for PSK and RTTY modes, mostly.
If that doesn't float your boat - and I know you like to not have to
rely on "black box" hardware - how about the NUE-PSK digital
modem/terminal/whatever else? It is fully documented, has full source
for all the firmware, and uses commonly-available parts. If you wanted
to, you could just work out a way of implementing the DSP part in a
DSPic and feed the demodulated text and spectrum data to whatever host
machine you wanted.
If no-one around you is interested in homebrewing or restoring boat
anchors, has it occurred to you that you might be living in the wrong
place? Here in Glasgow we have a thriving amateur radio community,
where most of the younger members (at 35, that includes me! It's an
aging population, sorry guys, but you know it's true...) are heavily
into homebrewing and "experimental" radio.
Gordon