[Elecraft] k3/psk on laptop
Jim Brown
jim at audiosystemsgroup.com
Wed Jun 11 11:42:45 EDT 2008
On Tue, 10 Jun 2008 22:51:02 -0400, Joe Subich, W4TV wrote:
>I hate to disagree with Simon but I do want to answer the old
>wives' tale about internal sound cards and laptops ...
I agree, Joe, but do so on the basis of far less information than
you and Simon, both of whose work I have a great deal of respect
for. Sound cards are wildly variable in their quality and
characteristics, and virtually all have pin 1 problems. But if you
understand how audio level matching works and do the bonding I
recommend to eliminate the hum and buzz voltages that exist
between equipment that you're interconnecting, most computer sound
cars, laptop or otherwise, will work very well.
My piece on interfacing is
http://audiosystemsgroup.com/HamInterfacing.pdf
It is a Power Point for a tutorial I did for a local ham club. The
tutorial also exists as text -- it's in Chapter 7 of the RFI
tutorial -- Solving Problems in the Shack. Both of these pdfs are
written to help hams UNDERSTAND the issues, and provide simple
step by step solutions.
http://audiosystemsgroup.com/RFI-Ham.pdf is the tutorial.
BTW -- my limited sample of laptops over the past 10 years has
been almost entirely with Thinkpads, specifically T20-series and
T40-series. I bought them new and paid big bucks, but they are now
available as used, off-lease units with a legal version of Windows
at very modest cost. The T20 and T30 series have a COM port. Later
ones do not.
Another BTW -- I am told that most laptop mfrs farm out their
sound cards to a third party mfr, and they're a commodity. That
adds to the wide variation.
73,
Jim Brown K9YC
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