[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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