[Elecraft] Skimmer and the K3S

[Peter W2IRT]

From: Tony Estep <esteptony at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Elecraft] Skimmer and the K3S

===============
As all the others have pointed out, the problem here has nothing to do with
LP-Pan. Using NaP3, for example, you can have a birdie-free display of
96Khz on either side, if your sound card is up to it and you set up the
software properly. Having tried both setups extensively, I can assure you
that you will get far superior performance from the combo of LP-Pan and
NaP3 than you will get from a Flex. It also is perfectly possible if you
know what you're doing to run NaP3 and Skimmer simultaneously.

Tony KT0NY

[pjd] Except I don't really care about seeing a waterfall or having yet
*another* piece of software (NaP3) open unless it's absolutely required.
What I want is a box in the background to do the decoding of ~100 kHz worth
of signals at the bottom of the band my K3S is tuned to, feed the output of
that box into Skimmer and have the callsigns displayed on the N1MM+ bandmap
during contests. As I indicated earlier, I'm behind a mountain to Europe and
roughly half the RBN spots that get sent to my station aren't copyable or
aren't there, etc. A live local Skimmer will tell me what is coming to my
antenna and will save me time when I'm S&Ping, going only to known, copied
callsigns.

For finding the winning callsigns in a DXpedition pileup, just looking at
the Skimmer interface ought to be able to do that for me, no? I don't see
what NaP3 brings to the table in that regard. 

My previous setup for a DXpedition pileup was to put the pileup on VFO-A,
the DX on SUB (locked), and see all the callers on Skimmer's interface. Find
the guy sending 5NN TU and pounce. The only problem was that everything from
about 4 to 6 kHz above the DX frequency gets obscured by the birdies/mirror
images on the skimmer display. And since most big DXpeditions split up, I
would lose a ton of callers in that murky no-man's land. The skimmer turned
out to be no help at all on some of the massive DXpeditions earlier this
spring as a result. The exception was Heard Island, who were split down,
rather than up. That worked like a champ on a few bands where the pileup was
insane.

I'm quite intrigued by the SDRplay box, and if anybody's using one I'd be
most grateful if they could contact me directly. If that can give me the
result I'm looking for (decoding the bottom of the currently tuned band),
then that's my next purchase.

Thanks again to everyone for your help. 

73,
Peter, W2IRT