[HCARC] "Canned Radio"

[Kerry Sandstrom]

Gary,

I'm not just a Swede, I'm a Viking with all that implies!  My Mom's family 
is French and English which actually means Danish since the Danes took over 
southern England and northern France until they decided to invade England 
again in 1066.  History is amusing at best!  I'm sure you know that the 
Norwegians had Ireland and the western isles (Iceland, Greenland and North 
America).  As I tell my Irish friends, they would be 2 foot tall leprechuans 
if not for the Norwegians.  Some of the Vikings used to get down into the 
Med from time to time.  I'd do a serious check on your so-called italian 
ancestry!  They might be Vikings too.  Can't help with your Polish 
ancestors, I'm afraid.  You know they call Stockholm "the Venice of the 
north" so I consider myself northern Italian when Italian food is served!

When you are a new ham, that is the time to try everything.  But remember, 
when you do try new things you are supposed to be learning something.  To me 
that means you don't go and buy everything because then you don't learn 
anything.  PSK-31 is a great example.  There are some commercial software 
and commercial interface boxes and ready made cables designed to go from 
your XCVR to your interface box and your computer.  If you do that - what 
have you learned? - nothing, in my opinion.  I think you would be a lot 
better learning how to connect your computer and XCVR together with cables 
you put together yourself, learn how to set the signal levels and learn how 
to operate it on PSK.  By the way, you can still get RS-232 interface cards 
to plug into the PCI express slots in new computers.  They run about $30.00 
and you have an RS-232 serial interface you can use for anything like a dot 
matrix printer if you really want to amuse your friends.  I think most if 
not all old XP desktops and earlier have an RS-232 serial interface.  I 
doubt that laptops had them ,however.  With the serial interface it is easy 
to key the PTT line if you don't like VOX.  You can also download free 
software from the internet that will do PSK-31 just fine.  One variety is 
called Digipan that is quite common.

RTTY is the same thing, MMTTY is available on the internet and runs quite 
well and does an excellent job on RTTY signals.  Of course, if you want to 
really run RTTY, you need a TU (Terminal Unit) and a computer set up as a 
"glass" TTY.  I used an Atari 800 with a home built Basic/machine language 
program and an Atari RS-232 interface to run it as a "glass" TTY.  The best 
thing about playing with old style RTTY with a TU is you really learn 
digital comm.  One of the nice things about MMTTY for me is you get a 
display similar to old RTTY tuning displays and everything you have read 
about tuning RTTY with old gear applies.

Both the RTTY and PSK-31 software I'm familiar with use the computer sound 
cards.  My experience has been that any modern computer sound card/built-in 
sound system is so overkill for either RTTY or PSK-31 that I've never seen 
any kind of problem with them.  I've never used a USB to RS-232 adaptor so I 
can't speak from experience, but I've been told that you lose the timing 
through that kind of adaptor and some of the RS-232 devices aren't happy so 
I stick with the traditional RS-232 approach.

Have fun,

Kerry