Digital modes

M0RVB March 10, 2017

I am planning to have a fiddle with digital modes. My current leads will not reach from the FT450D to the PC so I get the chance to do some soldering and make the leads longer... see if can remember which end of the iron gets hot.

There are a few quite strong RTTY signals about (I don't yet recognise the sounds of other modes) which takes me back a way. Years (decades) ago (I was 15!) I used to buy up old Creed 7B and 7E teleprinters, renovate them and sell them on to make a bit of pocket money. These were all set to 50 baud, not 45.5 baud as I only had a tuner for 50. I got quite good at it and I wish I had kept one. At one stage I had a couple running, one via a terminal unit wired to a B40 receiver, plus a separate tape punch and reader. It used to be fun running off reams of print from the Russian news agency TASS, or columns of numbers that I had thought were spy stations but turned out to be weather stations.

Fingers crossed I'll manage to get it all wired up this weekend and maybe even manage a QSO on 20m.

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M0RVB August 12, 2023

Reducing one's digital footprint

Five years+ on from retiring I no longer feel the need to tell the world my continuing story via the likes of Facebook. I actually only came to Facebook to find out what other people were saying, principally about my employer. I engaged a little with LinkedIn but never in any serious fashion and I deleted my LinkedIn presence a few months ago. As to Twitter, well, I think in all the years I held an account I sent five tweets. I deleted that account too since I moved to Mastodon. I have since deleted all my Facebook posts and all photos on Instagram and Facebook. I kept the accounts but will no longer engage with either, not even to post ‘likes’. From having my name at the bottom of several thousand web pages over three decades I reckon now it’s only on my own blog. Oh, and my Ph.D. thesis which is online. And I think that’s a good place to be.

M0RVB March 25, 2017

Data modes continued

Nice sunny Saturday here and I failed to get a reply in to several BPSK31 calls but then managed to reply to a CQ on MFSK16 - another new mode for me. MFKS16 is quite a 'fat' signal compared to the PSKs and I had to scrabble about for my printout of modes to see what it was. I tried Domino first to no avail, then found the red bars in fldigi just fitted MFKS16 and it decoded nicely, and an eQSL to boot.

M0RVB March 18, 2017

More digital

I had my first BPSK-63 QSO today. I like these modes, just set the rig to 14.070 and follow the matrix-like display... with no audio to annoy the wife. Mind you, as yet I have had no success having a CQ answered. I've sent plenty but currently the rather poor drive from the PC results in very little RF power. I hope to rectify that next week. There is a lot of RTTY about with the BARTG contest. Plenty of decodes but I've not joined in because I am not up to entering. Once the contest ends I'll have a good sniff for RTTY. Pity I don't have a nice old clattery Creed 7E to do it properly... but that is probably a step too far as I am still only a lodger in the spare room (aka study, aka shack) and may well be turfed out into the shed!