My New Toy A Nomic Rig-Blaster and SSTV
Last weekend i bought a Rig-blaster off a fellow Ham operator G1YPQ-Karl a good friend of mine. Ive had the Nomic Rig-blaster for a while on loan but had not got round to using it,Karl G1YPQ asked me if i wanted to buy it so i dropped off the cash and decided to give it a go.
The Rig-blaster was fairly straight forward to connect,it fitted directly to my Com port1 and came with a couple of of output leads with mic plugs fitted. The mic lead went into the 847,the Rig-blaster has different jumper connections inside which are quite simple to set for most Rigs microphone wiring. The audio out of the 847 went to the line in on my p.c sound card. You then connect your p.c speakers to the audio out on the Rig-blaster.
Hey presto! that's the connecting done, the next stage was to transmit some data and get the output level set correctly. I decided to try out SSTV as i have the software and i have been receiving SSTV pics for the last 3 years or so with good results, finally i get to send some. I used my Kenwood TH 7e handheld to monitor my first transmissions as this 145/433 TX handheld also has 0-1300mhz receive capabilities with AM,FM,CW and SSB so it is ideal.
Once i was happy i decided to get in touch with another fellow Ham M1PAC Phil, Phil was the guy who came to my QTH in the days of M3HTS(my old call sign) and introduced me to MMSTV, WINPSKse, SATSCAPE and anything impressive in the World of Ham software, so it was only right that my first TX would be to his good self on 2M SSTV frequency.
This Image is Transmitting my SSTV image, as you can see i have a few templates to choose from. I have no shortage of pictures which i can take directly from my Computer.
This image is in receive mode on the 2M band on FM and yes of course its Phil M1PAC, the small image in the bottom left hand corner is my Transmission sent back from Phil's QTH. Not bad for my first SSTV Transmission ever!
M1PAC This SSTV image and the ones that follow are on 14.230 mhz the 20M band operating onSSB
I0ZSG
HA6FQ S57LP So if you are an SSTV operator i will hopefully work your station in the very near future even though the bands have still been in an extremely bad way.
I have also tryed out PSK which again is quite good fun using Computer and radio together, again my friend Phil M1PAC was worked during PSK operation and i have herd some interesting QSOs taking place. I will have a post on PSK operation in the future but for now its 73 to all readers and thanks for visiting my Blog.
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