[hpsdr] Using the HPSDR in the Commonwealth Contest/CW Skimmer

[Steve Ireland]

Hi Andrew

 

I was indeed doing both running stations, and searching and pouncing.  I
found the latter relatively easy after a while and the key seemed to be to
use the 250Hz filter in PowerSDR/Open SDR.  With the 250Hz filter, it was
easy to quickly visually centre the station I wanted to call in the middle
of the passband and get them to come back to my first call.   With wider
filter bandwidths, I didn't always end up calling in the right place. ;-)

 

I did use the 100Hz filter quite a lot in a pile-up when lots were calling -
it was easy to reduce the pile-up to a just a single signal that way!  ;-)

 

The waterfall in PowerSDR is very good, but doesn't compare with the one in
CW Skimmer for clarity/ease of use (mind you, CW Skimmer is in a league of
its own, when it comes to a waterfall display and was designed by an
operator whose only operating interest is CW).  

 

I haven't managed to get CW Skimmer working under PowerSDR/Open SDR with VAC
yet, but hope to do this in the coming weeks.  Currently I get an error
message when I try to start CW Skimmer that says 'Invalid device number: 2'.
Any ideas anyone?

 

As an operator that uses 90 per cent CW, PowerSDR/Open SDR is a fabulous
piece of software with superb digital filtering, but I really miss the
waterfall displays of VE3NEA's Rocky and CW Skimmer software.  Still
PowerSDR/OpenSDR is developing all the time. 

 

 

Vy 73

 

Steve, VK6VZ

 

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Date: Sun, 11 Mar 2012 23:02:54 +0000 (GMT)

From: Andrew <irbsurfing at yahoo.co.uk>

To: "hpsdr at lists.openhpsdr.org" <hpsdr at lists.openhpsdr.org>

Subject: Re: [hpsdr] Using an HPSDR in the Commonwealth Contest

Message-ID:

      <1331506974.73409.YahooMailNeo at web171404.mail.ir2.yahoo.com>

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Hi Steve, 

 

Nice report, I too have found the digital cw filters so much better than the
old ringing analogue crystal filters - its a huge advantage.

Just wondering, were you calling or using 'search and pounce'? If the latter
how did that work out? I was thinking that a boon for search and pounce
operation would be if you could fix the centre frequency and tune around the
panadapter window with VFO A without the waterfall shifting, keeping the
history so that you can literally see when to pounce, don't know why
Powersdr doesn't have that feature. The history in the waterfall is so
useful. You can sort of do it with VFO B but its not quite so good as it
would be with VFO A.

 

Andrew

 

 

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