Saturday, October 22, 2016

The Planker goes digital.

I'm finding CW and SSB activity on 60m is pretty limited, but "channel 3" is hopping with JT65 signals throughout the evening.  So, what the heck - might as well jump in!

Running WSJT-X on my Linux laptop, I ran into a challenge in getting the rig to transmit:  The laptop doesn't have a serial port, and it recognizes my USB<>serial dongle as ACM0.  Unfortunately, WSJT-X only supports Sn and USBn devices, and while I'm sure there's a symlink work around, it was simply easier for me to deal with it in hardware by adding a simple VOX circuit.  So, I kludged one together and made my first JT65 QSO!

This is going to lead to a redesign of the RX/TX audio board, not only to incorporate VOX, but to provide separate RX & TX audio I/O (with isolation transformers) for the PC interface. I'd planned on redesigning the board anyway, there are a few things on the current board that I'm not entirely happy with, so it's not a big deal.  I'll put up the diagram and some pics once I have it operational.

73!  Steve N8NM 

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