Digital Modes

 

Although I'm not in a position to transmit my own digital data at the moment, I have been experimenting with receiving some of these modes, especially FT8 which seems to be very popular at the moment. The mainstay program for doing this seems to be WSJT-X (https://physics.princeton.edu/pulsar/k1jt/wsjtx.html). I do use this software, but I find sometimes that it just doesn't work! One day I turn it on and it jumps straight in and starts to decode. On other days, no matter what I do, it won't decode anything and I can't seem to find a reason or remedy on line for this.

 I have also been using a program called MSHV (http://lz2hv.org/mshv). So far I have found no problems with the decoding, but like I say I am unable to transmit just yet. The FT8 traffic seems to be quite heavy on 24 and 28MHz and it seems to go on all day. I do a lot of my decoding using an old Windows XP machine so I have to be picky which packages will run on it. An older version of WSJX-T will run on XP and so will MSHV.

My SDR of choice is HDSDR, a free program available for download.

My SDR dongle is the Nooelec Smart which can get down to 24MHz and goes up well above 1GHz. I love to decode data streams that are floating about on the airwaves. These include POCSAG pager transmissions, APRS packets from various sources, weather satellite transmissions, plane transponder signals (ADS-B and ACARS) and taxi MDT signals. The software for decoding all of these can be found on line for free. All good fun 😉.