We enjoy supporting live events and next up, is Pacificon, California, where Steve from SDRplay will present an Introduction to SDR on Saturday 21st October at 10.40am in Pleasanton/Danville   http://www.arrl.org/hamfests/pacific-division-convention-pacificon-2017

The RSGB Convention at Milton Keynes was a great success this year with many excellent talks – we were busy supporting the ML&S stand most of the Saturday but I did manage to get to see Matthew Phillips’ excellent talk on FreeDV – unfortunately it wasn’t videoed but he will be giving it again on Wednesday at the Bury St Edmunds Amateur Radio Club  when we hope it will be, and we will follow up with a link if it is. See below.

Above: Andy on the ML&S stand at the RSGB Convention

The convention was a great opportunity to meet old and new customers as well as our main distributors Martin Lynch and Jan Verduyn of SDR-Kits.   It was great to see Karl Brazier from Yaesu UK also demonstrating the RSP!

We very much enjoy supporting live events and next up, is Pacificon, California,  where Steve will present an Introduction to SDR on Saturday 21st October at 10.40am in Pleasanton/Danville

The following weekend, Steve will be at the Denver Fallfest at Ham Radio Outlet on October 27th and 28th:

FreeDV – Digital Voice for HF and other low SNR channels

Since the beginning of 2017 the RSGB News has been broadcast on 80m in FreeDV an experimental digital mode aimed to perform better than SSB voice in difficult radio environments. Matthew’s paper presents information on FreeDV; what is it, how and why is it being developed by a worldwide community of radio amateurs and how can amateurs can try it for themselves.

Information is presented on the pioneering work on the voice codec used ‘Codec2’ by David Rowe VK5DGR. In addition some thoughts on the future developments envisaged are shared.

The talk includes slide narrative, schematics and system diagrams, simple algorithm descriptions and audio and video samples. An emphasis is placed on practical ideas to become active.

The location is Rougham Control Tower Museum in Bury St Edmunds. Directions can be found on the Bury St Edmunds ARC web site at http://bsears.co.uk/rougham/

Time is 7:00pm for talk start at 7:30pm on Wednesday October 18th.

SDRplay hopes to support FreeDV in 2018.

I mentioned a year or more ago that I was enthusiastic about ‘propagation-triggered’ recording and Jukka, OH2BUA has really been very active in this area – take  a look over on  the SDRplay forum at his latest post – http://www.sdrplay.com/community/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=1839 where he gives his Fall 2017 update:

He writes about the “OH2BUA SWL Kit”  describing how it  “monitors ham radio digital (FT8 mode) traffic on 1.8MHz (160 meters) band. If it happens to hear nice DXs, it kicks a wideband MW-recording running in purpose to capture DX broadcasts. When the FT8 DX signals disappear, it stops the recording. For me, it works overnight, every night. I’ll do the harvesting next evening – IF something is recorded. In my case, it’s waiting for North American ham traffic, and aims to catch NA MW-broadcasts.” 

If you have any cool ways for post processing signals captured with the large bandwidth of an SDR receiver, then our forum is  a great way to publicise it, or to gather inputs from other potential contributors.

Ismo Kauppi and his DX listener friend, Vesa-Jussi Rinkinen are in Lapland this week on a DXpedition. There is a cabin in the Finnish Lapland, dedicated to DX-listening. More information available here: http://www.dxing.info/dxpeditions/aihkiniemi_dx_cabin_for_rent.dx   The hosting team has installed 13 permanent beverage antennas in the forest, each approximately 1000 meters long to different directions for catching rare medium wave stations around the world. They have several SDRPlay, Perseus and Elad receivers with them accompanied by a number of laptops and over 30TB of hard drive space. With that gear they are able to “record”  the whole MW band around the clock for seven days. When they get back home, they will examine their catch in more detail!

Ismo wrote to us today and told us….. “On Monday we wanted to try something new: We had spotted last year this high tower on the hill nearby, which has been used for observing  possible forest fires in the past. So we took a 5 element Yagi antenna with us this year and decided to scan the FM band as well. So we climbed up there with a RSP2, the Yagi  and a laptop. Our aim was to catch stations from Murmansk in Russia. Murmansk is over 200 kilometers away, but we were able to catch the stations we wanted to. The SDRPlay RSP2 was performing superbly.”

SDRPlay is performing also very well on MW and when I get back home, I will send tens of reception reports heard on SDRPlay!

Today we went out on the lake trying to catch some trout, which they have plenty in the lake nearby. I guess it was too cold already and therefore we got none today 🙁

Greetings from the Finnish Lapland!

Ismo and Vesku

Our US team (Steve and Mike) have updated a handy guide to using an RSP1 or RSP2 as a Panadapter – you can download it from http://www.sdrplay.com/downloads/ as follows:

This weekend, the whole SDRplay team has been on the road – in the UK it was for the UK National Hamfest in Newark (UK).   In the US it was for HRO’s “Superfest”

We met with many  customers – old and new.  It was such a friendly atmosphere at both locations.    Many thanks to all who dropped by – either to buy an RSP or to give valuable feedback on the preview version of SDRuno which we demonstrated.

It was great to have Mike over in the UK – Mike is responsible for our Video Guides on our YouTube Channel. He coped well with the jet lag having only touched down at Heathrow, midday Thursday. He was in full swing Friday morning and ready for an ICQ podcast interview by lunchtime!

Steve’s talks at Ham Radio Outlet’s Milwaukee Superfest were well attended – you can download the slides from the “Video guides and Media” section on our Downloads page.

Apologies if our support turn-round time is slow for the next 2 or 3 days – with everybody travelling over the weekend and early this coming week, it will take a while to catch up!

Some pictures from the UK National Hamfest Newark…..

Above:  Mike (from the USA). Ian, Preben and Andy

Below:  Mike and Jon with Chris from ICQPodcast

and from HRO Superfest Milwaukee……..

Above: The SDRplay booth

Below – a happy customer with Steve

SDRplay made the main feature on today’s ICQPodcast which can be downloaded from https://www.icqpodcast.com/download-the-show/2017/10/1/icq-podcast-episode-249-sdr-play

At the UK Hamfest this coming Friday and Saturday, come and see the new version of SDRuno in development, including a number of usability improvements and new features such as a save power and SNR values to CSV file.  We’ll be on stand 10 demonstrating RSPs – a chance to meet Jon (G4ABQ), Andy (software), Ian (hardware) and Mike from New York – famous for his “video guides”

The SDRplay team are preparing to come to Newark again this year.  As well as our UK-based hardware and software experts, we’ll also have Mike, author of so many of our video guides,  visiting us from the USA.   It’s a great opportunity to find our more about SDR receivers and the RSPs/ SDRuno in particular.  We look forward to meeting many of the folks who bought an RSP last year to see how they’re getting on, and to introducing lots of new folks to the technology.

Mike has just released a video showing you how to hook up a USB ‘wheel’ to SDRuno to give the look and feel of a traditional tuning knob: