It’s been over 10 years since I’ve been on an HF digital mode like PSK31. When I couldn’t find an adapter to plug my home-brew interface (I built it almost 20 years ago) so I decided to upgrade to a Digirig and boy am I glad I did. It took a while to figure out how to configure fldigi but I got it working. I cannot control the radio from my computer for some mysterious reason. But I can still use the varous modes and it will key the transmitter. I wonder if this is why the guy sold me this radio back in the day…
Anyhow, I’ve logged several contacts over the past few days using PSK31 and hellschreiber. It’s a lot of fun! I can even turn the radio’s audio all the way down and it works just fine because even though my radio’ss audio is fed to my computer (it sounds better coming out of the speakers). The Digirig has it’s own dedicated sound built in so I don’t have to monkey with my system’s normal sound. That’s music to my ears. I can, in fact, turn down the radio’s audio and crank the music loud and make digital QSOs with ease.
I am a little confused by all of the choices for modes. For example, there are 13 choices for just PSK, 18 for Olivia. RTTY is a little more reasonable but how do I know which one to use? It seems that most people (?) stick with the “lagacies”. Good old fashined BPSK31, RTTY-45, Feld-Hell for the Hellschreiber variants. At least that’s how it appears, time will teach me.
I did run into one little bump in the road and it seems that I cannot use fldigi and Echolink (run under Wine) at the same time. They use different sound cards. Maybe wine is getting confused. There’s always something to troubleshoot.
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