29 September 2012

fldigi, kx3 and pskreporter.info

I discovered pskreporter.info last night.  It is a very handy tool. The KX3, Signalink USB and fldigi running on my Linux laptop are working nicely together.  The pskreporter site shows monitoring stations that have received my digital mode  transmissions and/or transmitting stations that I have received and decoded digital mode transmissions from.  Cool!



22 September 2012

My KX3 has arrived

My shiny new Elecraft KX3 (#01685) arrived on Monday morning.  I'm thoroughly impressed with it.



I haven't had a QSO on HF for just over 6 years, so it is unsurprising that I have no contacts to report with it, however as a receiver it is performing very nicely indeed.

My current HF antenna is a Diamond BB6W, slung low at about 12 feet AGL. I have an LDG Z11 Pro ATU nearer to the antenna feedpoint than the rig, so I'm now using it in preference to the internal ATU, which did however tune the antenna to a lower SWR.




Last night I heard VP8NO, in the  Falklands Islands on 18.105MHz using 45 baud RTTY.  The KX3 decoded it fine and I monitored the traffic using the KX3 utility on Linux.  This morning I heard VK4ZD in Australia on 17m on SSB.  This receiver is excellent.

I've also got the I/Q output from the KX3 feeding an old Griffin iMic USB soundcard and can monitor 48kHZ of spectrum with gnuradio-companion.


So far, so good :)