PSK: I Love You

I'm now firmly ensconced in the 21st century, having successfully made my first QSOs in PSK31 mode. Two simple audio cables from the Dell's soundcard direct to the K3, a little bit of diddling with Digital Master 780, and we're off and rolling. First QSO was with WU6X in California who answered my CQ, followed by another with TG9AHM in Guatemala whose CQ I answered. All this with 30w -- incredible.

I've been decoding PSK31 ever since I got the K3, the rig does this internally and scrolls the received text across the LCD. It just never worked very well so I didn't believe all the hype about PSK31. But when I first fired up DRM780, I was shocked to see near perfect copy from signals that were barely visible on the waterfall display. Then I discovered the SuperBrowser feature... Holy smoke. I can see I'll be spending a lot of time in this mode.

Receiving and decoding PSK31 signals was easy, but getting the K3 to transmit took a bit of poking. First, I needed two audio cables (1/8"-to-1/8") -- I had one in the junk box with stereo jack on one end and mono on the other. This worked fine for the receive audio. Then I drove to Radio Shack to pick up another for the transmit line only to find an empty store with a For Lease sign in the window. Great. So I went over to the other side of the mall to Best Buy, but they had no cables with an 1/8" jack of any sort. Returning home in a rather pissy mood, I dug some adapters in the box to convert a 1/4"-to-RCA cable into another 1/8"-1/8". I hate adapters, but it'll have to do for now. Cable adventure over, I spent the next 45 minutes transmitting into the dummy load, making adjustments, tweaking the config parameters to get the audio into the K3's Line In jack and finding the optimum input levels.

In retrospect I'm thankful I didn't rush out and buy an external soundcard device, as the K3 I/O ports are fully isolated and this configuration seems to be working just fine. I may still add one later because I'm sure the soundcard in this Dell isn't very cutting edge, but for now my cash is better burned on something I need more (RAM, ground rods, beer...).

On the other side of the coin, one of the unintended consequences of Digital Master 780 is that with the waterfall I now can see all the noise I'm picking up.... but I'll save that rant for another day.