Thursday 2 December 2021

Remember PSK31?

A very cold, windy day yesterday, with heavy hail showers drifting in from the north.  

 

Having done some FT8 and FT4 on 17 and 20m, where results were not very good, I decided to return to an old friend - PSK31.  Remember that?

 

DJ6QC coming in nicely on PSK31 yesterday afternoon.

I recently installed FLDIGI on my Raspberry Pi 4B, and all went smoothly with that.  Although FLDIGI is a very nice package, it doesn't decode messages across the waterfall like DigiPan does, so you have to go chasing the lines on the screen. 

It's nowhere near as busy on 14.070MHz, the PSK frequency on 20m, as it used to be.  But there are a few stalwarts keeping the dream alive.

I had three nice, fairly long QSOs, including some live, keyboard-to-keyboard stuff.  I have to say I really enjoyed doing something other than the FT modes, and will have to do some more PSK in future outings.

1 comment:

PE4BAS, Bas said...

Nice John, I should take a look at PSK some day. Before the JT65/JT9 and FT8 era the mode to go was PSK31/63/125. I believe I already did some PSK31 experiments 20 years ago, it was quite new at that time. It became very populair just like FT8. And besides the usual macro transmitting it was easy to do some keyboard to keyboard chat. I usually changed the macro while transmitting to give it a personal touch. I see that the weather is the same as over here. We had some snow today. 73, Bas