[aprssig] Soundcard Packet Analyzer

[Stephen H. Smith]

On 10/22/2011 10:12 PM, Steve Noskowicz wrote:
> Nice idea.
>
>
>
>    Being from the "old school" (whatever that is) it always fried me when the younger Engineers (@ Motorola) wouldn't have a speaker on while measuring receivers, but just reading the digital readouts of the HP test equipment.
>    Hey! it's HP, it has to be reading correctly.  Sure, but just WHAT is it reading??

Agree 100%!

This also drives me nuts -- not being able to --HEAR-- anything from racked 
radios at mountaintop sites.   At Los Angeles County, we routinely bought one 
of the basic meter-and-speaker test sets for every single Micor, MSF-5000, etc 
base station purchased (and left a test set permanently connected to each 
radio) so that EVERY radio at a site would have the means for actually 
LISTENING to what was coming in.

I used to carry a hacked GE AM/FM  SuperRadio III to sites.  I added a Hi-Z 
balanced  external audio input to, so that I could snap clip leads across the 
600-ohm line output of speakerless base stations at remote sites for the same 
reason.   (I had used the 9.95 Radio Shack amplified squawk box speaker for the 
same purpose, but the SuperRadio has about 20 times the audio output that you 
need to hear over the racket of fans, blowers, power converters and other 
peoples' squawking radios in crowded sites.) As a bonus,  the AM receive, with 
it's DX/local sensitivity switch, was useful for searching for power line leaks 
and power supplies with dying rectifiers!

I use the same radio now to amplify the puny monitor audio of my IFR-1500 
service monitor. ,Now that every one is going to 2.5KHz "sliver-band" 
narrowband deviation, the recovered audio is nearly inaudible in the IFR's own 
speaker.

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Stephen H. Smith    wa8lmf (at) aol.com
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