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A Fine Business shot indeed, Steve.

There's a lot of information in that spectrogram.  Notice the "brick wall" edge of the DRM.  Some of the slopbuckets have a really nice transient when they key up, and you can really notice who is running processing and who isn't.

And you can see one of those so-called "hifi" slopbuckets around 3900 or so with WAY too much bass (and probably the attendant growly intermodulation distortion).

If the instrument is fast enough and the sweep is narrow, you can actually see an xmitter's synthesizer snap into lock (after a few swings +/- the center frequency), and see how much the carrier drifts from turn-on, as well as see how much synthesizer noise is on the carrier.  Xmitter fingerprinting is child's play with this sort of instrument.

Also cool is being able to see some idiot VFOing around the band then settling down on a particular freq, then calling "CQ".  Makes IDing these knuckleheads easy.

TNX for the post.  73 John

My vote is for Steve for OO.

Very impressive display! I can't say that I've ever seen anything quite like it. What piece of equipment was used to make that snap and how well does it work to identify activity in the CW band? The display of carriers being turned off and on may not show that well. I can only imagine a megabuck piece of gear. The scan rate appears extremely fast.

--Larry W8ER


OUTSTANDING DISPLAY!

YES - - - - - I want one TOOO :)

Cool stuff,
I wish I could bring our new R&S ESIB7 RX home on weekends but I would never finish the new QTH and end up spending all my time building scan tables to monitor the band.
Poor receivers are just as bad as poor transmitters.

One Question Steve.....

Are you qualified to use that piece of equipment ?????

Thanks for the FB summary, John...

Could you please describe some more of what's going on in that shot - in basics?  ie, What is the significance of the totem pole look of each signal?  I see the AM signal has some brighter colors in it showing more amplitude in some areas.

I can see what you mean about some the SSB signals having a fake "carrier/bass" produced by the audio being near the edge of their filter bandpass, etc.  Is this correct?  Where is the transient in some SSBers as you said?  

The sweep says "100ms"... but I see "29.21 sec" on the left corner. What is the total integration time of this shot?

What are some of the finer points you see there? Is that AM station saying, "caw mawn", or "hola" in that particular sweep?

Some signals are darker than others - is this pure signal strength or the density of audio as you mentioned about some ssb processors?

TNX, OM.
T

It's a Hallicrafters S-20R with the very rare SooperDooperSpectrumScope option, and an outside speaker.  

Either that or an Agilent 89600 VSA.

73 John

Gee I thought it was one of dose new sound cards with spectran.

Steve Wins the coolest toy of the day award!

It's a spectrogram much like the hammy hambone audio card software that's drifting around the net, except it's RF as opposed to audio.  

Picture a spectrum analyzer with a 100 mS sweep and 100 hZ RBW (which is what Steve used here IIRC).  Instead of showing the signal intensity in vertical deflection it shows the sig intensity in color - blue is essentially no signal and red is -30dBm.  Each sweep is saved in a "line" of pixels, then the next sweep goes below it, etc.  There are 29.21 seconds of sweeps presented, or 29.21/.1 sec = 292 sweeps.  Essentially you have a 3-d display: freq vs amplitude vs time.  

A VERY strong signal will be red; weaker signals will be various shades according to the color bar on the left side of the dicksplay.  CW signals show up as the dots and dashes you would expect; RTTY shows up as a jiggly line.  FM appears as a zigzaggy mess.  A strong AM signal modulated by a pure tone would show up as three lines; say a yellow carrier and two weaker (say green) sidebands either side of it.  Johnny would show up as a crappy yellow mess blocking about 50 KHz.

You can see the LSB signals as the higher freq audio out to the left and the lower freq out to the right.  See the signal that is more intense at the right - that's an indication of way too much bass.  Denser signals show the effect of audio processing.

You can see one of those carriers that kind of fades in and out - a good representation of ionospheric phading.

You can see on some of them a horizontal line when they start/stop xmitting.  This means a nice audio (or oscillator) transient... kind of like the big "THUNK" my Valiant makes on keyup.

That thing might work on 6 meters but I suspect all you'd get would be TV horizontal lines and a few little pissweak sparklies, caw mawn....

73 John

Wow - that's quite a message! [picture]

So, each horizontal pixel stream is a separate time snapshot/sweep of the band... that's really something.

You can see up around 3950 or so where a couple of stations appear too close - maybe 2.5kc spacing. Whereas, down around 3830 those guys appear to be using 2.7kc audio with 3kc channel spacing.

I see a few horizintal lines that may indicate transcient key up as you describe.

I'll bet with the horizontal baseline blown up X10 you could give out some really detailed bandwidth checks.

Yep, we all need a set up like this. Adding visual to anything gives a whole new dimension of data input efficiency.

Tnx again for the tutorial, JN.

T

Glad you boyz liked that. It's a different and really cool way to look at the spectrum or a signal. The spectrogram I posted is but one of many ways of "viewing" a signal with the analyzer I used. I can also show instantaneous phase, PSD, PDF, amplitude (more or less what you would see on an oscilloscope) and more. It can show one or all of these simultaneously. Neat stuff.

JN did a great job explaining the image. The URL below is another shot I made of Brent, W1IA on 3 April. He had just put his new Class E rig back on the air after blowing it up the previous night. The shot shows the spectrum 10 kHz above and 10 kHz below Brent's center frequency, so there is much more detail of the AM signal on this shot.

Same as before, if you get a 404 Error, just hit reload.

Enjoy!

http://www.amwindow.org/misc/gif/w1ia75m3apr05annotated.gif

I heard Brent for the first time last night. He sounds very good
and strapping 70 to 80 dBuV.

What a neat display Steve. It tells most of what anybody would ever need to know about signals and conditions etc. I want one!

--Larry W8ER

Man... you can see Bob's third BA hanging there in the low frequencies compared to Brent.

They both look pretty clean for hi-fi AM.

So, how long will you have use of it, Steve - just last weekend?   If longer, maybe take a bunch of shots of the regulars and post them...

An interesting example would be a stock 3kc audio boat anchor that is overdriven and WIDER than a clean "wide body" hi-fi AM transmitter.

T

For more info on this cool instrument, click here:

http://www.home.agilent.com/USeng/nav/-12086.536881170/pd.html

Here's a pic of the bad boy:

(http://cp.home.agilent.com/upload/cmc_upload/89640A.jpg)

I didn't see a price posted.

Should we take bets?    uh   $12K for my guess.

--Larry

Try $35-70K depending on options.

That's it. I wonder why Agilent used such a crummy looking IQ pattern on the upper left display?


The unit is at work, Tom. I will take shots of various interesting signals and post as time/conditions permit. Should be fun.

The Tom Vu model comes with the handy 20 dB pad to protect the front end. Not a bad price the guys next door bought the 40 GHz. R&S ESIB7
for about $150K and couldn't afford the tracking generator option.

Two different animals really. The R&S is an EMI receiver, albeit a very sophisticated one. Although the VSA can do pre-compliance EMI measurements, it's really for nitty-gritty signal measurement and analysis. The biggest difference is that the VSA can perform vector measurements and analysis. I don't think the R&S can.

Real World prediction:
Fifteen years from now you see one in a shit pile of test junk
on the ground at Hosstraders - no one knows what it is or even
wants it for  free...  :lol:   [Your home computer does it in year
2020 with a free software download]


Bizzaro World prediction:
In 2020 analyzers become more valuable than moon rocks
because everyone forgot to make any more.

T

Tom you are pretty close today. All this stuff is running windows based control software. It is a PC with a RF front end. The fancy case is a front
for keeping the cost high. Heck there was a vector network analyzer project in QEX last year you could build for about $200. It functioned to
200 mHz.  All this stuff runs windows and you can connect it to a network.
Testing can be set up over the net so remote control is pretty easy.
Many things have key board and mouse connections.
Yup the ESIB7 is not vector but you can't beat that S meter option
with any RX I have ever seen. You can even monitor FM while setting up
with the handy 2 inch front panel speaker.  Biconical antenna in the hall and you get tunes. No stereo though.

I saw the 89600's predecessor, the 89441, at Dayton last year for about $5K.  This was an $85K analyzer and was current til about 2000.  Has much the same capability of the 89600 plus has an arbitrary source.  What's cool about that is you can capture a signal to memory (max bandwidth = 8 MHz) then replay it back thru the arbitrary source into a receiver or whatever other instrument.  You can even play it backwards. ANd show the signal in time doman, freq domain, demodulated time domain, and demodulated freq domain SIMULTANEOUSLY if you want.

The 89441 is stand-alone, no PC needed.  5K for this is a hell of a lot better buy than those IFR service monitors, IMHO.

73 John

I heard you can pick up an 8753D network analyzer used for about $7K
another fine tool. Used one this morning.

Champion of the sky covered in maple syrup!!

Wow!! Thanks Steve...This is great!! I was going to bring an analyzer to do a sweep on the rig, but you just saved me the time. The anti-aliasing filter is set to brick wall at 12.5 khz and the pic  proves it. YAY!!!

Thanks again guys...it fun to have the rig on the air.

Brent(Tina) W1IA

Was it spectacular, Brent?

Heard you and Keith last night on 90, sounds FB!

73 John

Yes Brent was strapping last night on 90 and sounded great!
K1BOY well strapped.

Dave W9AD and I were oogling the display that Steve put up and Dave came up with this .. any guesses .. that is besides it's a display of WWV during the time announcement?


(http://w8er.com/pics/water.jpg)

SDR-1000


(http://www.flex-radio.com/home_files/sdr1k-enc_small.jpg)

$875 receiver only
$1375 100 watt transceiver

It does a 20 khz sweep. The picture of the screen was captured using a Logitec webcam. I understand it's a much better display in person.   :lol:

You can see the voice announcement, the click indicating the top of the minute and the first two tones following the click, I can't read the screen but it appears that they are less than 1 khz. I also see the calibrated signal strength reading (in dbm).

--Larry W8ER

That's pretty good frequency resolution on that display Larry. Do you know how fast it scans the 20 kHz segment?

Here's another shot taken tonight of K1JJ, W3DUQ, W2INR, W2APR and WB8BIL in QSO on 3880 kHz around 0030Z.

http://www.amwindow.org/misc/gif/jjduqinrapebil388011apr05annotated.gif

Actually I don't Steve. I assume that you are asking about the time it takes for a left to right traverse of the display. I am on the verge of ordering one of these things. Dave loves his, enough to displace his MarkV and his RX340, and I'm blown away by what I see. Since much is defined by software, I would think that some of the parameters involved might easily be changed to include wider sweeps .. etc .. to the limits of the hardware. Dave is saying that the SDR-1000 is a big improvement over the RX-340 in terms of recovered audio, selectivity, sync detector and I've heard MP3's to back that up! Additionally it just happens to include a transmitter! The guys at flex-radio have included routines that make the radio do AM and from what I have seen and heard of that .. incredible! A brickwall filter that allows you to set bandwidth out to 20 khz. I am seeing claims on the ultimate rejection of the filter being in the area of 50 db. I have seen some of Daves testing that shows it at about 40 db. I'll post more on this after I get mine and get some hands on time with it.

BTW great shot of the 75 meter activity. I heard you and the INR a bit earlier on 3880 but didn't stay around long enough to hear the rest jump in.

--Larry W8ER

The Flex Radio looks pretty cool, especially the RX side. I was surprised by the IMD specs of the TX side shown in April's QST - only -29 dB! That seems like a big step backwards considering radios with tube finals produced years and even decades ago produce IMD numbers of -40 dB or better.

Man I would love to see the hlr sbe rig in action.

That's pretty neat Steve. Not only can I see the Junkston 122 VFO drift but the color at the carrier shows the fading real well!!

Neat schtuff !

I can see everyone's on the same frequency, caw mawn...

If the ARRL gets their way with the bandwidth limitations every ham's gonna hafta buy one of these to make sure they're not too wide.

73 John

How wide I am is none of their business !!!

Unless, of course, they're paying my food bills !!!   :lol:

Hmmmm....   I'm looking at that 10kc++ audio spike and wondering who or what was causing that!

It looks like the labeled stations are cleared leaving -  DUQ and me... :lol:

At first I thought it looked like a classic key-up spike, but it now looks to appear in the middle of a transmission when it happens, like an intermitant audio parasitic or something..  Any opinions?

I was running my class E rig and have axed Steve to take a close look at my sig when he gets a chance.  It may be nothing, but who knows...   This kind of thing can blow rigs up, so worth finding who is the source and get it fixed.

This reminds me that it might be a good thing for everyone to check their own "key up" transcient. That is something most of us have  never looked at and it is certainly part of our overall signal on AM.  I don't see anything here unusual, like spikes on the scope during key-up, just a sloped CW leading edge. I think a key-up square wave with a sharp leading edge would cause a spike. Just like CW, a tapered slope to the carrier on key up is the best idea to reduce spikes/key clicks.  [and check "un-key" for a nice sloping collapse too, otherwise our channel neighbors will be hearing lots of mysterious clicks during fast break in operation... :badgrin: ]

T

My channel selector has a loose set screw.

  8)

I have a lot of stuff to A/B for next time.

Whew.....   I just did a test with the guys on 75M and they hear no key up/down clicks nor audio spikes up the band. Guess my E rig is OK.

During the test other guys checked their rigs and we found one that had a little problem with key-up spikes. So it's worth the effort to check ourselves out.

Slow the o'scope sweep speed way down and occassionally the leading edge or trailing edge will appear when the rig is keyed. A classic smooth CW shaped edge is what you want to see for a clean signature.

T

It was probably Bill's chair, T.  Actually it looks like it happened during Gary's transmission, but it if you look closely it appears to go completely across the screen which would lead me to believe it is some kind of broadband noise (lightning crash, electric fence, etc) rather than an audio spike.  Certainly doesn't really look like a parasitic.

Dave, are you sure that your channel selector's the only piece of equipment in your shack with a loose screw  :D ?

I have one of these instruments on my desk but no HF antenner, unfortunately  :(

73 John

You guys can get the same display if you down convert your IF to 12 KHz or so kHZ and use free SDR software.

fine looking rig Larry . . .  8)

You can't get 36 MHz of instantaneous bandwidth with a 12 KHz IF, though!

Everything has a price.

You won't even get a 20 kHz view (instantaneous or otherwise) using the sound card and the SDR software.

Tom:

I think the "spike" you see is legitimate. My guess is that it was an "s" or "h" sound and is just showing the excellent high frequency response of the transmitter. Now, if both you and Bill are lowpassing your audio at something less than 10 kHz, then there may be a problem.

Is this question meant to be rhetorical?

Steve .. what am I seeing then on the SDR waterfall display? If you carefully look at the scale it looks as if the window is 10 khz either side of the center frequency. A little interpolation makes it appear that the scan may go out to 9 khz, either side, or a total of 18 khz. That's not far from a 20 khz view!

Art,

I am grilling Dave on his and thinking very seriously about one. They appear to be pretty impressive, especially the receiver. Steve pointed out the 3rd order IMD product was measured at only 29 db down by the ARRL Lab and I didn't notice that earlier. That is certainly NOT impressive. I notice that there is a lot of experimentation going on now with different sound cards, ones with higher sample rates like the m-audio card.  I do not know what sound card the ARRL used although I assume it was the Turtle Beach Santa Cruz.

How is yours doing? Have you been using it on AM?

--Larry

Larry or Art or anybody:
Are there any lap top sound cards that work well with the SDR? I poked around the Flex web site but all I could seem to find that are "approved" are cards that are PCI based.

Pete,  they specifically say that there are no laptop sound cards that are approved. The ones that are approved, and the radio is only guaranteed to work with those cards, are PCI based with the exception of one of the Creative cards and that may be USB attached. If your laptop has a USB port, that might work.

Art may know more about this as he has an SDR1000. I am sitting on the fence and near buying one but my exposure is limited to reading the doc and working with Dave W9AD a small amount on his.



--Larry

What can I say? Eighteen isn't 20. :lol:  But actually I was commenting on the free SDR/demodulator software out there used in combo with a receiver/downconverter and a PC soundcard. You'll be lucky to get 18 kHz out of that setup since most receivers don't have IF bandwidths anywhere near 18 kHz.

"I am grilling Dave on his and thinking very seriously about one. They appear to be pretty impressive, especially the receiver. Steve pointed out the 3rd order IMD product was measured at only 29 db down by the ARRL Lab and I didn't notice that earlier. That is certainly NOT impressive. I notice that there is a lot of experimentation going on now with different sound cards, ones with higher sample rates like the m-audio card. I do not know what sound card the ARRL used although I assume it was the Turtle Beach Santa Cruz.

How is yours doing? Have you been using it on AM?"

. . . and do continue to grill Dave . . . it is barbecue season . . .

There was quite a flap at FlexRadio about the IMD measurement. Gerald Y. generated a letter that indicated the settings and configurations were incorrect. He has been accurate in all dealings with me so my sense is this is accurate. It does illustrate the cutting edge nature of the rig though. If I had it to do again I would purchase the base (1W out) system and build my own PA/ATU. OTOH the PA and tuner are high quality units and integrated into the "box".
I have a minor problem with broadband noise on my carrier that is generated by the Santa Cruz sound card. A simple R-C filter is the solution and the implementation is due today. So, my use of the SDR-1000 on AM has been limited. Reports from the gang on 3825 are very good however. It helps that an EQ and spectral analysis software are included in the PowerSDR software. I can also select my TX bandwidth up to 20KHz. Typically I leave it at 4KHz. It's kind of like the 180MPH speedo . . . it's there if condx allow.
Slop bucket reports have been glowing.

The PowerSDR ap hangs every once in a while and power out control is not always consistent. That might be due to the fact that you can control every aspect of your TX signal and I am continuously diddling. . .

Some of the GUIs that are being worked now would knock your socks off. Kinda like the big bucks Icom GUI but you can move the panel elements where you want on the front of the radio.

There were concerns about the parallel port interface going the way of the 5-1/4 floppy. Now there is a USB interface.

Bottom line: I would recommend the low power unit as the best value. The RX is the best thing since sliced bread with stepped front end gain and brick walls where you want them. The TX is still in process IMO. However, the "static" concept of waiting until the bugs are worked out doesn't apply. The bugs are always being worked out and it is a new rig every time you update the software.

Pete . . . there is a USB sound card that is being used so a lap top is a candidate. You need an amplified speaker so theres another box. I am considering a micro ITX footprint dedicated computer that has two PCI slots. My P4 3.0GHz runs at about 20% CPU utilization or so at full load of the PowerSDR software so choose your computer horsepower accordingly. Sound cards are always a major topic of conversation with "unsupported" cards parameters etc. The software is as close to managed open source as I have ever seen. More like an expanding project team than a user base.

-ap

You guys might want to put a bit more bias on the TX to lower the IP3
crud if the heat sink can handle it.  A sound card can't match HUZ man's
monitor device but who needs to see all that spectrum all the time.
The newer sound cards with higher sample rates will allow more viewing.
They will come down in price in time.

Wow! Thanks Art for the information. It seems like everytime you run across an SDR1000 owner, you get a little different piece of the puzzle. Dave is real wrapped up in trying to find a card that will take the AES/EBU digital output of his Orban and still fit in with the SDR1000. He recently tried some other Creative card and I guess it really screwed things up for him. The "restore" function of XP got his registry back to the point he could recover and pop the old Santa Cruz card back in.

According to Dave they are trying to find a better sound card for the unit, one that will allow them to move the 11 khz IF up to some higher frequency. Since the sound card is the "heart" of the radio, that might be a good direction. I wouldn't be too concerned about the 11 khz IF for SSB use but on AM, well if my shorts were a little tighter and my voice had some 6 to 9 khz components, there might be some interesting products! Although I have heard Dave's and it's pretty darn good. When he decided to move his Mark V to the back shelf, well it got my attention!

and hey, with the AM Max fiasco  :lol: (at least I got one) , I should be leary of leading edge products but I guess I am not. I doubt that I'll wait much longer on this one.


GFZ -- They are working on the sound card thing rihgt now and yes, I think even if the bandwidth can't match HUZ's tool, that's why they call him "tripod", it still could be quite useful in analyzing the stuff that we like to look at.

--Larry

Take a look at WBBN, 1130 kHz

http://www.amwindow.org/misc/gif/1130kHzwbbn9apr050045z.gif

The pro-grade 96 ksamples/sec, 24-bit sound cards have been out for a while. With the proper SW these could provide on the order of 40 kHz analysis bandwidth. That's more than enough to look at someone's signal and see if it's FB or not. The trick is getting a receiver with that kind of IF bandwidth.

I guess you could scan/tune a receiver with a smaller IF bandwidth, taking an FFT at each step and then patch all the FFTs together for a composite look at the spectrum covered by the scan. With this set up you could cover as much bandwidth/range/spectrum and you wished, within the tuning limits of your receiver.

The trade-off with this approach is the amount of time required to cover the span of spectrum you wish to look at. This time is dependent on how fast the receiver can switch frequencies (settling time of synth, IF, etc.) and how fast the sound card/computer can calculate, store and display the FFT.

Many Mil RXs have wide band IF outputs. The cubic R3030 first IF is as wide as the preselector. Racal made a few RA6840s and DF RA6830s
with wide band outputs. WJ 8718 has one also. These receivers would be great front ends with a stage of conversion to base band or base band I/Q
to feed a sound card.
The FFT function works a lot better than a scan function for seeing things real time. The Racal MA2232 FFT spectrum monitor is cool but only 8 KHz wide.
The 96K sample sound cards will be cool when the price comes down.

Indeed. Although the price of the high end sound cards right now are far less than the price of the receivers you mentioned (unless you get a good deal or a fixer-upper).

The other thing to keep in mind is as you get wider IF bandwidths, the quality of the A/D becomes more important. Running a wideband A/D into most sound cards is a recipe for lots of spurious crap. The criticality of the sound card used in the Flex Radio bears this out, and this is narrowband usage.

Steve,
The Flex radio has very little filtering ahead of the sound card. RC filters after the first mixer and maybe some roll off in the op amps driving the sound card. A simple down converter on any receiver would work. I had good luck with a Motorola DSP eval module taking in a 15.5 KHz wide signal and the sample rate was only 44 KHz.  This simple down converter could also be used with SDR software as a demodulator.  My goal is a spectrum monitor and demodulation hanging off a good RX IF. The Cubic R3030 would work fine. I also have a RA6830 withan aux IF channel 15.5 KHz wide with it's own slow agc perfect to feed a I/Q down converter.
This down converter could be adapted to any 455 kHz IF. I used a modified Ft1000 detector board from Tom Vu as my base band demodulator but plan to build something better. The lash up was JS but the performance was very impressive.

Very interesting.

What did you need to do to get the FT-1000 board to work? I've heard it would unlock very easily or something similar. I have one somewhere in the pile of stuff, and if you thing it's worth messing with, I'll dig it out.

I made 2 modifications. I increased the cap in the loop filter then I changed the chip cap in series with the resonator to pull it up to 455 KHz.
I think the IF was 450 KHz in the ft1000. Pete SOV did the same thing but he used a trim cap on the resonator. The center frequency of the resonator is actually a multiple of 455 KHz. (X8 I think) The loop filter cap was 22 UF maybe 10 UF in parallel with the stock value. It still drops out
on a deep fade. Problem now is the capture time is slower. The Classic PLL
thing. I coupled the I/Q outputs with a couple film caps to the motorola DSP56303 EVM. I never tried it into a PC as the shack pakuter is too slow.
Pete provided the software and filter constants that took a little SW hacking but it worked very well. I had to add wait states in the software
to get it perfect but we never figured out why. The filter skirts were deeper than I wanted to increase the drive level to find the floor.
Skirts were about 100 Hz. wide for all bandwidths tested. (2,4,6,8,16 KHz)
The problem with the Eval module was I had to reload software every time I chanded bandwidthe and never worked out a good memory / control interface. The SDR guys made the sound card work so lost interest in the eval module.

Cool. TNX for the tips bro!

Give a man an EMI receiver and he will listen to tunes. Teach him how to use it and he will piss off managers.

Art & Larry:
Thanks for the info. Station laptop here is a P4 Gateway running 2 GHz, 256 MB memory, XP Pro, 2 USB ports, and on-board sound circuitry. I'll try a break away from my flea market spots at Dayton over those several days and go visit the Flex booth and see what the latest info is.

Pete said:



Pete ... Dave is using a very small Dell that he got off of Ebay, I think it was something like $125. It was one of those "just off of lease" machines. He has chosen to use a dedicated computer just for the SDR1000. It has a 933 mhz P4 and 256 meg of memory and is running XP.

Art really brough up a good point in planning one of these and that is Daves machine is seeing about 40% CPU utilization during use. That is doing just radio tasks!

After what I have seen Pete, I would not want to use the computer for anything other than the SDR1000, no matter how big and fast it was. I wonder about things like turning on the radio and then you get one of those Windows beeps or sounds and I wonder where it might go! Does it go to my speaker like normal or go out on the air?

--Larry

"After what I have seen Pete, I would not want to use the computer for anything other than the SDR1000, no matter how big and fast it was. I wonder about things like turning on the radio and then you get one of those Windows beeps or sounds and I wonder where it might go! Does it go to my speaker like normal or go out on the air?"

You raise a good point Larry. I use my all purpose computer to control the SDR-1000. It's not that I don't have other computers. . . it's just that two computers won't fit on my desk. I like to multitask. That being said. I have had no problems with computer sounds going out over the air. The mic input is used for SDR-1000 TX.
I run word, project, thunderbird, firefox, and more background proggies than I should. . .  no problem. As I said tho . . P4 3GHz 1Gb 2sound cards, yada yada . . .
I am listening to 40m as this is being written. . . not much going on today. . .just a few slop bucketeers in the distance . . . 'must all be on their puters. . .
The RC filter cleaned up the wideband noise I mentioned yesterday. Now I can use the linyar. . . .


-ap

Art.

I don't think you have to put them on the same desk .. the same floor, the same house even. If your computers are running XP, there's a piece of software Start/Programs/Accessories/Communication/ called "remote desktop cornection". It's real easy to set up and secure. On a 100 mb internal network there's practically no difference from being in front of the host (SDR1000)computer. It's not the slightest bit sluggish like PC Anywhere or VNC. On the remote computer, you can run it full screen, or windowed. You can connect to the internet, read your email or whatever and still run your radio. I did this with the RX-340 and tried it with the TS-870 .. it's flawless! Actually I ran the TS-870 from the hospital and Dave was able to control my 870 from Chicago too. You should try it.

So put your SDR1000 in the basement and get all of the radio gear out of the wifes gaze!  :badgrin:

--Larry