I didn’t get a whole lot more amateur radio done.   I spent some time running JT65, mostly on 20m, but sometimes skipping up higher to 17m and 15m.  I’m still eight states short of my WAS, and was teased by stations in NV, WY and ND, which I managed to start QSOs with, but didn’t actually complete.   Grrr!   I did leave my radio running in monitor mode, and continued to rack up spots from another fifteen countries:  Bolivia, Chile, Columbia, Croatia, Denmark, Guatamala, Hungary, Mariana Islands, Norway, Paraguay, Singapore, Surinam,  Switzerland, Tanzania, and Thailand.

I spent some time looking at FreeDV: the digital voice program for HF that uses David Rowe’s  Codec2; low bitrate voice codec.  I didn’t have a lot of luck: I did get it all configured and ready to go, but off and on monitoring of the published calling frequency (14.236) didn’t result in more than a momentary glimpse of a few tentative bleeps.   I tried using K7VE’s QSO finder, and found that indeed, there probably were QSOs going on during the weekend net (1100 Pacific time) that I simply couldn’t hear.  Not too surprising: despite my apparent success running JT65, I suspect my antenna system is actually not that good, and lots is going on below my detection threshold.   I thought that it would be possible to configure up some software to simply wait for audio signals and record them using Audacity, but my IC-735 isn’t especially well calibrated for frequency, and I think I’m probably tuning about 130Hz high, which would prevent a synch lock if I just blindly set the frequency.  I still might try to set that up, and see if I can capture some of this digital audio.   But I think I need to get lucky, and/or make some improvements to my receive antenna before I’ll make any headway.  If anyone else is interested in FreeDV, drop me a note: I’d love to give it a try…

Addendum: I thought maybe a video showing FreeDV might further tempt readers. Here’s one showing it in use. It isn’t especially interesting in terms of weak-signal performance (the SSB audio is clean, with very near full quieting) but it should be noted that the FreeDV signal takes up only about 1100Hz of bandwidth, while the SSB signal is 2.5Khz or so. I don’t think it will replace SSB anytime soon, but in theory doubling the number of QSOs that can take place in a given chunk of spectrum is pretty neat…