Packet Radio is still cool!

So, after destroying a good ptt circuit, I find that the parallel port on the old standby 600 MHz Celeron machine has pins stuck high. Oh well, it gives me a chance to try the simple circuit using an opto-isolator to keep this fate from happening to the AMD 400 MHz machine. So I rummage around in the garage, plug in the sound card I find in some box of junk and then cable up the radio.

What am I met with when I try to run soundmodem?

sm: Cannot open PTT device "/dev/parport0"

So, it would seem I did not have the parallel port turned on the bios. Ugh. Reboot and set it on.

Next I just set the sound level using aumix to about 75 % or so and pot the mic up and give it a go....

call ax0 mplsdn (on local 145.67 MHz). and what do you know, I get connected on the first go. So I pop in a heard list and see that there is good old W0CRC bbs in the list and soon I am back to 1995! Ah, the good old days of bbs'ing.

Thanks Bob for the good write-up on your page!

http://www.qbjnet.com/packet.html

Need to write my own findings up some day, but that is not today.

Now on to a second circuit and set of cables for the HT and mini laptop to try some faster non-standard baud rates to see what I can get away with for speed on just the voice end of things.

73's DE KB0GBJ RYRYRYRYRYRYRYRYRYRYRYRYRYRYRYRYRYRYRYRYRY

Sorry for the diddle.

More soundcard stuff:

amixer sset Mic cap
amixer sset Mic 31
amixer sset Capture 15

Check your input source (some cards can output on the input sources!)
IEC958 in vs out?
Analog source = mic

Test record:
arecord -vv -f cd test.wav