Month: August 2012

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Funcube with HSM upconverter

notes

After months away from this project I am at this moment listening to 40 meter cw signals via  the High Sierra Microwave (HSM) upconverter into the funcube via Max/MSP.

The Max funcube external doesn’t provide a way to turn on the bias tee current which powers the HSM device, so… I am using this version of the FCHid software to turn on bias tee, and set LNA to 0db, while using Max to tune the funcube. This is on windows and both programs can run at the same time.

http://uk.groups.yahoo.com/group/FCDevelopment/files/FCHID/

Prior versions of FCHid don’t have the checkbox for bias tee.

Next on the agenda will be to make this work in Mac OS.

First impressions: signals seem a bit weak, although it could be atmospheric conditions. Filtering isn’t great but its adequate – it just doesn’t have the ‘punch’ you get with a good selective receiver… Which is why nobody in their right might would actually design a shortwave receiver this way.

Update: got it working on mac os using version 3.2 of QtHid to toggle the bias-t – this version is the latest as of the time of this post and was bundled with the dmg.