waterfall

[Kevin Olson]

Alex,. have you heard of any issue with the waterfall  and the ic9700? I started up my other computer and running RTL-SDR ver. 4. waterfall is working right off the bat. but not a thing when running the ic9700.

also run into problem with the rotor control  again. all setting are good.but it gets to that 90 deg point falling a bird and stop. ill play with that again. So far awesone program.

 K0KDO 73

[Alex VE3NEA]

The waterfall requires an SDR, it does not work from a regular transceiver.

Re. rotor control - this might be a limitation of the rotctld.exe driver. The FAQ section in the SkyRoof User's Guide contains some troubleshooting ideas.

[DD1US]

Hello,

first of all let me congratulate Alex for generating this excellent piece of software. Thank you very
much for generating and sharing SkyRoof with us !

I am using SkyRoof with my IC-7900 and was able to make already many QSOs via various LEO satellites.

The automatic doppler compensation is really nice.

Yet I am missing a spectrum / waterfall display on the PC and I am therefore prepared to spend some
extra work to get this added:

I like the IC-9700 hooked up to my various antennas for the differnt bands and that I can switch between the
various satellites with different uplink and downlink bands only by software / without having to change
cables etc.

 Therefore I am considering to add hardware in the IC-9700 to route the received signals to the outside
and then connect a SDR receiver to this “IF-Tap”. With this I do not have to worry about killing my SDR 
by making a mistake switching coaxial cables between the IC-9700 and SDR inputs but rather have the
SDR permanently attached to the tapped receive only signal.

I am hoping that it is then possible to use the IC-9700 as I use it today but have in addition a waterfall display
available in the Skyroof software, be able to tune by clicking in the waterfall diagram and also use the SDR
to decode telemetry of various satellites.

Has someone already done this or something similar ? I do not want to reinvent the wheel.

Also I expect that such a setup needs to be specifically supported by the Skyroof software as it will
have to deal with both the IC-9700 (transmitting and receiving) as well as a SDR receiver in parallel.

By the way my preference would be to use an Airspy SDR receiver.

Many thanks for any feedback.

Best regards

Matthias

www.dd1us.de

[Marcus PY2PLL]

There's already the transverter feature under Settings, where you can enable the RX IF (i use sometimes 435 => 28MHz) and then the RTL V4 displays the IF signal but labeled with the 435MHz frequency, with Doppler shift compensated accordingly.

73 Marcus PY2PLL

[Alex VE3NEA]

I am using IC-9700 and Airspy Mini - in fact, this hardware was used to develop SkyRoof. The unit that connects them is PTRX-9700, it is installed inside the transceiver and taps the RF signal behind the T/R switch, narrowband filter and preamp of the radio. The output of this unit goes directly to the SDR. I bought PTRX-9700 from its maker, but the plans are now available for home-brewing.

Airspy is used for the waterfall display (situational awareness), for decoding telemetry and SSTV and fore CW QSO, transceiver's audio output is used for decoding FT4 and  making FT4 QSO.