For anyone interested in a decent hand-held transceiver in the $100 range, the Wouxun KG-UVD1P is an excellent start! I bought two units a couple of months ago and I quite enjoy listening to the local repeater traffic, and participating in the odd net.
Being that I am an experimenter at heart, I wanted to know if the HF digital modes would work well on these hand-held units. In order to feed the speaker output to my computer, I hacked an ear-piece that I bought with the radios. The speaker output for these radios is a 2.5mm jack and computers typically have a 3.5mm jack. The ear-piece / PTT that I bought has the required 2.5mm and 3.5mm jacks in a nice package, so it was natural to reuse that portion.
After some cutting and soldering, I make a very basic “straight thru” cable with no isolation. This is not recommended as you have no electrical isolation between the computer and the radio. A well designed TNC does this for you (along with AX.25 decoding, etc). I plan to make a simple optically isolated connection cable.
So I fired up one radio as the receiver and the other as my transmitter. Using low power on 145.590MHz I sent myself a message consisting of :
TEST TEST TEST de VE3BUX VE3BUX VE3BUX
Lo and behold, the PSK31 transmission was easily decoded at the receiver. I tried various other modes including: PSK500, MFSK8-16-32, RTTY45 & 50 and some others. All modes worked just fine.
My next step will be to design a simple opto-isolator board that will trigger the PTT when the right-channel audio is detected. (Fldigi offers a mode where a steady tone is output on the right channel to function as a PTT trigger). I’ll do the layout in Eagle CAD and breadboard the design prior to having a PCB made. If it works, I’ll release the design with a parts-list for all to use.
Alban,
Your radio should work just fine with satellites, however, you will need a directional antenna (such as the Arrow II) to make best use of it. I would also advise that a second radio listening on the down-link would be a good idea. These Wouxun radios are not truly split VFO radios (ie. you can not listen on “x MHz” and transmit on “y MHz” at the same time).
APRS will work, though you will need a TNC or software to emulate a TNC with the radio. All this makes it a bit unwieldy to manage.
I’ve made a prototype isolating cable – I just have to work-up the CAD files and send it off for production. I’ll try to get to that soon!
and then ?did you manage to ?
i’m going to get my ham licence in france
my brand new UVD1P is on delivery from HK
i’m interrested in working with satellites, digital modes, APRS, and so on…
i wish you to share the results of your experiments on the subject !
thanks
Alban