#Level meter to use with fldigi plus#

That problem is overcome in that when that signal is received by the recipient a beat frequency oscillator “injects” an audio signal into that CW signal producing the familiar dah and dits of, yep you’ve guessed it, Morse code. Now the clever bit comes in that a CW signal has no sound and you can’t hear it as all you are sending is the carrier wave. It takes about an hour to build, fits in an Altoids tin, runs of a 9V battery and will get you around the world on the airwaves quite nicely. If you just send the carrier wave, the bandwidth becomes very small (200Hz), the power required to send that signal also decreases significantly and the actual radio becomes a very simple creature.īy way of example, this is a Pixie 40m CW only transceiver, which costs about £3 and comes as a kit. All the clever stuff inside the radio takes care of all this for you so that the only human interaction required is to talk into the radio and listen at the other end!īy “encoding” audio onto that carrier wave the bandwidth of the signal increases and takes up more space on the airwaves, is more susceptible to distortion, interference etc etc. In very simplistic terms a radio wave is made by taking an audio frequency and a carrier frequency, mixing them together (modulation) to produce a signal which blasts across the ether and is then demodulated (taken apart) by the receiving radio to give you an audio frequency and carrier frequency. – for a bit more information if you’re inclined. For the uninitiated, when you can’t get anyone to hear voice or other audio transmission, Morse will stand a much greater chance of getting there.Īgain for those in the public gallery who aren’t into this as much as others and need a hand keeping pace, CW is a means of communicating where by the carrier wave only is switched on and off. Now a saying that is banded around by the radio fraternity is similar to “when all modes fail CW will prevail”.

#Level meter to use with fldigi plus#

If you work to the above, RTTY and PSK will provide the DX QSO’s but CW (Continuous Wave) draws a larger audience so there’s a numbers element to it, plus CW operators are more likely to work for a contact. The award is granted by (and a registered trademark of) the American Radio Relay League.)įrom chatting with Andy, he made the valid observations that the three key factors in making successful long distance contacts are propagation (naturally!), timing (when are the operators in your target area likely to be at their radios) and numbers (more people on the radio maximises your chances) – almost like big game hunting except no celebrity lions! Or dentists with high velocity rifles!

(The DX Century Club, or DXCC, is an amateur radio operating award earned by making a distant contact, or DX, with 100 or more geographic entities around the world. Not necessarily a bad thing and it’d been good fun racking up the contacts but I really need to burst the Euro bubble if I’m looking to attain any awards such as DXCC.

OK, so after having produced a very pretty picture showing where I’d been during 2015 the first thing that hit me was that it was rather “Eurocentric”.