Wednesday, December 15, 2021

Hearing the FreeDV 700e beacon on 7177kHz

With my new low noise QTH I'm able to hear Alan, VK2ZIW's FreeDV 700e beacon on 7177kHz.


He's running 20W from Emu Heights in NSW. The beacon transmits every 10 minutes.

Normally I use Linux but the version of FreeDV in the Debian library is too old for 700e so I used the macOS version. 

At Alan's prompting, I grabbed the freeDV GUI software and built it on Ubuntu 21.10 with no problem. There's a build_linux shell script that does all the hard work.

Alan's beacon has a feature where if you put your callsign in the text message it will replay your transmission back to you. 

Unfortunately the macOS build seems to have a bug where the message field isn't editable. UPDATE: I found the message field in the "options" dialog. My mistake.

I'm looking forward to some FreeDV contacts in the future!

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