Turning the dial on 8500 it settled on 11088.1 kHz where a clear-ish image was coming through on JWX.īut the chart didn’t quite look right for a GYA one, it looked more NOAA like, and as it was at the end of the chart, the senders information and chart title box was starting to come through – along with a NOAA badge.Īs well as the badge, the ID started to become visible and I was amazed to see NOAA/National Weather services Honolulu – 24 HR Wind/Wave Forecast – pictured below. I wondered then if the GYA frequency noted in the NOAA document was incorrect. On going to 11084.4 kHz, to my surprise, I could hear a very faint signal though I realised quickly that the frequency was off a little. This included 11084.4 kHz (11086.5 kHz) which I’ve never found anything on before, and even has a question mark next to it in the Wordwide Marine Radiofacsimile Broadcast Schedule produced by NOAA. Unusually I didn’t get anything, so after a while I decided to try the other frequencies used by GYA. I wanted to get the 24, 48, 72 and 120 hour surface prognosis charts and had set everything up on 4608.1 kHz USB – the true frequency is 4610 kHz but you have to step down 1.9 kHz in USB mode for a proper decode.
This is all leading to a search I was making for GYA’s fax’s on the 9th May.
But I do know it does work with the AirSpy HF+ Discovery as one of my contacts on Twitter – Gerhard Schweizer – has managed it after I pointed him to JWX.Īnyway. I still haven’t managed to get this to work with an SDR but I have tried.
Ic r8500 icom software#
The latest software I’ve used – and I think the best to date – is JWX 3.0. And each Fax sender – Northwood (GYA), DWD and NOAA for example – generally works with a different slant requirement. Each can control slant error and suchlike, but each is different in doing this. Some of the software available does the rebuilding for you, but some don’t. This is very easy to fix with Photoshop if this happens. Sometimes this is required anyway to recreate a split image – if the phasing was not automatically detected, the modem could not deduce the beginning of an image causing an an image which is horizontally shifted.
Ic r8500 icom Pc#
I find, probably because my PC is getting past it, that the processor requirements to run the SDR software is enough to make this happen.Īny misalignment requires some Photoshop manipulation, often quite a few just to rebuild the image. This is probably because it is less susceptible to PC jitter – when the processor skips due to lag – and the image is put out of alignment. I have to say this gives the best results with all the software tried. The only receiver I don’t run through the mixer is my trusty Icom R-8500 receiver connected to the PC via the microphone-in input using a mono cable from the record-out on the Icom. fldigi has been my favourite for some time until recently. Some of the decoders i’ve tried include – Sorcerer, MultiPSK and fldigi. Some work with SDRs whilst some don’t – or rather my set up doesn’t let them work with SDRs as I run everything through a M-Track 8 mixer. I’ve used a number of decoders over the years and they have all produced some pretty good results, and each have their different features. I do this from time to time, especially when the weather is good here and I want to know when it is likely to end – more often than not, very soon, though I’ll have to admit the weather has been amazing in recent weeks. I’ve been tinkering with Marine weather radiofacsimiles recently. Quality not too bad, 4880 km away from here.Īgain, all received on my Icom IC-R8500 and Wellbrook Loop, using JWX 3.0 software. I received a further two charts before the end of that days charts and the service stopped. Part-way through chart at 2222z on 12th May 2020. As you can see below, the chart just started. It was static on 9108.1 kHz (9110 kHz) when I started and was about to give up, when all of a sudden a transmission started part-way through a chart – just like they’d flicked a switch on that frequency transmitter. While there are Wind/Wave charts sent on all of the stations, the 24 hour Wind/Wave that is produced by WFO Honolulu is only broadcast on the Hawaii frequency.įrom this, I’m happy to say it was Honolulu that I received and have noted it as such.Īt the time they replied I was actually listening out on one of the NOAA Boston frequencies to see if I could get anything from them. In reviewing the schedules looking for that particular chart (Honolulu’s 24 hr Wind/Wave), I believe that is only transmitted from Hawaii. After my last blog – Weather Fax from Honolulu – I decided I’d drop the Weather HF Operations in Honolulu an email to see if they could confirm whether it was them that I received or not.Īfter a few hours I got back the following response from one of their Ops staff: