No fuss PSK. How I first got on air. Easy.

The purists may not like it, but you can get on air easily too. I reckon there is no need worry about fancy I/O boxes until you have a play and get to know the mode. My interconnect is now built, but I wanted to show you how I got on air the first time with PSK. Setup checklist to minimise distortion & excessive bandwidth of PSK signals Tune the rig for normal output on CW Change to the appropriate sideband setting (USB for PSK is standard) Turn off the speech processor and leave it off Set the audio control of the rig as you would for normal SSB operation Set the PSK software to Transmit, with no data being transmitted Adjust the audio output from the soundcard so that the RF power output from the rig is no more than 25% of the cw output. (e.g. 25 watts for a 100 watt rig) This will provide approx. 50W average output during QSO. There should be no ALC indication at this power level. Although you might be able to set the power higher in step 6 with no ALC, this setup should ensure that a very clean signal is transmitted. A few words of caution. If driving the microphone input of the rig, an attenuator between the soundcard output and the transceiver input may be needed. Distortion can also occur in the sound card at very low, or very high output levels. An attenuator can ensure that the soundcard output control is near the middle of its dynamic range, giving the cleanest audio signal to the transceiver.