WB4SON

So after a week of experience with WSJT-X and in the interest of full disclosure, I am clearly no expert.  But here are a few gems that I’ve found by reading through the manual a few times:

• Set the incoming level to about 30 on the scale.  Best results are when the slider to the right is about mid-scale, so use your sound card controls to position it to 30.
• The decode rate is critical.  I was pretty sure mine was set at the recommended 48000 samples per second.  I had noticed several strong carriers that were appearing on the waterfall display that did not correspond to signals shown in the P3 pass-band.  These signals ranged from 5-30 dB over the noise floor.  I suspected my sound interface, but Spectrum Lab showed it to be clean.  I double checked the recording device/properties/advanced and found it was set to “CD Quality, 16-bit, 44100 Hz”.  I changed it to “DVD Quality, 16-bit, 48000 Hz” and everything was just fine with the waterfall.
• The software does support bidirectional rig control.  You will notice a small box, about the size of a check box, slightly to the left and down from the ORG window.  This is colored orange when rig control is unidirectional.  If you adjust the Setup/Configuration screen “Polling rate” to 1 or 2 seconds, then that box will be colored green.  Now any VFO change will show up on the ORG display (in theory).  For the most part it works fine with my K3, but it does seem to get upset when I change bands.
  

  Red Text Illustrates Green Rig Control Box

• You can use Split Tuning for optimal transmit tone generation.  Since WSJT-X can sample up to 4 KHz of spectrum for JT65 and JT9 signals, it is possible to see and decode both areas at once (if you have a receive pass-band that can handle 4 KHz).  However the audio pass-band on transmit may well block higher frequency tones.  In my case, I could decode a signal at 3000 Hz with no problem, but there was zero output because 3000 Hz tones were out of my transmit pass-band.  By enabling Split in the Setup/Configuration screen AND setting my K3 to Split, WSJT-X will shift the transmit VFO to keep the generated tones in a 1500-2000 Hz window.  This works in both unidirectional and bidirectional Rig Control modes.  By the way, when this feature is enabled, a “S” appears in the orange or green box near the ORG window.

Having a bit of spare time on my hands today, I finally installed Version 1.2 Beta of the WSJT-X, which is Joe Taylor’s implementation of JT-9 and JT-65.  Although it pained me to stop using Joe Large’s version of JT65-HF, which has served me well for two and a half years, when I saw “Download no longer available, JT65-HF project abandoned” on Laurie’s JT-Alert website, I figured it was time to move on.  Plus I knew that there were JT-9 signals lurking a couple of KHz above the usual JT-65 waterfall spots.

The installation went smooth as silk, even for someone who hadn’t read the manual.   It took me a bit to figure out how to scale the waterfall window by twiddling with the individual controls, and eventually I figured out that the “JT65 2500 JT9” setting controlled the frequency that JT-9 signals would begin to be decoded (and what the shift 2 KHZ button was for).  Going into configuration I soon had my station info entered, and my rig control information all set.  The test buttons for PTT and Xmit allowed me to get the transmit levels set (unsurprisingly completely overloaded until I backed the gain slider down to about half).  I also assumed that the RX signal bar on the left shouldn’t be pegged off scale, so I adjusted the digital slider down until things were about half scale there too.

Sure enough, signals began to decode every minute — lots more of them that I was used to (it seemed like JT65-HF would decode six or so on 14.076, but I was decoding more than a dozen (they would scroll out of the decode window every minute).  Eventually I found a station that seemed to be running JT-9 (very narrow bandwidth) who was calling CQ, and I double clicked on his decoded message and checked on the button to enable transmit.  A few seconds later my rig was in transmit, and the signal monitor produced an almost constant tone — but I could hear the slightest warble.  After 50 seconds of transmit, I was in my first JT-9 contact with a station in Uruguay.

Being the backward-sort of person I am, its now time to read the manual.  Plus I need to install the new version of JT-Alert which supports WSJT-X, and get it interfaced into my HRD 6.0 logbook.

It’s fun to try new things!