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In: Amateur Radio, Audio
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Both the IC-7300 and the IC-9700 have an IF output option. A great feature that enables the receive of all kinds of exotic transmissions. On the IC-7300, Icom pitched this feature at DRM receive. Soon after the IC-7300 launched, it became clear that the IF output bandwidth varies with the receive mode setting, which is illogical (Mr. Spock). For DRM receive, all is fine: set mode to AM, connect something like DREAM to the IF output and listen to PC audio. For CW skimmer, it’s a little more problematic, so maybe Icom only had DRM receive in mind when designing this. It will work, butRead More →

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“My IC-7300 has lower power output compared to my previous transceiver.” Yes, with compressor off that’s true. Is the IC-7300 broken? No, it’s not. So what is wrong here? Often, the resulting discussion is about peak meters, PEP, settings, the weather and cosmic radiation. By chance I noticed, when changing tune power levels in WSJT-X, (the slider on the right) that the IC-7300 ALC has very fast attack time. An input level increase above max output level is corrected very quickly (to avoid overshoot). But then the reverse action, the same input level decrease, is followed very slowly by the ALC. It takes up toRead More →

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In: Amateur Radio, Audio, Computer
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I’ve decided to stop trying to use two different computers (one Win10 PC for amateur radio and one Mac Mini) more or less at the same time, switching back and forth keyboard and screen. So I upgraded my Parallels to version 15 (at reduced price..), installed Win10 on the Mac Mini and started to transfer the different amateur radio programs to the new Win10 virtual machine. Running WSJT-X on Win10 in Parallels works, but I noticed dropouts on transmit. No issues on receive, only transmit. Audio is all about timing, and generating the WSJT-X audio requires proper timing, something that a virtual machine will struggleRead More →

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In: Amateur Radio, Audio, Computer
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I have both the IC-9700 and IC-7300 Icom transceiver connected to my Win10 PC. Looking at device manager or your amateur radio software setup, it would be nice to know which is which. The serial ports of these Icom radios have model and serial number embedded in the “serial” field of the USB device properties. On Windows, this information is used to keep the device assigned to the same COM port all the time. Unfortunately, the audio devices are all called “<some number>- USB Audio CODEC”. So “2- USB Audio CODEC” references my IC-7300 and “3- USB Audio CODEC” my IC-9700. This is not somethingRead More →