AOR5000 Best Software?

[gigyahurts]

Thanks for your comments, Syslabs. The software is working well and I will almost certainly buy it next week.

The ability to run multi radios is a very important one although my other radios, a TS2K and VX7R, are not supported at this time.

As I said before, I am very new to this and as such my operating methods are almost certainly lacking. The panadapter will no doubt make a huge difference in how I operate but will not completely take the place of the search feature.

I am trying to automate my information collection for the least amount personal time commitment. How the time stamped search feature would help is that I can search a block of frequencies for a large time period with short delay on signal and record the transmission. Since the recording is time stamped, I could pick out portions of a recording that sound promising and with the time stamp determine the frequency if each hit was also time stamped. This would allow me to focus on this frequency more in the future or disregard frequencies that had no information of interest..

My next big hurtle is to get some new coax run to dedicated receiver antennas and the antennas installed. Has anyone had much success with a discone antenna like a diamond d3000 for satellite reception? I know it will be inferior to a dedicated QFH antenna but I am only going to put one more VHF/UHF antenna up and it will have to be a compromise. The question is, will it be good enough for reception of satellite data?

 

[syslabs]

gigyahurts, thanks for the positive feedback regarding our software. Yes, the ability to use several radios within the same program (window), e.g. for different tasks, is a very convenient and important one. Nonetheless, to my knowledge, RadioControl still seems to be the only software which provides this feature in this form which may be because it requires consideration in the software architecture right from the beginning.

However, at least the support for VX-7R is questionable as it does not provide a full computer control interface but only a clone interface for its memories and radio settings. If computer support is important for you, I can recommend the Kenwood TH-F6A/F7E which contains a VHF/UHF transceiver and a wide band receiver and is supported by RadioControl. You can upload/download memory channels and use the radio in VFO mode and therefore pretty much all RadioControl functions. The only drawbacks are that the signal strength cannot be read out via the computer interface and that you need a special control cable which feeds the audio signal to some speaker or the PC sound card or has a special plug which avoids muting when being plugged in.

Another portable radio that still has one of the best computer control interfaces is the AOR AR-8200 which allows almost complete control from RadioControl, but is significantly bigger than the Kenwood and Yaesu radios.

Regarding the search feature. The RC frequency search file gives you an overview about the occupancy for each found frequency. The higher the hit count, the more active the frequency. Sure that's only an overview but it should nonetheless be helpful to sort out potentially interesting from uninteresting frequencies. Another thing to keep in mind is that an SDR is not just a panadapter but a complete (SW) receiver. Practically every SDR allows you to store a part of the received IF spectrum for later review and playback of interesting portions. That opens up totally new possibilities as you practically have a snapshot of a certain spectrum range over a certain period of time. So you may identify the interesting frequencies via the hit count in the RC frequency search file and look them up in the stored IF data file by loading it in the SDR software. The only problem at this time is that the maximum storable bandwidth is something about 2 MHz which may be too small for VHF applications unless you want to monitor a set of relatively close frequencies.

What is a option as well is to write your own software application as a script or VB6 app, for example, that connects to our COM Automation interface and accesses the radio's scanner and consumes the reported found frequencies directly. That option would give you the most freedom of course, as your application may also access and control the NetSDR and therefore combine both radios in one application.

You see the possibilities are numerous.