Discriminator Tap Questions

[Robbyboy]

Howdy everyone --

I am eight levels beyond baffled and need some assistance. I have a Pro-2039 which I installed a discriminator tap on. When I tried to get it to run, I did not have audio. When I connected a cable to the discriminator tap, I got my audio back, but it did not sound any different than before. When I ran the audio on T4Win, I couldnt get a square wave out of it.

To make things more weird, I ran the connection to my line jack on my BC 9000 XLT and was able to decode fairly regularly. Can anyone give me a good whack with a clue stick because I am clueless right now about this.

Any help provided is appreciated!!

 

[kb5udf]

Wild guess/similar prob

Once when I was first testing a tap on my pro-2067, the speaker audio went dead. I traced to back to having the discriminator audio shorted to ground. Luckily I found it before doing damage. You might check for this kind of problem.

 

[SCPD]

I am eight levels beyond baffled and need some assistance. I have a Pro-2039 which I installed a discriminator tap on. When I tried to get it to run, I did not have audio. When I connected a cable to the discriminator tap, I got my audio back, but it did not sound any different than before. When I ran the audio on T4Win, I couldnt get a square wave out of it.

I'm assuming you soldered two wires to your radio. The other end of each wire was soldered to lugs on an audio connector like a 1/8" or 3/32" mini-headphone jack. You may or may not have included a small capacitor in series with one of these wires.

1. Check the solder lugs on the audio connector used at the radio; you'll have "tip" (your signal), "ring" (ground), and possibly a third lug that is shorted to the tip when nothing is plugged in.

2. if you have speaker audio while the discriminator tap is disconnected but audio levels drop dramatically (or even slightly) when a patch cable is plugged into both computer and radio - you may need to add a resistor (about 33k to 100k ohms) in series.

3. another option is to add a buffer amp to further isolate the computer's microphone input so that it doesn't place too much load the radio's discrinator signal.

-rick

 

[Dewey]

1. Check the solder lugs on the audio connector used at the radio; you'll have "tip" (your signal), "ring" (ground), and possibly a third lug that is shorted to the tip when nothing is plugged in.

-rick

Just adding to Rick's option (1)... if you connected to the wrong lug, you might be shorting your radio, which would explain why the audio comes back when you plug a cable in (you're opening the short at the jack).

Dewey