t4win mic in

[RidgeRunner]

I am making up my cable for the mic in jack on my comp. Just a question on a mic it should only be two pins there correct? Center being audio and outer ring being ground. My question is that I need to know so I buy the right plug.

Thanks

 

[rescue161]

Correct.

I have to use a mic jack on my laptop as it does not have an aux-in jack.

Scott

 

[RidgeRunner]

yay replies

Ok thanks for the reply! Well I just may work on that since it is rainy and crappy up here in new england.

 

[rescue161]

Rainy and crappy, "AAAGHHHH" (in a Homer Simpson voice)...

We haven't seen rain since March. I miss it.

 

[ErickSaint]

Sorry to drag this back but as I understand this, I will be able to use the mic input for a tap, correct? I have just gotten into this type of scanning and dont want to chop up my new BC246 just yet. So I was looking at getting a radio from ebay to play with a tap and the software associated with it.

When I was looking at the laptop I intended to use, which is an old IBM thinkpad with 120 Mhz pentium in it, all it has for input is a mic jack.

Any hints as to what a good radio would be for adding the tap to?

 

[SCPD]

Hi Erick;

Microphone input - yes that will work. You may need a small buffer amplifier in between the radio and laptop. 120 Mhz is a bit slow - you may want to keep the window size small or avoid the oscilloscope display - it eats up more CPU than the rest of the program.

Best choice for a radio is anything that is ...

1. cheap - something older from eBay, garage sale, or ???
2. conventional (trunking isn't required, in fact it's ignored in this situation)
3. can support the actual band of interest.

Usually the mobile/desktop units are easier to mod than the hand-helds; there's more room inside. OTOH, some folks prefer a handheld - particularly for use with a laptop - because, like the laptop - it's portable and runs on batteries.

-rick

 

[ErickSaint]

Thanks for the tips. I have been looking on ebay and there seems to be a ton of BC350C's there for the $50-$60 range. As for the laptop I have another one here in a box somewhere that needs a few parts, but I think thats a PII od some flavor or another, also a thinkpad.

I was looking to experiment with all the softwares out there, just wasnt sure if I could do it on the older one with only the mic input. Are the other softwares as much of a resource hog as t4win? The trunker apps seem to be mostly text based, but since I have no tapped radio I havent been able to do much more then open them up and look at things.

 

[SCPD]

You can boot up the Thinkpad 120 into DOS and run the older trunker apps. You'll need a discriminator tapped radio AND a data slicer. More than enough horsepower for these programs.

If you avoid the oscilloscope display on the receiver panel - or adjust the window so that the panel is small (less pixels means less work) then T4Win will probably work. It was originally written and tested on a 450 mhz mobile pentium with the goal of consuming less than 20% overall CPU. That will swamp the P120 at 70% - sometimes dropping to 10% and sometimes peaking at 100%. You'll just have to try it out - I haven't run it on something that slow. Generally speaking, anything over 50% is going to give the user a "sluggish" experience.

As for why something on Windows takes more CPU than something similar on DOS - its the graphics. It takes just as much computing effort to set one pixel on a VGA or better resolution screen as it does to place one whole character onto a text mode display.

Nowadays I find 650 Mhz Durons and 733 Mhz Celerons in the dumpster so performance hasn't been a problem.

I would also suggest you try the following before actually running T4Win. Get one of those free Oscilloscope programs. Set it to display your microphone input. Use that to see how clean / clear the actual signal is being received. You'll be able to quickly identify signal level issues (like weak / flat audio or clipped / too loud audio).

-rick