USB Soundcards

[ka3jjz]

Those of you that use the newer laptops without any speaker/line in jacks have to use USB soundcards to feed the audio into the various digital decoding apps. Anyone recommend some? Do they come with drivers or even need them?

This is yet another topic we can put in the wiki, and I will be using a Tecsun H501X feeding my Win10 laptop, and it doesn't have speaker or line in jacks

Mike

 

[popnokick]

I've used the West Mountain Radio RigBlaster Advantage very successfully, although it may be overkill for receive-only operation. But it will work to provide USB audio to a computer from analog outputs on a radio. A less expensive version is the RigBlaster Plug-n-Play. One of the differences with the WMR units is that they use optoisolators rather than transformer-coupling of the audio. All of the West Mountain units provide rig control via CAT or RS-232 which is essential when using one of the digital modes with a transceiver. Are you thinking of a specific receiver to use this with, and does that receiver have CAT or RS-232 control capability? If no CAT or RS-232 then you'll need to make all your tuning adjustments from the radio... the software will not adjust the radio as would normally be the case with digital modes.
Another approach might be to use the $5 - $15 USB adapters that provide analog audio in / out jacks. There are dozens of them available. But once again, you'll need to experiment to determine if it will work with your digital app of choice, and then still have to manually tune your receiver.

 

[ka3jjz]

That might work well for ham radios, but not so much for a portables like the PL990 or the H501X. Out of curiosity did you even use these models to receive non-ham modes (like DSC or HFDL)?

A good USB soundcard would probably be a lot less expensive than one of the West Mountain Radio devices....Mike