ke8qzc:~/projects/modesonpridenetwork



On 5 March 2023, I did some experiments with KJ7OMO and VA3QAK through the Pride Radio Group linked repeater system. The question of doing SSTV thru the Pride Network this was raised by VE2TBR during the weekly Young Amateurs Radio Club net that evening (see more on the net here).

The computer I used was a laptop that sent and received signals through the internal microphone and the built-in speakers. I began with my Anytone 878UVii Plus HT, but the signals it could send were not loud enough to be received by KJ7OMO, so I eventually switched to Echolink.

The first mode we tested was Feld Hell. The signal I received through the Anytone thru DMR looked like this:
which is unintelligble. So we thought that FSK105 Hell would be better -- it was not:
So we settled on slow Hell, which worked GREAT receiving thru my HT:
But when I sent back, everything was too quiet to be heard by KJ7OMO:
After this we moved on to try PSK (we tried BPSK31 and 2xPSK1000) -- both failed, as did ODFM-3500. During the PSK experiments, I moved to Echolink to help the tx problems from my end, but the PSK and ODFM modes still failed. We did try Feld Hell once more with me using Echolink and we were able to complete a qso:
We also had success using RTTY with this setup:
At this point, VA3QAK wanted to try out VARAC with us over the network. We had no delusion that it would completely work -- it of course cannot with the delays of an internet-connected linked repeater network, but calling CQ was decodeable across all when the bandwidths were ensured to match:
For our finale of the evening, we tried SSTV to some interesting effect. KJ7OMO sent me two images via SSTV over Echolink, here they are:
And here's what I got on my end:
Now it was my turn, so I sent this image:
but it was detected as the wrong encoding on KJ7OMO's end (it thought I sent MC110-N but I was sending Scottie2) and came out like this:
All in all these were fun little experiments, and shows a way that hams without a lot of equipment can still play with digital modes with friends over long distance.