I don't see the reason for using SignaLink USB with HRD. I guess I was under the mistaken impression that the receive audio would come out of my computer's speakers, but it doesn't. It just comes out of the radio's speaker. I really had in mind running HRD remotely from another computer in the house wirelessly. I haven't figured out how to get the sound from the radio to the computer in the house. Granted I'm pretty stupid about these things. Any suggestions would be appreciated.
Hi,
HRD is actually a suite of programs which do everything from control your rotator to handle audio digital modes and logging.
What you use with it depends on what you are trying to do.
You have not really indicated what functionality you are trying for in the HRD suite, apart from remote access, so it is a bit hard to give you much advice.
I am assuming you want to use HRD to control the radio, which is easy enough to do, but if you are looking at different modes, it
starts to become more complicated.
The signalink USB interface, in essence, is just a USB audio card which has isolated audio and PTT lines incorporated into it.
It is only used for doing digital modes such as PSK31 and dozens of others, and that is its only role in life.
When receiving audio from the receiver/txcvr the audio is digitised inside this sound card and available to any program which cares
to access it. This is no different to using the internal PC soundcard, it will be exactly the same.
For what you want to do, that is actually hear the audio coming from the receiver, you need to use a program which accesses the soundcard (internal or signalink) and grab that digitised audio, reconstruct it and pass it to you somehow.
For example I use the signalink connected to my FT897D radio, and use a PC based audio DSP program called Brunifilt to dig out CW signals and pass it to the speaker for me to hear.
Most times nowdays, multiple programs can access the soundcard data, so I commonly run Brunifilt, CW skimmer and DM780(part of HRD), all at the same time. You can also run two digimodes programs such as DM780 and Fldigi at the same time, believe it or not.
It all depends on how the program treats the soundcard.
So this long winded discussion is a way of telling you , as long as you can find a program which takes as its audio input the USB signalink
(normally called USB codec in the windows configuration), you can pipe that anywhere you want.
This program should take the audio in, setup a network link, probably using TCP/IP protocol and then have a similar program at the other end which accepts a TCP/IP network stream and converts it to audio, essentially VOIP stuff.
Just remember though, not all programs play nice, and some are greedy preventing you from sharing the soundcard.
I am sure there are lots of people who have various solutions to your problem, I routinely work a guy who works his gear from an apartment while his gear is at his folks place (more room for antennas).
I think he uses Multipsk though.
Dont feel clueless, the only fools are those too vain to ask a needed question.
Good luck. I am sure you will get lots more informative replies.
73s
