[RTTY] Building a PC for the radio

[Peter Laws]

On Mon, Jun 21, 2010 at 17:57, Charles Morrison <cmorrison at lusfiber.net> wrote:

> Peter, I've found that most MOBO's are rather quiet these days, depending on
> the quality of the case.  I've had the cheapo $15 ebay cases that were
> terrible for RFI, and I've had some older cases that worked fine.  Needless
> to say, I'd stay away from the "gamer" cases with the big plexiglass sides
> and lots of flashy lights.  As previously stated, of course LCD's are more
> quiet then CRTs.

Forgot to reply to this.  CRT-free since 2004 or so (and at work since
1998 - and boy was that IBM 9516 expensive!!).  Case is a fairly
serious Antec with no gaming "features", so good there.  Current mobo
was a cheapy and does make noise.  I've tried a few ferrites here and
there but A) the noise isn't *that* bad and B) I've decided that the
current board is term-limited and it's just not worth the fuss.



> As for the VMWare.  No problem with VMPlayer which is free.  Of course, it
> needs to run on another Windows box.  A new motherboard, 4GB ram,
> ***32bit*** Windows 7 (I know, 64 is compatible and supports more memory,
> but the possible incompatibilities make it unnecessary and a bit more
> problematic), and you can P2V your existing XP workstation and lose
> absolutely nothing.  Your com ports should work just fine, my SIIG does.

Expect to use VirtualBox on a Linux base.  It appears that the latest
versions of VB can deal with the images that are created by VMWare's
P2V.  We'll see if that holds up in reality.  :-)

The interesting bit will be the SIIG as it will be linux underneath
not XP.  Linux is pretty good about "just working" with serial ports
of any persuasion, but again, we'll see if that holds up in reality.



> Only thing you *may* have problems with is the soundcard.  They work,  but
> I've noticed a bit of choppiness from time to time.  Once the os loading has
> settled down, I haven't had problems with Youtube streams (audio and video)
> or windows media files playing.


Now that could be a show-stopper.  Are you running MMTTY, et al, on
that soundcard?  Because I expect to use this system as my Radio PC,
and being able to decode RTTY (and PSK) are kind of critical to that
mission.

Thanks for the tips!

Peter

-- 
Peter Laws | N5UWY | plaws plaws net | Travel by Train!