Tag: fldigi

  • Send an ICS 213 Form with Your Phone!

    Did you know you could send a digital ICS213, and a large number of other forms or text, with just your Android phone and a radio? You can, and it’s super easy to do! The hardest part, really, is getting the software onto your phone.

    With the normal desktop version of FLDIGI, you can send nicely formatted forms using FLMSG. This is something that Matthew AF7PV has been exploring on the monthly digital ARES net and it works really well. It works great using a Signalink and even works well just holding the radio’s hand mic up to the speakers of the laptop, just like the smartphone SSTV apps do.

    The developers of FLDIGI came out with an Android version called AndFLmsg. You can’t get it from the Google Play store, but you can download it and install it directly to your phone from the Sourceforge website where you download the normal desktop version.

    The mobile app strips out a lot of the desktop FLDigi application, leaving mostly just the NBEMs messaging forms and a few of the popular modes. What’s great about the mobile version is that creating and managing messages looks just like email in the app. Honestly, it’s much easier to use than that desktop version.

    At the last monthly digital meeting I was able to both transmit and receive several FLDIGI form-based messages just by acoustic coupling. So even if you don’t have a big mobile radio, a laptop and a fancy Signalink digital interface, you can still participate in the monthly digital net just by putting your phone up to your radio’s speaker. We think his might have a lot of value for ARES operations, especially for something like the mass delivery of update messages or something along those lines.

    Although sadly there is no iOS version of this app for apple devices, you can get the desktop version of FLDigi for OS X on a Mac, which supports the message and form functions.

    Come help us experiment on Matthew’s Digital Modes Net, the first Tuesday of every month on the 443.300 repeater.

  • Digital Modes Net Explores Fldigi

    The members of the monthly Digital Modes Net have begun experimenting with Fldigi. This “Fast Light Digital” application runs on several different OS platforms and uses your sound card (e.g. a SignaLink) to send digital information over the air. No TNC is required for this mode.

    The Fldigi application provides a chat interface in which text is sent as you type it, but there are additional applications that allow more sophisticated data transfers. Flmsg is one such program; it works in cooperation with Fldigi to send form data, and there is a built-in template for the ICS-213 message form as well as the ARRL radiogram. Flmsg applies a checksum to the form data to detect transmission errors. Similarly, the Flwrap application cooperates with Fldigi to send arbitrary file data, also with a checksum.

    There is an overlap in functionality between Flmsg and Winlink, but one interesting difference is that whereas Winlink is more or less for communication between two stations, Flmsg can be used to send a message to multiple stations simultaneously. That’s also true for Flwrap — it might be used to send file data from the EOC to all field stations in a single transmission, for instance. The data rate is rather slow, so this might be done simplex rather than via a repeater.

    Join the Digital Modes net on the first Tuesday of the month if you’d like to give it a try. Time and frequency details are on the nets page.

  • Digital Modes Training Net

    A new recurring net has been created with the goal of exploring some digital modes that should be useful for emergency communications. We’re using UHF and we’re initially focusing on SSTV (slow scan television) for image transfer and Fldigi for keyboard-to-keyboard text-based conversation. The net meets on the first Tuesday of the month at 8:00pm on the 443.300 MHz repeater, which requires a 100.0 Hz tone.

    A deluxe rig for both SSTV and Fldigi would include a laptop with an external sound card (such as the popular SignaLink USB sound card) cabled to your 70cm radio, but simpler setups can also work. For instance, there’s an SSTV program for the iPhone that can produce the right tones from the speaker, which you could hold close to your radio’s microphone. SSTV transmissions can then be decoded by holding your phone’s microphone close to your radio’s speaker. There are Fldigi apps available for Android, but we haven’t seen one for iOS.

    This net is totally about troubleshooting and practice, so feel free to join even if you’ve never used these modes before and you aren’t sure whether your rig will work. Matthew AF7PV is the net manager, and questions about the net may be directed to him at digitalnetmanager [at] multnomahares [dot] org. Links to useful software can be found on the Digital Net page.