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DRT TALK v1.8 (c) Spencer 2007/8

When I purchased the DRT-1 from Sat-Schneider here in Germany I was more than satisfied with my purchase. This tiny receiver covering 10Khz to 30Mhz (see the photo next to a 1Euro coin) outperforms all of the receivers I could compare it with.

The DRT-1 is an 'SDR' which means it's a software defined radio. The signal from the antenna is mixed down to a fixed IF frequency of 12Khz and this is then fed into the audio card of a computer which does all of the filtering and demodulation. This means the DRT-1 has almost perfect and infinitely variable filter widths and can cope with all modes such as AM/FM/SSB/CW and of course DRM where it really excels.

After building my DRT-1 into a suitable box, I began experimenting and Sat-Schneider provide a free tuning program for the DRT-1 called the DDS9951. This is very primitive but allows you to test the receiver. This program only tunes the receiver to the required frequency and you need to use another program to do the filtering and signal decoding. I then tried the very comprehensive program from G8JCF which can control both tuning and signal decoding but I personally preferred the decoding program from M0KGK, unfortunately this as with many other decoding programs cannot tune it, So I decided to write my own program 'DRTTALK' to tune the DRT-1.

What can DRTTALK do, well it will communicate with the DRT-1 via either COM1,2,3 or 4 and allows you to tune to any frequency between 10Khz and 30Mhz. You can step up or down between the amateur bands or you can step up or down in 1Mhz steps. Using the cursor keys you can step up/down in 1Khz and 100Hz steps though these can easily be changed with a key press to for example 5Khz, 9Khz or 10Khz steps and the fine tuning between 100Hz, 10Hz and 1Hz steps. The program offers a VFO plus 5 'Quick Memories' and 9 banks of main Memory Channels for storing frequencies. A full description of the program functions can be found in the pdf file which is part of the download. And yes DRTTALK is free to use provided that if you pass it on then you do so together with it's pdf documentation, do not charge for it and do not modify it in any way. Of course as is usual you use the program at your own risk.

At the moment the program is a 16 bit application which means it runs on any system from DOS through Windows XP and my future plan is to recompile it as a true 32 bit application. Full instructions for installing and using DRTTALK are included in the documentation.

Just right click on the pic to download DRTTALK and the documentation as a zip file

Note: if you are updating from v1.7 or earlier  then you should delete your drt.dat file before installing and let DRTTALK create a new one.

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