For those of you practicing with your FLDIGI, you’ll be able to tune in this weekend to Voice of America.  They’re broadcasting on shortwave this weekend, mixing voice and digital communications.  There will be four broadcasts lasting 30 minutes each.  Get your laptop out and fire up your digital commo software.  Remember, you don’t have to be a ham operator to use these modes when simply receiving (listening/monitoring).  This will be great practice for all of us.  Below is the email I received from an AmRRON operator in occupied America.

Voice of America

JJS,

Below is a paste of the latest email regarding ‘testing’ of Fldigi on the AM Shortwave Bands.

They have been testing this for a while now and it works great. This weekend the transmissions will originate in the US so any in the Redoubt area would likely hear.

Follow the link for information on modes. Unless those receiving have considerable practice with Fldigi they would likely be best to monitor for ONE of the ‘multiple’ modes. MFSK32 will be a small picture, a bit different than text but automatic in that mode. There will be more of this in the future.

XXXXX  Tango-XX

 

VOA Radiogram, combining voice with digital text modes via shortwave broadcast, will “soft launch” this weekend.

The half-hour program will be transmitted four times during the weekend via the BBG/IBB/VOA Edward R. Murrow transmitting station in North Carolina.

 

Transmission schedule (all days and times UTC):

 

Saturday 1600-1630   17860 kHz

Sunday    0230-0300  (1930-2000 Pacific)    5745 kHz (Saturday evening in North America)

Sunday 1300-1330 6095 kHz

Sunday 1930-2000 15670 kHz

 

UTC conversion chart: http://www.flyafa.com/files/ZULUTOLOCALTIMECONVERTER.pdf

UTC is also known as Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) or ZULU Time

More details here:

http://voaradiogram.net/post/45287954494/soft-launch-of-voa-radiogram-this-weekend

 

The weekend’s program will include multiple modes transmitted simultaneously. After the “hard launch” (probably March 23), only one mode will be transmitted at a time.

Kim

radiogram(at)voanews.com

voa_2

 

                                                         VOA Radiogram: how to decode the modes

 

 

You can also practice decoding a psk31 message on your fldigi software using the audio file from Radio Free Redoubt, below (click to play):

PSK-31 Message