Anyone played around with Olivia?

[mithril]

For the last few days I’ve been trying to get my ICOM HF radio and PC to receive and decode Olivia signals, and all to no avail.

This might be a bit techy for this forum but knowing the diversity of skills present amongst it members I thought I’d give it ago.

I’ve tried using MixW (freeware version) and Ham Radio Deluxe with DM780 (standard and also the latest beta version). In both cases I can sometimes see a weak spread spectrum waterfall on 80m and 40m but I’ve yet to see readable and meaningful characters, and with no squelch I just get seemingly random chars.

How easy is it to receive?

 

[Talbot]

zieewwwwwwww

Thats the noise of your post going right over my head /forums/images/graemlins/blush.gif /forums/images/graemlins/blush.gif

words of one syllable please so that I might glean some degree of understanding /forums/images/graemlins/confused.gif /forums/images/graemlins/confused.gif /forums/images/graemlins/confused.gif

 

[BrendanS]

Texting via ham radio in a nutshell, though there is more to it than that

http://hflink.com/olivia/

 

[EDM]

Olivia is a nice digital mode, that alas is difficult to set up to receive.

I have worked with it in the past, using MixW (still the best Multi-Mode non-contest ham software) as well as some Linux software, and found it to yield a very good S/N ratio, however it does have a slow data transfer rate.

The main problem when receiving it, is there are various bandwidths of the signal, 1K, 500hz etc, and this in tern alters the number of tones that are used.

The most common frequencies are around 14:107, with a degree of "channelisation" similar to SSTV on 14:230.

I hope this helps

Tim

PS Why bother with Olivia - CW is still king

 

[mithril]

Hi Guys, thanks for the replies.

I'm trying Olivia cos it seems diffiult to use and here on the boat in Lagos its creating a little necessary mental stimulation.

I use PSK31 quite a bit but its prone to errors when sigals are weak. Olivia is supposedly better by virtue of its FEC. Trouble is I rarely see / hear any signals on the CQ frequencies. These being 500/16 so known config. Actual QSO's can be any format so decoding them would be extra difficult as I'd have to stumble onto the format they have chosen.

I wondered how critical tuning was and how accurate the sound card frequency needs to be? Some RTTY programs I have can change the sound card freq so I know a number of frequencies are possible but does Olivia need a specific one?

Sorry no words of one syllable.

Hi Brendan, where are you now. It seems ages since we met up in Calheta.