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This utility's purpose is to record a QSO and send it back to the other station to let the other operator hear his/her own signal.
This is easy enough to do with Windows' built-in Sound Recorder (sndrec32.exe) if your radio has VOX capability. But not all radios have VOX, and even those that do from the microphone input, do not always have the same capability from the auxiliary connectors on the back of the radio.
For instance, I have 2 HF rigs: a Kenwood TS-440SAT and a Yaesu FT-817.
The Kenwood TS-440SAT will key on audio signals fed to the rear connector, but the microphone should be unplugged otherwise noise from the shack will be superimposed to your signal. I have modified my microphone to shunt the audio from the mic as long as the PTT switch is not pushed in, but now the VOX does not work on the rear connector. So with this rig, I have to unplug the microphone to allow the rear connector to activate the VOX. Not very convenient (but still easier than the Yaesu, read on).
The Yaesu FT-817, on the other hand, does not support VOX at all from the rear Data connector, and the Data connector is only active when the DIG mode is selected. In order to make my program work with the FT-817, I had to change the mode used in DIG from AFSK to USB, using menu item #26. I selected USER-U for USB.
Use a RigBlaster(tm) interface or something like that, with Windows' Sound Recorder.
Some of these units have a built-in VOX circuit and/or can easily route the signal from the computer to the microphone input of the rig.
Only problem, the Rigblaster is a little too rich for me, and too large anyhow (I like my shack compact). And this "solution" requires more wires, more power supplies and more things that can go wrong.
IMPORTANT NOTE: I do not own nor do I have ever used one of these commercial adapters, so do not ask me for help setting them up. If you have bought the hardware, you are entitled to help from the vendor. If you have bought it second hand, you can probably get help from another user or from the Internet.
Software such as MMTTY has the capability to key the rig via the serial port, so I thought about writing a program that would essentially emulate the Sound Recorder utility, but with the capability to key the rig via the serial port when playing back sounds, so I could use the same setup I currently have for MMTTY.
QSO Recorder was born.
Check the Release Notes for downloads, installation, usage and the latest information and bug fixes.
It has come to my attention that some users have had problem with incompatible Multimedia ActiveX control. This control is a common Windows component which is being upgraded regularly by Microsoft and it is shared with a number of Windows programs and my software apparently is not compatible will all versions out there.
If you get an error message when starting the program indicating a problem with the Multimedia Control, I am afraid you are out of luck, as I do not have a fix at the moment.
I believe the long term fix would be to use the Media Player control, but the API is different and I need to convert my program to use it, something that I have not done yet.
July 2020: This program was written for Windows XP in 2004. It is quite remarkable that it still runs on many computers running Windows 10 (but not all, apparently some audio subsystem configurations are different and incompatible with the old dll). If it works for you, great! If it does not, I am unfortunately unable to make any further modification or bug fix. While the executable may still run on current versions of Windows, the Visual Basic 6.0 development tools themselves no longer run under Windows 10 and I no longer have a computer old enough to properly run those old development tools.