Howdy, new to the forums, been reading for a while. and decided to give it a shot on the AM side.
Howdy, new to the forums, been reading for a while. and decided to give it a shot on the AM side.
Looking at some budget based transmitters for a first timer. hook up to a laptop and mixer. I've found mixed reviews on most of the common ones. I saw a mention of the Gizmo and did a search and found it had been retired and in its place was the Spitfire. Any thoughts on this rig?
http://www.vcomp.co.uk/spitfire/spitfire.htm
Thanks,
Scott
73
K4SHL
I own one, and am in the process of setting it up with an external antenna system outdoors. Winding a new, larger Manteca Magnum style loading coil today.
The only problem is I can't find a weatherproof utility box locally ... that it will fit into. The circuitry looks good, simple to see what's going on, easy to set the DIP switches, etc. I checked the sound with the plugin antenna and its good, but not spectacular. However, I will try again running it through software AUs (multi-band compressor, hard limiter, SoundSoap (Bias).
Ken N.
I'd be very interested to hear of your experiments with the Spitfire. I want one, but I think I'll hold off until the start of 2010 when their new model the Hurricane becomes available. Realistically what kind of range are you getting with the Spitfire? The price of these units is certainly attractive.
I don't know the range of the Spitfire yet, I didn't really try it out with the wire antenna. I'm trying to get my outdoor loaded coil antenna system to resonate, having some problems which I'll talk about in another thread. When it comes through clearly, the audio is amazingly good.
Haven't seen or heard anything about a 'Hurricane' transmitter. Just went back to their site, no announcement of any such unit. According to blurbs on the site, the Spitfire is the latest transmitter. Where are you getting your information?
The Hawker Hurricane was an amazingly good aircraft, but it wasn't as advanced as the Supermarine Spitfire. No idea what that means in this case.
Howdy,
Got some fairly good range w/Spitfire tonight. I want to talk about it in a new topic, tho' because have some other questions.
Well. I bought the version II of The SpitFire. When I get it working, I'll give a review here. Right now, I have not been able to get it to work...
Doug
I've found most of the kit transmitters don't need to have a great ground, just thinking of the Talking House and Ramsey that transmitted fine without one, if not very far.
I wonder if the transmitter is in frequency lock, or if there's some kind of protection against modulating it if it's not tuned right? What about a signal of any kind, are you getting a dead carrier on the frequency it's supposed to be set for, or perhaps another frequency that it might be on by mistake?