Receive-Only JS8Call For FREE!

hello again everyone and welcome back to the underground today we're going to talk about how to set up js8 call absolutely for free without buying any hardware whatsoever all you need is some software and an internet connection for those of you who don't know what JS call is jsh call is a basic program for communicating using HF radio it allows users to send basic rudimentary text messages from one person to another all around the globe you can't really send too much uh with it it has a a pretty strict character count but it's a very rudimentary program uh so much so that I would consider js8 call to be the the basic standard for HF radio data modes in other words if you're able to download install js8 call and get it working with your HF radio you can do pretty much anything on HF radio right there there's really nothing that you can't do once you figure out JSA to call and how all the audio stuff works every complicated piece of software that you can use on HF radio will be a lot more simple and the good news is you can get started with JSA call without even buying anything or without uh having a license at all you can get started with js8 call by receiving signals like I mentioned js8 call is meant to exchange messages however if you wanted to just listen in to the messages that are being uh put out there you can absolutely do so very very easily and it actually kind of helps you learn the software you can play around with it a little bit and experiment uh even before getting your license even before buying an HF radio which is usually a very big expense and before figuring out how antennas work and all that kind of stuff if you just wanted to play around with JSA call this is a really good way to do that so let's get started uh right up front we only need four things really we need to download js8 call we need to go to the uh js8 call.com website and download the program that we're going to be using today we also need to go to vb- audio.com VB audio cable is what we need this is a driver to make sure that we're able to take the audio and push it into js8 call we need to make sure that our program our js8 call software can hear some kind of audio signal and this is what's going to allow us to do that we also need one more final piece of software called bkt time sync which you can download from this website here this allows us to set our PC clock uh the clock for our operating system uh to be extremely extremely accurate uh we need extremely accurate time for js8 call to function otherwise it won't uh decode the signals properly this is something that a lot of people tend to forget a lot and you'll see people transmitting on js8 call whose uh clock is off and they can't figure out why no one's hearing them so uh we'll explain a little bit more of this when we get into it and finally you need an internet browser uh and an internet connection really any web browser will work it doesn't really matter what kind you choose but you do need an active internet connection that's kind of the caveat here we'll be talking about how to receive js8 call signals using an SDR uh so that you're completely off- Grid at a later time but this is just for people who want to play around with the software and experiment a little bit so if we've gone to all these websites and we've clicked download on js8 call uh We've downloaded the latest version of that we can also download the latest version of the VB audio cable and here on uh Mania radio was website we can download bkt timesync once we have all of those downloaded uh we can just store them somewhere on our computer and we can start working through the process so the first one that we're going to do is install js8 call and we'll get this out of the way so the setup is pretty easy here uh you just need to go through it you know make sure that we click all this stuff right install everything pretty standard Windows installation process once we have js8 call installed we have it right here now it actually did save uh my my user settings because I I use this to receive on my desktop computer here so it saved a lot of my settings including my uh fake call sign that I'm using for receive only uh if you're using this to transmit you need to put in a real call sign your actual call sign so you can put that in right here but for receiving only uh you can put anything so it's not super clear in the JSA call uh literature because of course js8 call is tailored towards radio hams and uh they don't tend to emphasize that you can actually use this software in receive only mode by using uh any call sign whatsoever as a matter fact we're going to turn off transmit just to make it simpler you can it doesn't matter at all you're just using this program to decode some audio and speaking of audio we will go ahead and unzip the zip file that you get from VB cable cool so there it is it's just a simple file here and you're going to once you once you unzip everything you're going to click the exe file that is most appropriate for your system if you have a 32-bit uh computer you're going to use just the standard one or if you have a 64-bit one you're just going to click that installation there once you click it it's very very simple uh you're going to have instead of remove driver you're going to have uh install driver right here it's just a one button push and once it's done you'll have it so once you have the VB cable driver installed you can confirm that it is in fact installed and is in fact working by clicking your uh speaker button down here and you and you should see one that says cable input VB audio virtual cable you can go ahead and select that right now if you want just to speed the process along and finally we're going to run the bkt timesync software again run as administrator Windows might be trying to protect your PC but you can run anyway here is the installation window for this very very easy just go through this as well it's going to install the program and we can can run it as well okay so this there's a lot going on here uh there's a lot of stuff going on here but basically bkt time sync software uh what it does is it syncs your PC clock uh to very very accurate atomic time so really the only thing that we need to do is just open the software and as you can see it does a lot of stuff automatically you can ignore all of this stuff what we're looking for right here is this last line on this page which it will say local clock offset was and then some random number and we want to make sure that time was successfully synchronized using ntp server meaning that we have an internet connection the cool part about this software and this is very very important if you wanted to operate off grid is that this software is needed if you wanted to sync your uh PC clock using a GPS uh dongle so you can actually select the comport if you have like a little USB device plugged into your computer you can select the comp port and all the appropriate settings and this software will intercept the GPS time from GPS satellites and we'll use that to sync your PC clock so you don't need an internet connection for this software that's really really helpful for a lot of stuff that we're going to be talking about later so make sure that you download this software because if you lose internet connection and you're not able to download files and you're in some kind of off- grid situ sitation you're going to need the software so go ahead and download it now uh before it goes offline you know what I mean once we have synced the clock and all that kind of stuff everything's working uh we can go ahead and close this out uh we don't need to keep it running or anything like that now that we have bkt time sync going and and it synced our clock and we're all good to go uh we can now get to the meat of the matter which is actually decoding signals with js8 call so so just to recap we have installed js8 call and we can see a screen similar to what we've got here again if you get some kind of popup wanting you to put in a call sign you can put in any call sign you want because we're just receiving today it's physically not possible to transmit so you can't get in any trouble don't worry about it we've also installed VB audio cable and we can confirm that VB audio cable is working by going down to our little speaker button uh here on our Windows computer and we can check cable input VB audio virtual cable that's our uh play back device right and finally we have installed bkt time sync so that we have uh synced our PC clock with the most accurate time available now we can actually start piping in some audio from the internet into JSA call JSA call at its core is software that you're using to receive audio right but say you don't have a radio plugged in well we're going to use someone else's radio if you go to websdr.org this is a collection of of uh mostly research institutions and uh like ham radio clubs and such that have sdrs set up and streaming for anyone to use all around the globe this is a fantastic resource for all kinds of stuff from uh beginners stuff like we're working on today to actually uh listening to your self transmit if you wanted to check and see how far you're how far out you're getting uh you can actually use these sdrs for that remember these are soft defined radios so someone uh has gotten basically a very a much more sophisticated version of uh like an rtlsdr and they have hooked this up to the Internet and they have uh made it so that you can tune it yourself right the nuts and bolts is to how these things work is a little bit complicated so let's go ahead and and work through it a little bit let's go ahead and choose one here let's try the northern Utah web SDR in Corin Utah me go ahead and open that in a new tab here and this is the website you get all of these websites look very different and they look uh a little bit busy right there's a lot of uh a lot of stuff going on here uh but really what we need to do is choose uh this particular website has has them labeled by uh they've got five wow so they've got five sdrs online and it looks like a VHF UHF one as well so let's go ahead and choose web SDR 1 all right so once we've chosen an SDR whatever kind of online SDR that we want want uh we can scroll down and find a few things now again these Pages look really really busy a lot of times there's a lot of confusing stuff on it a lot of people who aren't you know radio nerds might get a little bit overwhelmed but it's okay we don't need to click too many things on this web page there's not a whole lot you can mess up here the first thing that we're going to do is look at our waterfall here and just make sure that it is in fact you know working and and functional sometimes these sdrs go offline but most of the time they they work 24/7 we also want to make sure that we have a place to put our frequency in this case the frequency we want is 7078 KZ or 7.78 mahz depending on what website you have we also want to look somewhere on the page for a bandwidth section right here on the bottom is what we're looking for and you want to select USB um Us in this case on this particular one it's divided up into USB wide medium and narrow you can select wide it doesn't really matter for what we're trying to do anyway so that's what we need to do we need to put in the frequency in this case the main frequency for js8 call is 7078 and we need to choose upper side band for our bandwidth here that's all you need to do as far as radio settings go you can choose a different frequency so if you know of a jsh call like net or something or like a group of friends that's getting together on js8 that they're getting away from the standard frequencies you can put that frequency in here and you'll be good to go it's just that for testing purposes and you if you want to make sure that you are guaranteed to get a signal go with the main frequencies and you can and uh you can kind of uh pick those up there because there's always somebody on js8 call usually you'll you'll be able to hear somebody so it's good for testing to make sure that your audio stuff works now if you're using Milla Firefox there's one extra thing you need to do and that is uh click a button to start the audio so right now you've got your headphones plugged in you should not be hearing anything from this website if you're using a different browser you might uh but right now I need to click since I'm on uh Firefox uh the button that says Firefox mailla audio start okay so once we have our web SDR working uh we've got a good internet connection and we've CH chosen the right frequency we've selected USB wide or whatever upper sideband mode you have and we've clicked uh the button to start the audio and we have gone down here to our sound uh Source selection and selected cable input once we've done all of that there's still one more thing we need to do in JSA to call so we pull up JSA call and you might see something that looks like this on the waterfall this is not any kind of radio signal this is not right uh this is either you've got some serious interference or you have the wrong audio Source selected remember the VB audio cable creates a virtual cable it's like plugging in your uh js8 call software to the website so we've got the cable right but we need to make sure that js8 call is hearing the right stuff so we need to go to file settings audio and make sure that we have the cable output selected in the input we're connecting the outputs to the inputs and the inputs to the outputs if that makes any sense we're connecting all of these cables so once we click okay we should see our waterfall clean up a little bit here and if we wait just a little bit of time we'll be able to hear signals coming in all right so here we go wow look at that we've got a lot of uh js8 call signals coming in lots of heartbeats lots of people talking back and forth uh you can see people a few people are kind of stepping on each other there a little bit but what we want to see is we want to see each of these Transmissions right here to be between the Green lines this is something that even uh very experienced radio amateurs uh forget a lot of times we want to make sure that our time is very very accurate because as we can see the way JSI call works is in uh 15sec time intervals so along the bottom of the screen here we can see it counting away on this little green progress bar each of these little time uh sync modules here basically what js8 call does is it transmits for 15 seconds and listens for 15 seconds and this makes sure or at least is supposed to prevent people from kind of stepping on each other here so this this guy right here is sending a little bit of a a longer heartbeat he's using a different mode and uh it's taking a little bit longer for him to get through his message here so most of the time the standard messages will look like this or something like this over here so the point being with this and this is why we had to download that time sync software is that if the timing is off like say this signal is shifted up or down it's uh it's not going to be good you're not going to be able to decode anything because js8 call is listening for very specific uh data between these lines here and you'll see this a lot of times if you see somebody if you see a transmission like you're not getting any messages up here but you see somebody out there and their transmission is split uh between a line you can you know that their time sync is off uh and they're not going to be able to receive or transmit anything well they can transmit but nobody's going to be able to decode their messages the bad news is that this time sync is required for js8 call you need to have accurate PC time on whatever computer is running the software the good news is that there's a couple of ways of doing that so in a truly off-grid situation you can actually use uh a couple of different methods you can use GPS like I mentioned uh instead of the internet uh and you can also use uh the auto time sync function so if I expand this a little bit and come over here to our little menu on the side where it says Timing there's a way to automatically uh detect time drift so say you're in the middle of the woods you don't have a GPS uh you're trying to communicate desperately with some other human being that's out there but you don't have uh your the correct time your time is off uh by just a couple of seconds which is enough to mess with J JSA call well if you can hear a bunch of other people what you can do is is is Select start automatic time drift and what it will do is JSA call will listen to all of these other people transmitting and just kind of assume that they are on the correct time and then sync your time with theirs you can do this manually as well here uh so that you can make sure that you're all synced up uh very handy feature uh it takes away kind of one of the biggest Cons with js8 call which is you need to have super accurate time and is something that you can't forget to do for instance if I go a day or two maybe you know like if I do like a once a week net or something like that and I turn my computer off and just kind of let it sit uh for a week uh it time is going to drift it's going to drift away from accurate time so I need to remember or have a checklist for me to click the bkt time sync and sync the time otherwise I'll open up js8 call like everything's fine and I'll see a bunch of signals but I won't uh decode anything so this is something that you absolutely have to do even if you are just receiving uh messages right so uh hopefully this is a good way of setting things up so hopefully this will get a lot of people started with working through how js8 call works and actually being able to receive a bunch of signals using uh an SDR that's plugged in around the world uh one really good use for this is if you're trying to see if your radio is actually working uh you can use resources like psk reporter to see who is hearing you out there but you can also do it manually yourself if you didn't want to involve anybody else you can pick a random frequency that's of course within the the amateur bands and is appropriate and all that and you can transmit on one computer and then have or or with your radio and such and then you can have your desktop computer uh set up to to listen so you can select a uh an SDR that's kind of a long way away from you and see if you can actually hear yourself uh on on JSA call so it's pretty cool little feature uh if you wanted to play around with a bunch of settings you can remember this is receive only so you can't really mess things up as a matter of fact watch this if I come up here to the frequency and select let's say let's just say 2 m nothing on the waterfall changes because js8 call is not connected to my radio uh if we go up here to file settings radio uh the rig should be selected as none we're just using js8 call to decode audio that we're feeding it right so I know by looking over here uh at the web SDR that my frequency is 7078 but here on js8 call the program is not smart enough to know that I've changed that so it's just listening to audio which is pretty cool so that ladies and gentlemen is how you use jsh call in receive only mode absolutely for free of course this is dependent on having an internet connection so it's not something that you'd want to rely on in an emergency but it is a resource uh and it is a good way to learn how jsh call works a lot of time people invest a lot of money uh in HF radio stuff and they they have a little bit of uh difficulty uh getting even basic stuff like JSA call to work so this is a good way to practice and uh get familiar with the software before you even buy anything at all so hopefully this is helpful for everyone thank you for all of your support and we will see you next time and as always fight in the shade