During the first year of VOA Radiogram we experimented with Flmsg, a companion program to Fldigi. Flmsg enables content transmitted by radio to be opened in your browser as a formatted web page.

Again this weekend (23-24 July) on VOA Radiogram and on The Mighty KBC, web documents will be transmitted using Flmsg. (More information about these programs: http://voaradiogram.net/post/147795364347/voa-radiogram-23-24-july-2016-transmissions-from.)

You will, as usual, use the Fldigi software to decode the modes. If you don’t already have Fldigi, download it from https://sourceforge.net/projects/fldigi/files/fldigi/ .

And you will use the companion program Flmsg. Download it from https://sourceforge.net/projects/fldigi/files/flmsg/ .

To make Flmsg work with Fldigi, in Fldigi: Configure > Misc > NBEMS > under Reception of flmsg files, select Open with flmsg and Open in browser, and below that indicate where your Flmsg.exe file is located – probably somewhere in Program Files(x86).

If all goes well, when the digital mode transmission concludes, Flmsg will open a new window of your web browser to display information about The Mighty KBC. If your default browser is not open, Flmsg will open it for you. (If you are asked to ignore checksum error, select Yes.)

NB: On VOA Radiogram, 23-24 July 2016, the Flmsg file transfer form will be used. When the Flmsg transmission ends, a window will open. You can save the VOA News .html file and open it at your convenience.

If it doesn’t work the first time, or you don’t have Flmsg installed, you can try this later from your recording.

In Windows, an easy way to save the received document is to use the Microsoft Snipping Tool. Please send that image as an attachment to your reception report.

(Both the VOA Radiogram and KBC html files this weekend will include photos which are accessed via the Internet rather than transmitted via shortwave. The latter would require several minutes.)

If you are an Android user, TIVAR does not accommodate Flmsg files. But a similar program, AndFlmsg, as its name would indicate, does. Unlike TIVAR, which is receive-only, AndFlmsg encodes as well as decodes and is used by radio amateurs for message traffic. After the Flmsg is received, go to the index screen and press on the name of the file.

#shortwave