VOA Radiogram has been experimenting with the EasyPal digital image software, which can be obtained from vk4aes.com .

Because EasyPal requires a certain threshold of signal quality (good signal strength plus not too much interference or fading), decoding the images can be difficult. Three VOA Radiogram listeners have devised interesting solutions.  

Roger in Germany:

This time I had problems with the Easypal image of the first run on USB. The second run then I made with the audio of LSB. In the decoding program [EasyPal] all correct pieces of USB-passage were obtained / used. Only the missing or incorrect parts had to be supplemented from the LSB-area What a great error correction!

Roger uses an ICOM IC-R75 receiver with Studio1 SDR software. His decoding results on 22 June at 1600-1630 UTC on 17860 kHz are summarized in this document.

Michael in Germany:

For EasyPal I had to repeat the decoding 5 times, before all necessary segments were obtained. This is  easy with Perseus, as you can mark a part of the recording, and this will be played in an endless loop, until you stop it manually. So each loop resulted in some new decoded segments, until the picture was complete.

Alan in the UK:

I’ve been doing some more tests with EasyPal and looking at ways to reduce errors and improve reception, and I’d noticed that of the three signal traces, the lowest frequency one suffered the least from the effects of fading, but the middle and higher trace at around 1.5 and 1.8 kHz did look much lower and would vanish at times during some, and these seemed to produce the most errors. I run the line output from the receiver to the PC via a graphic equaliser, and I tried boosting this by a few decibels at around 1.5 and 1.8 kHz and you can see the difference on the two screen shots I have attached. Setting these so they are all about equal in amplitude and not overloading does seem to give the best decodes and the least errors.

Generally speaking, I have had more success decoding EasyPal using SSB rather than AM mode.

Any other EasyPal tips and tricks?  Please let me know.

The June 22-23 VOA Radiogram EasyPal image as decoded by Lorenzo in Italy on 17860 kHz: