[IRCA] A useful smartphone app for DX'ers

["Paul B. Walker, Jr." <walkerbroadcasting@xxxxxxxxx>]

Wether you do AM, shortwave, longwave, FM or something else.. I think this
will prove useful.

I have a pretty high return rate when submitting reception reports and
asking for QSL cards/letters. I'd say my return rate is probably better
then 60 percent, sometimes even 70 or 80 percent. It just depends.

But what helps me so much? EVERY reception report I email or snail mail in
includes an audio recording. Sometimes it's only 30 seconds if the signal
is real real rough ,weak or hard to pick out anything useable. Sometimes I
include anywhere between 5 minutes and 30 minutes with a detailed report.

Well, how do I record? I use my smartphone! I have an Iphone 6plus with
128gb of storage. IPhone's record some of the best audio I've ever heard
from a smartphone. Androids do a pretty decent job, not as good, but not
bad.

The best app I've found for this is Voice Recorder Pro 7. I think it cost
something, but if it did, it was only like 99 cents of $1.99.

You can select the format to record in (mp4, mp3 or wav), you can select
the sample rate, bit rate (32kbps all the way up to 320kbps), you can
select mono or stereo as well.

But where this really comes in handy, you can email the audio file to
yourself or someone with the click of a button, you can upload it to a
google drive, dropbox, one drive or box cloud account. You can even have it
upload to an FTP server or to your Facebook page if you want!!

The one feature I like is being able to turn your audio into a youtube
video and uploading it directly to youtube! I was recording videos by
holding it up to the radio's display and while the audio was good, it
wasn't great because it was a bit further away from the speaker so I could
show the S meter and frequency on the display.

So what  I ended up doing is do is put the phone right near the radio's
speaker and start recording... this produces better audio then a straight
up video. Then you click a button after the recording is over and it
generates the video frames for you, putting a picture there and you fill in
the particulars of  your video and it uploads it to your youtube account.

See what I'm talking about here, by viewing my youtube account
https://www.youtube.com/user/OnAirDJPaulWalker

you can easily tell which videos were made by me holding up the phone to
the radios display and which are audio only with the video generated by
this smartphone app.

Here's an audio only track that I recorded to give you an idea how it
sounds:
https://soundcloud.com/paul-walker-11/radio-mediterranne-international

I don't recall if they have this app for android phones, but if they don't,
there's something similar.

It's worth investigating. A detailed written report is one thing when
requesting a QSL, but audio is indisputable and absolute confirmation of
what was heard.

Paul walker
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