WSPR with Two Receivers and One Computer

Thanks to Alan Reeves’ good advice, I was able to get the two USB sound cards working at the same time on the same Windows XP computer, something I did not manage to do up to now. Alan is using the same cards I am using, but because he uses them with the Microsoft driver that is built into Windows XP, he is able to use two identical cards simultaneously. I, on the other hand, was using the Creative driver (Creative is the sound cards’ vendor).

Once I manged to remove the Creative driver (this was very hard; more on that in another post), I inserted the card and Windows reported that it detected a new Hardware. I allowed Windows to install the driver automatically and indeed the installed driver was Microsoft’s, not Creative’s. I inserted the second card. Windows did not report a problem. I fired up two instances of WSPR, told each one to use a different card, and that was basically it.

Actually, it was not quite as simple. For reasons that I still don’t understand, initially only one instance of WSPR would actually receive audio. The other instance behaved normally, but it didn’t see any audio. I think that the key was to start both instances after both cards were inserted and working. In any case, eventually everything worked and I was spotting stations on two different bands at the same time using two Softrock receivers (the 7MHz Lite II and the Ensemble II RX) and one computer. It ran fine all night, producing more than 600 spots on 3.5MHz, 7MHz, and 10Mhz. Very satisfying.