Came across this a while back: http://www.gpd.hk/pocket.asp / GPD Pocket review: An outstanding, but niche, PC for your pocket | Windows Central
Sounds like initial reviews are pretty favorable and would be awesome for portable FT8/digital modes.
Having done a few ft8 activations I’ll state the obvious.
A) readable screen in a bright environment (or some clever and workable shade over device) is essential.
B) having run ft8 on my i5 ms surface the additional cpu power seems to deliver more/better decodes that my thoroughly underpowered notebook.
I still remain somewhat unconvinced of ft8 on a peak! Seems like a ton of hassle…
Paul
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Cute but seriously pricey.
The headphone port doesn’t include a mic, so for digital use, you’d need to add an external sound card device to provide line in/out.
73 Paula k9ir
That somewhat works against its size/weight advantage if you have to bring a external sound card along plus something to enabling accurate time setting if away from cell coverage.
Agreed, exactly my point. Unfortunate that the GPD apparently excludes a mic input, as it wouldn’t seem to be costly or difficult to include it.
It is possible that this device does have a mic input that the documentation and reviews just don’t explicitly call out. My 7" WinBook tablet port shows only a headphone logo, and the documentation is ambiguous regarding a mic. I have used an adapter with the WinBook that splits the TRRS to speaker and mic as part of a successful portable all-mode station. However, spending ~$50-60 for the WinBook is a far cry from $500-600 to discover if the same can be done with the GPD Pocket 7 ;-)!
That’s what I think. eBay here in the UK is full of W10 tablets with the Z3735 Atom CPU. Some a 2G/32G most are 1G/32G and they’re not expensive. Add a bluetooth keyboard because the touch keyboard steals too much screen real estate and you are in business. I have a horrible Win8 unit with 1G/16G that runs WSJT OK on an external USB soundcard. It’a bit messy but usuable and not too heavy or large.
This new GPD unit looks really good and is a neat unit (sound card input excepted.) But it’s a lot of money.
If you’re using it just for SOTA then yeah, it’s spendy but if you compare it against similar spec’d smartphones(1080p, 8GB ram, etc) then it’s not too out of line. I’ve always had a soft spot for portable computing though(anyone remember Palm?).
USB soundcard shouldn’t be a huge issue, the one I use here is just under 1" square and works with WSJT just fine.
I was under the impression that whilst many laptops have a mic in jack, they do not have a stereo line in, so you would need a usb sound card in any case for most ham radio applications. The Syba (VIA) USB Sound Card SD-AUD20101, has 96Khz sampling, so also gives good panadaptor bandwidth with SDR. For some reason I can’t get wsjt-x working on my tablet though. Winlink works fine, as does HDSDR, but no wsjt-x. The GPD also has 2 usb ports, so no usb hub needed!
de OE6FEG / M0FEU
Matt
You only need Stereo in if you want to do SDR stuff with I/Q input. WSJT works just fine on a mono input/output.
According to the internets it looks like it may have a TRRS input for mic + headphone: https://www.reddit.com/r/gpdwin/comments/6qqo8f/is_the_headphone_jack_y_split_input_for_a/