If one is good, two are much better

It has been an interesting day testing the FLEX-1500.

This afternoon I went on a PSK spree and announced I was QRV on the FlexRadio reflectors. Propagation wasn't that grand, but there was a nice opening into Texas from NC. Below were the QSOs I made in about an hour of CQing

• KJ7HQ, Olin
• WB2TQE, Howard
• K5KDN, BobT - Running a FLEX-5000 (a FlexRadio software developer)
• W9OL, Bill - Running a FLEX-5000 (aka Firebrick - A 2009 Flexie award winner)
• KD5TFD, Bill - Running a SDR-1000 (one of the original SDR experimenters and HPSDR guru)
• WI5C, Ron

I received very good reports on signal quality, which is what I was most concerned about. Looks like this is going to make a nice digital QRP radio.

Once that was out of the way, I embarked on a mission. I got to thinking. There is no technical reason why you can not run a FLEX-1500 and a FLEX-x000 (Firewire based SDR) on the same PC. PowerSDR 1.19.3 (aka PB-PAL) has the facility to tell PowerSDR what directory is used for storing dynamic data, such as the database, EEPROM backups, etc... So if each instance has it's own dedicated database configured specifically for the radio hardware, it should work.

After a bit of trial and error and learning how to use an undocumented feature (developers never document their code very well), I was able to get a FLEX-3000 and FLEX-1500 running on the same PC at the same time. This was a big deal, but I was not satisfied. Oh no, I have to get dual SDRs running with dual digimode programs at the same time.

For those who are not versed in this, it requires additional digital audio paths from PowerSDR to the digimode sound card program. So I created two additional VAC cables for the second instance of PowerSDR running the FLEX-3000. You have to be able to control this beast, so an additional virtual com port was defined for CAT control.

A low and behold, it WORKS! This is what it looks like on a wide screen monitor. I put everything on one monitor to prove it was not two separate computers.

(click to enlarge)

The FLEX-1500 running @ 48 KHz is in the top right hand side of the monitor and the FLEX-3000 running @ 96 KHz is in the bottom left hand corner. Both are decoding PSK-31 QSOs on different frequencies.

Fldigi is connected to the FLEX-1500 and it is below the FLEX-1500 PowerSDR console.

MixW is connected to the FLEX-3000 and is above the FLEX-3000 PowerSDR console.

Methinks this is way cool.