Back from Dayton

My feet and knees hurt, I had no voice left and had to endure flying home in thunderstorms, but boy was Dayton really fun. I really enjoy meeting in person the folks that I correspond with on the reflectors and get to spend some quality time with the Austin crew (I live in North Carolina). It has taken a few days to recover and having to work a couple 20 hour days for my "day job" the week after I arrived home didn't help much either. I now feel more normal again after a few good nights worth of sleep.

By now you have probably figured out that there hasn't been a lot of new things for the FLEX-1500 testers to be testing due to the lack of activity on the ye ol' blog. That is because for the past several weeks, FlexRadio has been completely revamping the audio/control interface for the FLEX-1500. The version I have been testing utilizes the native Windows USB HID audio drivers. This approach would have allowed the FLEX-1500 not to have used a custom device driver which would have made it easier to install and support the FLEX-1500. Testing however showed that the native Windows USB HID driver just didn't have the stability, performance and timing required to deliver a really high quality product. So the developers and engineers started building their own streaming kernel mode USB driver for the FLEX-1500 and initial lab testing has been really promising in the performance arena. The RX->TX->RX switching time are really fast. I can't say how fast yet, because it all has to be packaged up with PowerSDR, but the numbers are really small (small is good). The CW folks are going to like this radio.

On another note, one of the lead developers, Eric is now experiencing a maternity non-maskable interrupt. His XYL gave birth to their fourth child on Friday May 21. Samuel Ray and mother are doing fine, but the timing of Sammy's arrival will put a slight delay the driver integration into PowerSDR progress. He will be working from home and coding in-between feedings, diper changes an taking care of the other kids while his wife is recovering. So a bit more patience will be in order. I know the whole FlexRadio engineering & Development team is working long and hard hours to get PowerSDR v2.0.0 ready for the public beta and subsequent final release. This is another "baby" that they really want to get birthed too.

Off to Dayton

I am off to the Dayton Hamvention with my FLEX-1500 in tow. Having received one of the first pre-production beta units, my FLEX-1500 needs a few hardware updates to bring it in line with the other production units. There was a couple of minor codec filter changes to reduce the DC noise at the "0 Hz IF" and a change to expand the capabilities of the RX preamp to give it more stages or levels to choose from depending on band and band conditions.

I'll be part of "Team FLEX" working the booth and doing hands on workshops at the Flex Banquet on Saturday night. Make sure you stop by the FlexRadio Systems booth at location SA315. See ya there!

The FLEX-1500 goes ATOMic

I dug out my Intel ATOM 330 (D945GCLF2) XP SP3 machine from the bottom of the closet (it was stored there when it wouldn't play well with the FLEX-300) and after spending an hour or so doing BIOS, driver and other updates, finally got it running with the FLEX-1500 using the latest version of PowerSDR v1.19.3 from SVN. The results are better that when running with the FLEX-3000 (since it basically didn't).

On receive with no RX DSP special processing, it runs at about 37% utilization.

With NR/ANF/NB1/NB2/BIN enabled on SSB, it caps out at ~55% CPU with no degradation of the display or audio.

Now load up VAC 4.09, Com0Com and Fldigi for operating digital modes and the CPU utilization jumps up to ~48%. If you add on a logger or DDUTIL, I suspect I would be at the ragged edge of what this little PC can do.

This is just how it played on my ATOM desktop machine so there are no promises with your ATOM based laptop. Your mileage will vary.

I also finished my Rubidium (Rb) disciplined oscillator project. I put a LPRO-101 Rb stabilized reference oscillator in a forced air, ventilated enclosure with a DEMI 1x4 10 MHz distribution amplifier/filter so that I can slave multiple radios off of one Rb frequency source. It's 10 MHz stabilized signal is driving the DDS for both the FLEX-5000 and the FLEX-1500. I hope to have a few pictures and a new frequency stability run using it with the FLEX-1500 in the coming days. So, its true, the FLEX-1500 is really "gone atomic"!