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.