As of right now, I am thoroughly broken on RTTY. I think it is because we implemented some fixes to make RTTY contesters happy.
1.10.2 worked fairly well, but actually was partly broken for PSK. I didn't run it long enough to sort it all out, but I could make it work without too much fuss. The main issue for me is that I'm happy, more or less, with MixW, but for normal (non-contest) operation, I have to do a couple of strange things (always have) to make it work. The thing is, MixW is not very smart about offsets (this is true, so far as I could ever tell, for both MixW 2.16 and the current 2.18). If you use the standard RTTY AFSK offsets and then switch to CW, it doesn't appear to remember it should have different offsets for different modes and uses the AFSK ones for CW. I think this is a bug, but there you go, its the world of closed source. A 2K offset for CW is totally hosed. One quickly tires of going into MixW to manually fix things, which as a practical matter simply must be done to do click-tuning or anything else, really. So, for the sometime RTTY user, force-fitting the AFSK offset to agree with your CW listening offset is a pragmatic solution. It's how I get by. (Long time readers might remember I've discussed this before and even advocated it for others). And, as well, for ordinary DX chasing, it is convenient (even if nonstandard) to use USB rather than LSB because both the SDR panadapter and the MixW waterfall work much more sensibly for "listening up." So far, so normal, more or less. To recap, I have Mix W set up for a mark/space offset of 400. I have it using USB (logically "inverted", but it is explicitly USB as far as MixW is concerned and MixW seems to do the inversion for you if you set it that way -- you can set "inverted" separately for anyone who really is running USB). I've been able to run it that way since PowerSDR 1.3.something or other. With 1.10.3, it appears that our various "fixes for RTTY contesters" has broken me so thoroughly, I'm not totally sure I can explain it. What it appears to be is that _even in DIGU_, I get a fixed, negative, standard AFSK offset. Changing the "click/tune" offset does nothing. I can't find any other control for this. This just totall hoses MixW. When I change from USB to DIGU, the transmitter frequency of the SDR does not change. HOWEVER, MixW seems to be told by PowerSDR that the frequency is something other than it is (about 2K lower, apparently the standard AFSK offsets) and, worse, it actually seems to be "listening" there. The MixW waterfall and the SDR panadapter are totally mismatched. So, it's not like they disagree about what to call the frequency. MixW really appears to be somewhere else. I can't listen to what I should be. It's early morning as I type this and I was trying to follow a ZL7 pileup, so not much else on. But, as far as I can make out, that's what's actually happening. Worse, I can't simply back up to 1.10.2 because I upgraded firmware. I don't know if going back is a good idea and I don't know what level to download myself to do so (remember that chart I asked for? Having the code paternalistically tell me isn't a perfect solution after all -- and having the download have a name like "current" isn't keen either for going back). At the moment, I have no plans to "go back." I can make it all work, as an SWL maybe, "like it used to" simply by being in USB. But, the whole point of DIGx was to not have compression et. al. operational for transmit. I didn't submit this as a bugfix, because I have a feeling the answer is "working as designed" except maybe for the fixed negative offset in DIGU. But, I'm not sure this is the right offset for PSK or other digital modes either. The click/tune had a compromise of sorts by having a different value for upper and lower. But that covers _maybe_ two modes and only applies to click-tune from the SDR itself and not to operations from 3rd party software. It looks to me like you need a "digital offset" right next to (or, probably, in place of) the click/tune offset, which affects none of this (probably shouldn't). It probably needs to be a drop down with values for known modes that can also be set manually, like the parallel port address setting for SDR 1000 was. Another option would be to have a "RTTY" profile for USB that did what DIGU/DIGL is intended to do, but runs the offsets "naked" without any attempt to be "smart" about correcting to mark/space. Or, perhaps, we need to think hard about giving up on the possibly false ideal of using "mark" for the apparent frequency to start with (it's potentially a false ideal if you need a different offset for each mode). I'm not sure what to do. All I know is that for the moment, I'm basically not running RTTY with my new rig. Larry Wo0Z PS, now that I think about it, maybe we should use the transmitter profile as the overall solution. We could have the ones we now have for real SSB, but we could also have some that turn off compression et. al. and yet also set a programable offset for RTTY, another for PSK and affect both the rig interfacing and click/tune. That would work similarly to my long advocated "digital check box" but might also accommodate all of this even better. This would also get rid of the manual "set to DIGU" thing altogether, which was never my preferred solution. _______________________________________________ FlexRadio mailing list FlexRadio@flex-radio.biz http://mail.flex-radio.biz/mailman/listinfo/flexradio_flex-radio.biz Archive Link: http://www.mail-archive.com/flexradio%40flex-radio.biz/ FlexRadio Knowledge Base: http://kb.flex-radio.com/ FlexRadio Homepage: http://www.flex-radio.com/
