very nice write-up, michael. well done! 73, w5xz, dan
From: Michael Babineau mbabin...@magma.ca
To: phi...@mac.com
Cc: flexradio@flex-radio.biz
Sent: Wednesday, September 18, 2013 1:56 PM
Subject: [Flexradio] Flex-1500 on CW (was Re: Flex 3000 for DX'ing and SDR)
Phil :
There are likely a couple of things that need adjustment. But first off if you
are expecting
full break-in on CW from the Flex-1500 then you might as well put it up for
sale now.
Properly adjusted it will work as well (break-in wise as a semi-break-in rig
like the Ft-817)
but it won't do full break-in CW.
If you are getting latency on the sidetone (which is likely the case) then you
need
to adjust a few parameters in PowerSDR.
Out of the box, PowerSDR should run on almost any machine of sufficient
horsepower
but it won't necessarily run well on CW. If you read the FLex-1500 manual
section
on CW and the Flex-1500 part of the PowerSDR release notes (Page 12) they
document
quite well the three main things that potentially need to be adjusted in
PowerSDR to allow
for smooth CW operation on the Flex-1500.
Note that you must STOP PowerSDR to make these changes and then START again
to determine how effective the changes are.
The first thing is adjusting the USB Driver Buffer Setting.
This is accessed via Setup/General/Options
It is a slider the goes from Conservative on the left to Aggressive on the
Right.
You want to make it as Aggressive as you can without causing drop-outs or
distortion
in your receive Audio. My suggestion is to adjust the slider only one position
to the right
at the time, exit the SETUP, START PowerSDR and listen to a station for a while
to determine
if the change in settings is causing an issues with receive audio. Repeat this
process over and over until you either get to the most Aggressive Setting
(unlikely) or
you start to hear audio drop out or significant distortion on RX. At that point
back it off one
position. Resist the temptation to go to the most Aggressive setting first as
it may cause
PowerSDR to hang up or quit (my experience).
The second adjustment is the audio buffer size.
Repeat the same procedure as above (i.e stopping PowerSDR, but this time
changing the setting
to one smaller then Starting PowerSDR).
Setup/Audio Buffer Size - You want this to be the smallest value that doesn't
cause drop- outs
or distortion on receive. ( i.e. 256 or 128 if possible)
Setup/DSP Buffer Size - CW RX (should be 2048) only reduce this if necessary
to further
diminish sidetone delay. Changing this value to a smaller one will have an
impact on the performance of the narrower CW RX filters. I wouldn't suggest
going any smaller than 1024 otherwise you are diminishing performance of
the receiver.
Adjusting the above three settings should give you reasonable performance on CW
with
no noticeable sidetone delay.
For anyone only using a Dual core machine, if this isn't enough there are a
couple of
other tricks that help, but I only suggest trying these as a last resort.
SETUP/DISPLAY Refresh Rates Main Display FPS (normally 15, can be reduced to 7
with no ill effects). Reducing this should improve the CW performance.
If you are really just running PowerSDR (which is what I suggest on a dual core
machine)
then you can increase the Process Priority by a notch with no ill effects.
SETUP/GENERAL/OPTIONS Process Priority (I don't recommend going with a setting
higher than Above Normal or High, the default setting is Normal).
The other worth mentioning is that if you are using the internal keyer in the
Flex-1500,
be aware that if you enable Iambic sending it will default to Iambic A. Many
people
(myself included) learned Iambic B and I couldn't send with Iambic A if my life
depended
on it.
The CW Keyers settings within PowerSDR can be accessed via the
Setup/General/DSP level
(yeah I know this doesn't make a lot of sense the first time).
For CW operation, in my experience with the last two releases of PowerSDR, you
need a minimum
hardware configuration of Intel Core Duo (2 GHZ), with WIN7 (XP works but you
will get more out
of your Dual-core processor with WIN7) and at least 4 GB of RAM. If you want
to run a lot of
other software (loggers, Digimode programs, email etc) then I recommend
something like an Intel
Core I5 based computer. I am currently using an Acer Laptop with a AMD
A10-4500m (Quad Core)
and 10 GB of RAM with WIN8 and it works great. Don't forget that the computer
is about 80%
of the Radio.
Best of luck
Michael VE3WMB / VA2NB
Message: 5
Date: Wed, 18 Sep 2013 06:33:23 -0600
From: Philip Townsend Lontz phi...@mac.com
To: Phil Cragg p...@headstartpets.co.uk
Cc: flexradio@flex-radio.biz flexradio@flex-radio.biz
Subject: Re: [Flexradio] Flex 3000 for DX'ing and SDR
Message-ID: e580e743-7c4d-4355-86b8-09296c044...@mac.com
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Yesterday I got my 1500 working... But what's