A Quick Round-Up of This Evening at the Hall
Loads of quick bits and bobs to pass on, none of them too waffley, I promise.
A huge turnout of people, which was brilliant to see. Several new faces (to me at least) and a real buzz about the place. Even better, most people were clutching laptops, phones, iPads and tablets. I guess most of that hardware was Windows-based, and everyone seemed to be successfully running the Flex software and accessing either the MSARS or Worthing club radios - maybe others too.
Really happy to see that. So many people running SmartSDR in one place! Couldn't believe it really. That absolutely justifies the acquisition of the Flex radio to me. Even if the number of actual users doesn't immediately shoot up, there is clearly a significant level of interest and I'm sure that eventually, there will be far greater patronage as people get properly comfortable with it.
I wasn't planning to do a 'talk', but you know what happens when I get yapping. I hope everyone got a little something out of it.
Towards the end of the evening, I sneaked into the shack, and together with Phil and Merv, managed to clip-on around a dozen cheap Chinese ferrites I picked up off eBay this week. Alan also dug out and re-connected the shack mains filter (I didn't know there was one in there!) which will do no harm at all. It still needs a darn good tidy up back there, but I think that all the common sense shack housekeeping measures are now in place.
Testing Update
As soon as I arrived home, I grabbed some dinner and was straight on the Flex to see what effect all that ferrite material had made.
As it's the issue that's been keeping me off the club radio since before Christmas, I fired up some FT8, and over a period of about half an hour, gradually dialled the power output up to around 65W - and no blown fuses! Have we finally fixed it? Maybe we have :) If you're going to use full-duty cycle digital modes, please be kind to the radio and keep it under 70w.
Then I tried some tests on the KiwiSDR. It had automatically performed a firmware upgrade when we power-cycled it, but it came through that OK, and I can confirm for sure that it's now far less troubled by RF from the Flex than at any time since it was installed. Less in fact than when it was installed here at my home QTH. Way less overloading and it displays a much more civilised output from the Flex on the waterfall, except when you're really booting it.
So then I tried the Flex for it's audio output level and quality. Wow, what a difference. It's now possible to turn the mic gain up quite a bit more, and even turn on the Processor (at any of the three levels) and still project an acceptable audio profile. Of course, you can still overdo it, but when used in moderation you can have it sounding pretty good with compression turned on. The other upside to that of course, is that you can obviously stuff much more power into the envelope. Very happy with that result, but will reserve final judgement until we've hijacked a few of Ken's nets with it and obtained a lot more reports. Who would have thought that a bit of stray RF could have so many negative effects? OK, most of you experienced guys, and to be fair, I think it was more than a little bit of RF.
By the way, for those who expressed an interest in running digital modes remotely on the Flex, this is the YouTube video I mentioned.
It explains the basic configuration far better than I can. You'll have to set up your own COM port and data port definitions, as they'll differ from machine to machine. Shout me if you get stuck.
That's it for now, catch you all again soon... and great to see Russell tonight too. Hope you're finally feeling better. We were getting worried about you.
Berni M0XYF
