[hpsdr] My Penelope results

[ww2r at g4fre.com]

Having returned from road trips i have now had time to try out the 
penelope/janus/ozy trio in conjunction with the sdr1000 for rx 

I have installed:- 

svn://206.216.146.154/svn/repos_sdr_windows/PowerSDR/branches/kd5tfd/PennyMe 
rge 

which I believe is the latest powersdr that supports penny 

I put the boards in the following order (progressing away from the atx 
connector) ozzy, janus, penelope (in adjacent slots) 

Running power sdr i get a short burst of noise from the amplified speaker 
combined with signals from the band for ~5 seconds then no audio. The 
spectrum display works fine. Stopping/starting power sdr doesnt get the 
audio back. If I power off/on the sdr stack and restart powersdr i get the 
same 5s of noise then silence 

After removing Penelope and changing the setup to match, the receiver pART 
worked properly again 

After trying a lot of things, unsuccesfully,  including running the ozy.bat 
before launching powersdr, in desperation i tried swapping the board order 
to:- 

ozzy, penelope, janus in adjacent slots 

and everything worked fine! I searched the archives and didnt find any 
mention of sequence criticality, but is my original order a known issue? 

At this point i was able to test the transmitter. I set txgain to 38.0 and 
tune power to 100% on all bands and found 0.33W on 80m, 0.25W on 10m and 
0.1W on 6m. Measurements were made using an HP436 power meter attached 
directly to Penelope. Powers were also confirmed with an HP8563E analyser. I 
have seen 0.5 to 1W reported by others under these conditions on lf, where 
is my missing 4dB, or is it not really missing? 

On penelope i see 4 LEDs lit under the above conditions. Occasionally the 
5th lights on a good SSB whistle! 

I read the  posts about USB activity lowering power output, the HPSDR is the 
USB device on the computer (2.2G processor, 4G memory) 

I have alos seen mention of penelope having ALC. It would appear my output 
stage isnt compressing, when i change TXgain from 36 to 37 to 38db I still 
see an increase in power 

Feedback appreciated 

Dave 

WW2R 

 

 

 

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