[hpsdr] Mercury Questions

[George Medakovich]

Thank all of you who have contributed to this great project!

I received my Mercury on 12/26 and after a few days finally got around to
setting it up on my Windows 2000 box - a 1.1Ghz Asus motherboard with 
1GB of memory.

After the usual fiddling with software and about 100 reboots the 
Ozy/Mercury/Penelope
combination came to life and I enjoyed about 2 hours of listening and 
learning my
way around PowerSDR.  I had it connected to a pair of ham sticks up on 
the roof through
an antenna tuner and was enjoying the performance - my basis for 
comparison up until
now has been my old NRD-525.  I do not recall the exact PowerSDR 
configuration,
I believe that the Penny clocks were chosen.  The version of PowerSDR 
was the one
released on 12/31.
It was running with intermitent hangs (I had to tweak the display
and priority settings to get it to run evenly on my relatively slow 
computer) and eventually stopped altogether.

Since then I have not been able to get much off of the Mercury.
I have tried installing everything fresh on an XP laptop and have also 
installed and run
the firmware upgrades, but still without sucess after many combinations 
of slots/clocks/firmware tried.
The Ozy firmware load looks good and I have been able to run install and 
run the Usb-Blaster emulator
as well.

What I see now is after start the meter quickly goes to -180dBm (-200 
w/out preamp) and stays there.
The Windows process monitor shows a high rate of input, so the usb data 
is apparently flowing.
On the W2000 machine I have had slightly varied results, sometimes after 
a few minutes there will
be some intermittent activity.  Relays click intermittently (including 
when only Mercury and Ozy
are present).  Sometimes the panadapter shows a low-level noise that 
does not vary when different
frequencies are selected, usually in this case there is also an 
off-scale peak about 10kHz (11?) lower than
the selected frequency.  The adc chip is warm, as others have noted, but 
not what I would call hot.

My questions at this point are:

(1) The firmware upgrade instructions say that after a successful load 
the two right-hand lights
on Mercury should be flashing.  Although I am getting all good messages 
from the usb-blaster
program, the only red light lit is the left-most one (the four green 
lights are on).
This is also true after loading and starting PowerSDR - and I noticed 
that in the new Mercury manual
that this may not be normal (thanks for that guide, too!).

(2) The Penelope guide mentions that the Ozy led 0 should be steady on 
when there is a 122MHz
signal present.  Assuming that this is the upper led on Ozy, mine is 
blinking.

I hope I have not toasted something on my Mercury.  Could anyone 
recommend something I could
check?

Thanks!

George, ae5ci