[hpsdr] Mercury V6.3 vs V6.4

[Joe Martin K5SO]

  Hi Berndt,

The changes between Mercury v6.3 and v6.4 may not be particularly  
noticeable to you depending upon how you use your system.

Here are the differences:

1)  In v6.4, the jumper status for Channels_8_1 (GPIO3) is ignored and  
the IQ data is required to be sent to Ozy/Magister/Metis on a single  
Atlas bus line; which bus line is used depends on the logical address  
set by jumpers on the Mercury board.  In v6.3 and earlier the  
Channels_8_1 jumper told Mercury whether it should use eight data  
lines of the Atlas bus in parallel to send IQ data to Ozy/Magister/ 
Metis or not.  If the jumper was present Mercury would send the data  
in a serial manner on a single line to Ozy/Magister/Metis, as is  
necessary if more than one Mercury board is present on the Atlas bus.

2)  In v6.4 three receivers are implemented in the Mercury FPGA;  
whereas in v6.3 only two receivers are implemented.

3)  In v6.4, Atlas data lines C25, C27, and C29 are reserved to pass  
firmware/ADC overload signals to Ozy/Magister/Metis, even though in  
this particular version Atlas bus lines A6 is used to pass Mercury 1  
firmware version/ADC overload status and Atlas bus line A4 is used to  
send the ADC overload status only (no Mercury firmware version is  
reported to PowerSDR in v6.3).

 From a multiple Mercury user standpoint today the main noticeable  
differences are that the firmware versions for any Mercury other than  
Mercury 1 isn't reported to the PC in v6.3 and only two receivers are  
implemented in v6.3, which isn't particularly significant presently  
since PowerSDR only supports two Mercury boards presently anyway.

Joe K5SO


On Mar 14, 2011, at 4:27 PM, Berndt Josef Wulf wrote:

> ***** High Performance Software Defined Radio Discussion List *****
>
> G'day,
>
> What are the changes between firmware versions 6.3 and 6.4? Is it  
> worthwhile
> the upgrade?
>
> 73, Berndt
> VK5ABN
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