[hpsdr] No Signals from a New HPSDR

[Jim Gailer]

Please accept my apology and disregard the previous 'no subject' post
(consider it a senior moment)

Hi

I hope someone can help me!

Having collected a full set of HPSDR boards and finally found some time, I
have set out on the adventure of trying to make them work.

My first attempt was to set up on a fast Windows 7 Pro 64 bit laptop but
after much trying could only get a "Error starting HPSDR hardware, is it
connected and powered" report from PowerSDR. Feeling I was too ambitious
using this I tried again on my older XP desktop, which went more smoothly,
except the receiver seems not to operate. I have successfully set up Ozy and
updated all of the firmware, PowerSDR reports no errors and also reports:

Board [Version] Slot

Gibraltar [N/A] J1
Ozy FX2 [20090524] N/A
Ozy [18] J2
Penny [240] J3
Mercury [30] J5

(By the way, the Altera programmer is at 11.1 now so the batch files used to
update the firmware need changing to reflect the changed directory
structure).

The symptoms are that noise is audible at the headphone jack; There is a
single 'spike' at the centre of the panadaptor display which does not move
when tuning. An injected cw signal into the Rx connector on Mercury does not
show on the panadaptor display, but produces a ADC overload indication at 40
mV rms (Rx not calibrated). There are very brief freezes of the display. If
an antenna is connected to Mercury, several additional un-tuneable spikes
appear at the upper and lower ends of the displayed spectrum.

I have tried all of the sample rates, with identical symptoms. I have tried
all the buffer sizes, smaller ones seem to increase the display freezes
slightly.

***********

LEDs on the boards are as follows (1 is on):

Ozy, top to bottom, 00000000001 before PowerSDR started and 1001111F001 when
connected to PowerSDR. F is flashing at about 1pps.

Mercury, has 4 green LEDs and red LEDs are 100001AB0 where A is flashing at
about 10pps, B about 5pps.

Penny, leftmost LED on and rightmost LED flashing at about 1pps.

Gibraltar, LED is green (and 10 MHz available on the lower BNC and the bus)

Alex, has one green LED per board on and give an insertion loss of about 95
dB from 1.8 to 30 MHz whatever band selected on PowerSDR.

***********

PowerSDR version is KD5TFD 2Feb2011b.

USB connections are 2.0 (or at least there is a 'standard Enhanced PCI to
USB Host Controller' fitted)

PC is a 1.5GHz Athlon with 1GB memory (377 MB available when PowerSDR is
running and connected) with Windows NT home, SP3.

Thanks

Jim, G3RTD