[hpsdr] SWR Problems with PennyLane

[Mark Leone]

I finally got around to getting the TX side of my HPSDR up and running, 
and I'm unable to tune the output of PennyLane. I don't have a PA yet; 
PennyLane connects through Alex to an external Automatic Antenna Tuner 
(LDG AT-100ProII), which has a coax feed to an inverted V dipole that 
I've been using with my other rig for a year and a half.

Using ghpsdr, when I press Tune, I see the SWR values cycling, and it 
never gets an acceptable one. The same thing happens if I key the rig in 
CW mode (I don't have a mic yet). Using PowerSDR, I see output power and 
reflected power of 0, presumably rounded down from the 50 mW output of 
PennyLane. But I hear the CW tone of my transmitter in the audio form 
Mercury, though an O-Scope connected in line through an RF sampler 
doesn't detect anything.

I tried connecting my other rig (Kenwood TS-570) into the external 
tuner, with the Kenwood internal tuner bypassed, and I can tune to a 
usable SWR. I also tried bypassing Alex, routing the coax directly from 
PennyLane to the tuner, with the same result. Also I connected a 50 Ohm 
dummy load to the output of PennyLane, and got the same result.

PennyLane has LED 1 on solid and LED 7 on slow blinking. When I key the 
transmitter, LED 7 switches to fast blink. I understand the meaning of 
these LEDs from the documentation, except I didn't see a reference to 
slow vs fast blink for LED 7. As far as I can tell, this is telling me 
that the board is powered on, output level is zero, and the firmware is 
running.

I plan to build PennyWhistle as my next activity, but I assume I should 
be able to tune the output of PennyLane directly; so I probbaly 
shouldn't proceed with a PA until I figure out what I've done wrong.

Mark - K4XML