[hpsdr] SunSDR2 - new TRX

[Joe Martin K5SO]

Hi Werner, 

Thanks for the note!  Well, fear not.  I, for one, am still very much committed to making the phasing of 3 or more Mercury receivers work properly for DF, directional nulling, and/or beam steering.   There's plenty of room for others to usuefully contribute to the project on this issue too!

While just about anything is possible to do if you put enough time and energy into accomplishing it, it is unlikely that 3 Hermes boards can readily be used together for phasing applications.  This is primarily due to the lack of connectors etc on Hermes to input/output coherent clock signals that would be required to achieve coherent operation of the three.  Using independent, coherent Mercury receivers is most likely a better approach rather than trying to make 3 Hermes work together. or

It "should" be straightforward to use multiple Mercury receivers on the Atlas bus to do phasing, and in fact the existing multiple Mercury board programs on my website do in fact work.  They're not perfect by any stretch but they're not too far off the mark either.  The biggest problem for me that has arisen with phasing multiple Mercury receivers is getting consistent control of the relative phase differences on initial power up for the multiple receivers and, to add to the mix, there is a nagging little "burp" occasionally that injects a random phase relationships between one (more of the boards that I have not fixed yet.  It should be doable and I certainly haven't given up on the problem.  

The reason you haven't heard much about the phasing programs lately is that I have been distracted with tidying up some of the inefficient use of Altas bus lines that are being temporarily used to pass parameter such as (Merc firmware version numbers, ADC overflow alert signals, line-in and mic gain settings, ALC, FWD, REV power levels and a couple of other items.  I now nearly have a solution (90% done) to free up five of the Atlas lines, including passing of of those mentioned parameters, plus setup of the TLV320 chip on Penelope at start up, so when I get that job finished I will return to the phasing problem work.  It's kind of slow go, I realize, so thanks for your patience.  It'll happen though, as I agree with your (and others') opinion that its an important task to make work. 

73,  Joe K5SO

On Jun 3, 2012, at 2:39 PM, Werner Karn wrote:

> Hi Joe,
>  
> thanks for your quick precise answer. I recently read one of your articles, where you described your software development to do phasing with 3 standard receivers and with the standard HPSDR Atlas bus. I thought this could be a very important feature for the ham community, at least for myself, but it looks like it is no longer supported with the Hermes development ? Or will your 3 Rx phasing software work with 3 Hermes boards as well ?
>  
> 73,
>  
> Werner   
> 

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