[hpsdr] Hermes Arrived

[John Marvin]

My Hermes arrived yesterday. I've got some of work to do to get 
everything together to use it effectively (I'm planning on modifying my 
HF Packer V4 to add a separate RX jack and change the relay connections 
to do the antenna switching), but I couldn't resist quickly throwing 
together a receive only setup.

My first problem was trying to install Kiss Konsole and PowerSDR. Their 
installers insist that .NET 4.0 be installed.  I've got .NET 4.0 Client 
installed, but the installers don't appear to see that. I didn't spend a 
lot of time yet trying to troubleshoot that. I'll probably try 
reinstalling .NET 4.0 or install 4.5 which installs the full profile. I 
do have some questions related to this:

1) Is there an easy way to override the installer so that it will 
install the software even though it thinks .NET 4.0 is not present?

2) Has anyone else run into this? Any other suggestions?

Since I was in a hurry to get something working, I moved on to 
installing the 64 bit version of cuSDR. What a wonderful piece of 
software. One feature I love is the ability to "tune" the waterfall 
display by vertically scrolling the spectrum display. I don't know if 
the HPSDR version of PowerSDR is better, but my current experience with 
PowerSDR-IQ (for my SoftRock RXTX ensemble) is that you constantly have 
to play around with various waterfall parameters depending on what band 
you are in, due to changes in background noise levels.

I also loved the wideband display (my understanding is that KK also has 
this feature, but since I couldn't install that I was happy to see it 
also exists in cuSDR). Since others have had ADC overload problems I was 
curious to see what my situation was going to be. I discovered that my 
strongest signals were a local AM station and, since I live in Fort 
Collins, the various WWV signals. But none were quite strong enough 
cause an overload.

Overall I found cuSDR easy to use, with fairly intuitive controls. I 
look forward to watching the continued development of this software!

I didn't get a chance to try the two receiver capability. I wound up 
wasting a bunch of time exploring the low end of the spectrum, since I 
haven't had the opportunity to do so with a good spectrum analyzer before.

Regards,

John
AC0ZG