[hpsdr] Getting Mercury to work with Magister..need some help please

[Joe Martin K5SO]

Hi Paul, 

I would be happy to work with you to get your system up and running.  If you are already working with someone on it, that’s fine, continue with them.  

Your plan to first bring up Mercury with Magister is a good one.  Although I don’t have a Magister board I do have Ozy here and perhaps with the information that iQuadLabs has provided on the specific differences between the Magister and Ozy boards we can determine easily what jumpers you need to have on Magister and get you going quickly.  

The first thing (after setting the board jumpers properly) you need to do when bringing up an unknown system such as you describe is to put current firmware into your boards.  Current firmware for Magister/Ozy is Ozy_v2.4 (which should load automatically from the PowerSDR version you are running, if PowerSDR loads a different version from Ozy v2.4 we can easily fix that), Mercury is now at v3.3, Penelope is at v1.7.  

Be aware that earlier versions of firmware and current software may not be compatible with each other, therefore, when bringing up an unknown system for the first time I would strongly recommend loading current firmware and using current software.  Later, after you establish that your system works properly, you may use anything that suits your fancy.  

Are you familiar with the process of updating firmware on Mercury and Penelope using the Magister board with the USBBlaster-Binaries method?  It’s described in detail in the ReadMe file in the USBBlaster-Binaries folder on the SVN repository at 

http://svn.tapr.org/USBBlaster-Binaries/.  

Or if you are familiar with using the Quartus II Programmer utility and have a USB blaster cable we can go that route to load firmware.  

Let me know if you would like to work with me to get your system running.  I’m sure there will be a variety of choices for you to choose from as who to work with and it certainly won’t hurt my feelings at all if you choose to work with someone else!   I didn’t want your request to go unanswered so I am responding to give you at least one choice!  

You may respond directly to my email address, as it would likely be more efficient to interact one-on-one via direct email rather than via the public reflector.

In any case, best of luck with your system!

73,  Joe K5SO


On Jan 24, 2013, at 8:58 AM, Paul wrote:

> ***** High Performance Software Defined Radio Discussion List *****
> 
> Hi guys,
> 
> Trying to get my first HPSDR system going. It is a used system complete with
> Penelope, Mercury Atlas Pandora, Hercules and Magister. It was sort of a
> hodge podge of cables and things attached with double sided tape so I
> stripped out the box and am starting to assemble from scratch. I tried
> getting just mercury running last night..no joy. I have gone thru the
> mercury manual and powersdr manual and set all the jumpers on the Mercury,
> but the Magister had a few jumpers that had come off and I don't know where
> they go. I can't find any manual for the Magister to show where the jumpers
> should be. I have the J8 jumper on the Mercury for the on board OSC, it's
> checked in PSDR as well, and I am getting white noise out of the RX
> headphone jack, but am not rx'ing any signals. I tried putting in a signal
> from my HP 8640 with no joy. If I increase the level from the HP, I can see
> the "ADC overload" flashing on the PSDR console, but still no indication of
> a signal in the panadaptor. I ran the calibration procedure several times,
> with different levels and freqs...still no joy. My computer passed latency
> check and I have been using PSDR with my softrock so I know basically how
> that works.
> 
> Arg! Help please. Anyone with Magister info? What am I missing?
> 
> 73
> Paul
> VE7KHz
> 
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