[hpsdr] New ANAN-100D & openHPSDRj, cudaSDR, on Linux - some questions

[Darren Long]

Hi,

My shiny new ANAN-100D arrived today and I'm now on a learning curve
getting this baby up and running with my Linux 'puter.

I have been using ghpsd3-alex s/w with my KX3 and FCD-Pro+ for a while
but this is my first experience with HPSDR hardware.

I only ordered it yesterday, and kudos is due to Waters and Stanton for
delivering it in less than 24 hours, and it seems, for slipping in the
fresh 4.9 firmware which they hadn't realised had been released until I
placed the order.  At least that's what I assume the blue "Hermes 4.9"
annunciator is indicating in cudaSDR.

I initially fired up the rig with openHPSDRj for a quick fiddle then had
a go with a build of cudaSDR derived from VK5ABNs branch and that seems
to work too, though it doesn't look like it has explicit support for the
Angelia.

I'm mildly confused about a few things though.

I was hoping to hook up my Wellbrook Loop to RX2 to avoid any risk of
transmitting into it and generally use that for reception.

1) I suppose I can't use RX2 with cudaSDR if it thinks it the rig has a
Hermes board. I suppose I can configure cudaSDR to use Ant2 and put the
loop on that, as there is no danger of transmitting into it with cudaSDR.

2) I'm generally curious about the audio output from multiple receiver
slices.  I'd not really thought much about local audio facilities on the
Linux box, although I did pre-emptively fork VK5ABN's svn repo onto
github and then patched in N1GP's local sound modifications into a new
branch last night in anticipation of the impending arrival of the new
rig.  My github repo is here: https://github.com/g0hww/cudaSDR-g0hww

I haven't managed to get any local audio signal out of this branch of
cudaSDR yet, but have got audio from the front panel headphones port, so
I'm not too worried about that yet.  it does look like something is
almost working in the local audio branch build, as an instance of
QtmPulseContext appears in pavucontrol, but I'm not getting any audio
signal through it.  Perhaps I've missed something out in my manual
merge. I'll take another look later when the excitement has levelled off.

Anyway, on to the actual question number 2. I had, perhaps naively
assumed that I'd be able to get local audio from multiple receivers, fed
independently into pulse audio, so I would be able to feed modems with
them, such as fldigi and FSQCall.  I'm now wondering if this is
generally viable, whether this facility is available in any of the linux
compatible progs out there already or whether I'm going to have to put
my coding gloves on to tackle this?  I'm optimistically assuming that I
can cobble together a distributed mish-mash of multiple receiver
goodness with the bits and pieces from ghpsdr3-alex that will satisfy
this urge but I've not had a fiddle with that yet with the new hardware.

3) I didn't manage to get openHPSDRj to use the Rx2 antenna either.
When I select the RX2 antenna in the Antenna tab of the Configure dialog
box, nothing changes, and when I reopen the dialog box, the setting has
reverted.  I also tried setting the Rx Ant to RX1 thinking this might be
the EXT1 input, but nothing changes then either, and the setting reverts
as noted before.  Am I doing something wrong, or perhaps more coding (or
waiting) is needed?

4) I suppose the Alex filters affect the Wideband spectrum, so can be
turned off unless needed.  Does anyone have any advice on this?

That's the questioning done.  I'm very impressed that I've got this far
within a couple of hours of arriving home with the new rig and with only
a cursory reference to the documentation, which I did admittedly flick
through a few days ago.  Nothing has crashed, and no smoke has been
released.  Its all looking very good.  Many thanks to all those who have
worked hard to make this possible.

Cheers, 73

Darren, G0HWW