[hpsdr] PowerSDR, cuSDR and new GUI for HPSDR

[Doug Adams]

All,

I think Edson W. R. Pereira" <ewpereira at gmail.com <mailto:ewpereira at gmail.com>> made a number of good points in his post on 24 Oct 2016. I especially like his suggestion to separate the GUI code from the DSP code.

As someone who has tried writing SDR code I can attest to the fact that it is a monumental undertaking. By separating out the two major components you allow someone with an interest in one or the other to concentrate in their area of interest/expertise and you make the work much less intimidating. Ham radio is all about experimentation. Who’s to say that someone won’t come up with some new UI approach that many of us will find useful. We’ve already had a great deal of innovation on the DSP side and hopefully that will continue. While we’re at it, my guess is that there are other separable subject areas that could be identified.

I own both an ANAN-100 and a Flex-6500. In a way, Flex has separated the UI from the DSP; the DSP is all inside their radio with the UI all in the PC. Because of this separation I was able to develop a Mac-based UI for my Flex without any real understanding of the DSP code (and without breaking it). For my ANAN-100, I would like to be able to do something similar, experiment with UI designs without having to touch the DSP code. This would be much easier if I could run OpenHPSDR DSP code as a server. I could even run the server on a Windows/Linux PC and develop my UI on a Mac.

I’m a lifelong ham and a retired software developer. I fully appreciate the work that has been done to date. Software is hard! Partitioning and organizing software makes it possible to build on the existing software base without having to learn everything and without introducing annoying bugs. I would suggest that any good software product, e.g. PowerSDR or SmartSDR, will reach a point where you need to step back away from the trees and look at the forest. Software developers have a term for it, “refactoring”. 

Maybe it’s time to consider how our software can be refactored to make it possible to build even more capable software without superhuman efforts by individuals. I can imagine many individuals contributing to all sorts of areas if they could work on only that part of the system for which they have some expertise. Users of the system could then pick and choose the UI, noise abatement, etc. that they find useful. I know it sounds simple and isn’t but shouldn’t we strive for something like this?

73’s 
Doug - K3TZR






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