[hpsdr] Hermes II

[Marc OLANIE]

Hi

>1.  Quit focusing on how many receivers the units can do.  Two are nice, but I cannot see anyone
effectively using 7 or more(the majority of us).

I'm using 14 of them daily. Ham radio is NOT only ragchewing and contesting. It's experimenting, and new digital modulation schemes -and/or real time propagation prediction tool- definitely need multi RX and probably multi-TX in a short term evolution. (I do not particularly appreciate JTxx and FT8 traffic, but this could be an example amongst many others that need many simultaneous receivers on different bands)

>2.  Start moving towards VHF and UHF capabilities.  The chips are available now.

Agreed if exploiting niquist zone or parallelized ADC, but not mandatory. A good baseband rig is far better than any super-duper-multi-RX doing a lot of things with a lot of birds

But indeed, a low phase noise, high dynamic, spur free baseband rig with a lot of easy to operate transverter switching capabilities would be appreciated. Kinda "super IF" for my 10 GHz station.

>3.  Too much concern about how powerful the FPGA is.  As I remember, the mature code in the Hermes

Don't agree. Hermes code and signal handling is frustrating. Dealing with "audio" segment when you have the ability do deal with 60 MHz of bw is an incredible limitation. (some people don’t only use their ears to "listen" to frequencies... and less and less people will do in the future... I definitely need to work at least with 2 MHz wide waveforms). Hermes code is a really nice piece of ham equipment, but it is still based on a more than 10 years old architecture. And this evolution -and the evolution of the frontend- needs a rather powerful datacrunching unit.

FPGA is a bottleneck. A combination of fpga and GPU or using several gpu's has been mentioned several times.

>4.  Think about direct connection for an lcd screen, mouse, and keyboard.

I really don't understand why more than some antennas inputs and a gigabit ethernet (or PCI, fddi, whatever high speed bus) would be helpful... please, resist doing the same mistake Japanese manufacturers tend to impose to the "market". I'm not a "market", I'm a radio ham, and my different SDRs are on my roof, connected via the network. I don't need to "see" my rig or "listen" to a speaker connected to it.

I'm not trying to "troll" Glenn and I understand his point of view. I'm just trying to show that opinions could definitely diverge and it would be unappropriated to 
- force the development team to adopt a solution that fits personal point of view
- try to imitate the "commercial trends" ruled by  the "big three" (buttons, lights, only contest/dx aware rigs) 
- definitely block all ham waiting for a real new generation of SDR that would nuke all the present limitations or the Hermes v1 familly

Just my 2 cts
Marc f6itu