by Steve
2. December 2009 20:48
Evening all, it's a pretty wet night here in the UK and with the children tucked up asleep in bed and the YL at work it seemed a pretty good idea to get some shack time in!
I’ve put together some pictures of the Perseus, QS1R and the Perseus running using the HOKA SDR interface. I have tired to keep them pretty similar on settings so you can get a look at the lay of the land as it were when it comes to the current crop of SDRs. I will say this and that is the QS1Rs SDRMAXII interface although not as polished as the Perseus GUI does has the advantage(?) of the waterfall and FFT spectrum at the same time; again the HOKA SDR also shows the two together.
It is a shame that as yet Nico has not decided to offer this feature – I am sure it is on someone’s Christmas list! As far as performance goes the HOKA SDR is in very early beta and as such does not benefit from some of the changes Nico has made to the firmware loads for the Perseus. I am sure this small issue will be corrected in a later version along with some more control over the GUI and spectrum monitoring bandwidths etc now as the native Perseus GUI has 2MHz on tap.
For all the screenshots have a look in the gallery.
Best 73 & good sDrX!
by Steve Walker
31. July 2009 14:16
I have been a big fan of the HOKA software since my first Code3 back in the early 90's. Now with the current Windows version you will soon be able to control the PERSEUS SDR directly from the Code300-32 interface. Below is a screen shot (from hoka.it) of what the basic interface looks like. Currently it is controlling a SDR-14 but the version due very shortly will have support for the PERSEUS hardware. It was very good of Nico to include a basic ICOM CI-V command set.
I have some other RX control software I am looking forward to testing with it. A report on this will follow later this month.
Another very useful feature the HOKA and PERSEUS supports is direct decoding from the IQ output without having to utilise the audio stages of the PC. This allows direct 'digital' communication between the two software programs and improves performance. Many people currently use VAC to feed a software decoder, however people are finding this not the ideal solution.
Hopefully more programs will begin to support the IQ method and not rely on virtual soundcard interfaces at all. It would be nice to drive DREAM this way.
Maybe someone from the DREAM project is already looking into this?
73's and good (SDR) DX.
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