Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Betty meet Diversity...Diversity....Betty

Flex has been hard at implementing something called PAL or platform abstraction layer into PowerSDR. This is a step toward making the software platform (as in operating system) independent. What that means is that the software can be configured to work on MAC and Linux and other O/S's besides Windows. I have not really been involved in this aspect of the development until last night. Last night I updated my program to work with the PAL subversion. I downloaded the files from one of Bob N4HY's folders on the Flex sub-versioning (SVN) server. The SVN is where many different versions of the software reside as they are being developed. I opened up the version contained in this folder and here is the console that greeted me


This is the new "Pretty Betty" console. At present there are 11 different console variations living in this sub-version that I can choose from. This one is called "default". Various aspects of this console are also adjustable so you can further modify the appearance in literally hundreds of ways. In my operation I tend to upgrade things a lot and I want to spend as little time as possible customizing things since it doesn't really matter to me, but for a guy say with color blindness or in need of high contrast in visual perspectives, this would be a Godsend, PLUS it just looks cool!!

I was yanking around on Betty and hit ALt-Ctl-R and up popped my old friend Diversity


Many of the bugs of the early alpha version of the code have been squished and the console now allows diversity to be easily integrated into the operations. This is a shot of A31A on 40M this morning. He was zero copy without diversity. My night time/early morning noise has lately become horrible. There is something in the neighborhood that has arrived to screw up my ham radio fun. It adds about 15 or 20 dB to my noise floor. I may have to go around and shoot out all the street lights since it seems to adhere to this kind of timing pattern. In the mean time diversity may assist me in my woe.

There are still some bugs to squish, so its time to get out the hammer and see how many ways I can break the software, but that's what I do best :) If you have an interest I suggest you give Betty and Diversity a whirl they are becoming the premier pair.

To run this you need the latest driver

FLEX-Firewire_Driver_v3.5.0.7171.exe

and the latest firmware

FLEX_Firmware_20091105.exe

from the Flex website download page and the SVN address for the relaease is

svn://206.216.146.154/svn/repos_sdr_windows/PowerSDR/branches/n4hy/pb-pal_10_19/bin/Release

PLUS PLUS PLUS add this .dll file into the folder where you copy the above files

new-pal-dll-v3.5.0.7171.zip

HOT DOG I got Diversity back just in time for CQWW CW!!!!!! And Betty is easy on the eyes!

You see it's proof: God loves me and He wants me to be happy :)

For grins I heard 3V3S in Tunsia on 30M so I fired up diversity and bagged him in 3 calls



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