Hi Neil, as far as I know, there is no new feature development at this time, however, new radio DLL's show up from time to time. I guess it depends on what you want. I want the features I need and reliability. Also, 2 of my 3 radios run in HDSDR so the recording format is the same. My CloudIQ doesn't at this point, but RFspace was looking at the possibility of making a DLL for it in the future.

Hi Mark!

Mark, do your scheduled recordings fail if they are set to a few hours ahead, but within the same calendar day? Does even the first recording of a set fail? Do any recordings in a sequence work after one or more failures, or does every recording fail?

Do you get zero byte files or no files at all? If you set for example recordings at 19:00, 20:00, 21:00 etc, do any of them work? What if you set 22:00, 23:00, 00:00, 01:00, do any work/fail? If only jobs after midnight fail, have you tried changing your PC time to say 12 hours behind and setting a recording at 13:00 today (which would actually be 01:00 tomorrow to see if there is some other scheduled process causing the failures?

If recordings work when set a few minutes or a few hours ahead, what is the cutoff beyond where they stop working? Is it a number of minutes/hours after the last use of the computer, or after a specific time each day, or totally random?

Is anything shown in the Windows event viewer logs around the time of the scheduled recording? Does it make any difference if you are running SW2 as an administrative user? If any recordings do succeed, who is the owner of the files according to Windows? Does anything change if you ask the scheduler to record to an external Flash drive? Does it make any difference what mode you are recording in? Have you tried doing a Wireshark capture with UsbPCAP to see what communications happen around the time of the scheduled recording?

Are there any maintenance jobs or File History or backup or cloud storage services running on the machine as scheduled overnight jobs?

I’ve never tried recording BC stations on a schedule, can you let me know all of the settings you are using for the recordings and your firmware/software versions and I’ll try to reproduce the faults using my second DUO. OK, it may only result in a “Me too” bug report, but even that would perhaps help the Elad dev team.

Neil G4DBN

Hi Mark, sorry I haven’t been following the threads about recording, but I was looking at HDSDR as a potential way to record contests without the problem of locking the centre frequency that I get with SW2 when a manual recording is in progress.

I am rather concerned that HDSDR development seems to have been abandoned three years ago though. Does anyone know what the status of the project is? Has it been merged into another SDR project stream or just left orphaned?

It may be that there is a solution to my specific problems that can be achieved with SW2. First is that I want to be able to record the audio channel on tx and rx for the full duration of a contest. Second is that I want to have a way to click on the waterfall to be able to hear a station that was on another frequency and hear the audio from that transmission. If I could also scroll back the waterfall, that would be a huge bonus. Typical use-case is when I am working meteorscatter and there is a burst on another channel, it would be great to be able to replay it on demand with a click, even if it had to be on another channel. Another use-case is when I see a weak CQ on the calling channel on a VHF/UHF/SHF band but I am listening elsewhere. I have no idea who it is, so don’t know where to point the beam. By then they have given up calling and gone back to listening, perhaps turning their beam so they don’t hear my plaintive “who was that? DBN calling!” calls. If I could replay the audio, and identify them, I might be able to beam at them and make the QSO. Or find that it was someone I worked half and hour ago….

For the audio stream, I can of course just send the SW2 audio output to another program via a VAC and record it that way, but it would be much nicer to have the facility built in. Being able to scroll around on the waterfall and replay things from the recent history without having to mess about playing a file would be great.

Is there a trick to being able to enable recording of just the audio stream without losing the “normal” behaviour of lock to CF?

Do any of the other programs using ExtIO allow scroll back and replay of audio from the recent history?

There are some more pressing issues that seem to have dropped off the radar. The unsolved fault with TMate timeouts is a big problem in contests, I may have to find an alternative way to tune the rig as having to reload SW2 and other programs every few hours is getting to be painful. Also with polling set to 120ms, the TMate tuning feels sluggish. Maybe I’ll have to open up the DUO and fit an external connection to a TMate-like tuning knob in parallel with the internal encoder.

Last year there was some discussion about the waterfall update rates. The available option of “fast” is OK, but the others are all very VERY slow. It would be nice to have the rate set to fast or /2, /4, /18, /16 or something rather than fast and lots of way-too-slow options.

Neil G4DBN

Hi Bill,

There are two audio buffers that seem to affect recording and playback. One is in the Audio tab and is a playback buffer. I have it set to 500 ms, or longer. Don't go too short because it can stop playback.