OpenSDR

Hockley Esssex, United Kingdom, 4th October 2015, Waters & Stanton Europe’s Ham store confirm the release of OpenSDR v 3.2.28 which compliments the Apache Labs SDR Radio products.

The new release has enhancements to the Radio Astronomy functionality within PowerSDR along with a new Spectral Noise Blanking system to complement the existing NB and NB2 noise blanking features. Other enhancements and more details of the release include the following:

PowerSDR/OpenHPSDR mRX PS v3.2.28 has been released. This release can be downloaded from the openhpsdr.org website. http://openhpsdr.org/download.php This release contains the following changes: Radio Astronomy (RA) Joe, K5SO – added Rx2 to the RA feature to allow both Rx1 and Rx2 data to be simultaneously collected/viewed – added a new control to the RA display to allow the selection among options of 1) simultaneous display of Rx1 data and Rx2 data, 2) display of Rx1 data only, or 3) display of Rx2 data only – added Rx2 data to the read/write-to-disk option from the RA window; data format for each line of the .csv file is time(secs), Rx1(dBm), Rx2(dBm) regardless of what option is selected for display in the RA window – added a compiler directive to try to resolve the EU vs US formatting issue of the previous RA read/write to .csv files Spectral Noise Blanker (SNB) Following the release of new Noise Reduction technology, NR2, earlier this year, this release includes another new tool for your “Noise Toolbox”: SNB, a Spectral Noise Blanker. There are many different types of noise/interference and so having an assortment of tools at your disposal is of great benefit. The Spectral Noise Blanker is of a very different type than our Wideband blankers, NB and NB2, and will address some additional impulse noise issues. It can be used along with NB/NB2 when beneficial. It also plays quite nicely with NR/NR2 to address both Impulse Noise (SNB) and Random Noise (NR/NR2) simultaneously. While NB/NB2 operate on wideband spectrum data and impact both the panadapter display and the S-meter, SNB operates differently and impacts only audio. SNB uses Linear Predictive Coding (LPC) to evaluate the spectral formants of its input. It then uses that spectral information to identify impulses and to synthesize replacement samples for the signal in regions where it has been corrupted by those impulses. Yes, it does not just zero or interpolate across corrupted samples, it synthesizes approximations of the original signal using the spectral information and the

samples before and after the impulse. This technology largely does not depend upon amplitude to identify impulses; therefore it can often detect impulses that are equal to or smaller than the amplitude of the signal and can clean signals when other blankers fail. Computing replacement samples requires quite a bit of matrix computation; so, to keep compute requirements within reasonable limits, SNB currently restricts audio bandwidth to roughly 300Hz to 5400Hz. This is a design trade-off which will be revisited as faster processors become available. To turn this blanker on, simply click the “SNB” button on the main console. (Note that NB and NB2 have now been moved to the same button.) In Setup, there are a couple threshold adjustments, “Threshold 1” and “Threshold 2”. However, the algorithm is self-adjusting and you probably will not be able to achieve much improvement by fine tuning these. Summary of your current Noise-Interference Toolbox: Impulse Noise * NB (Wideband) * NB2 (Wideband) * SNB (Spectral) Random Noise * NR (Variable-Leak LMS Algorithm) * NR2 (Signal/Noise Power Density Algorithm) Carriers & Similar * ANF (Automatic Notch Filter – Variable-Leak LMS) Noise / Interference Null * Diversity Reception [Requires a radio model with two ADCs] Peaking Filters * Audio Peaking Filter [for CW] * Dolly Filter [for RTTY] Expect future additions! Various Bug Fixes and features – added the ability to split the open collector outputs between VFOA (1-4) and VFOB (5-7). To use, click on the “4×3 Split” checkbox on the Setup=>General=>(Penny/Hermes/ANAN Ctrl) page. – added a ‘mask’ field to the static IP address feature. This allows using the correct broadcast address for the specific port the radio is on. This corrected a problem when using a static IP address when multiple adapters are present. See the Setup=>General=>Hardware Config. page. – added multilingual for ToolTip comments

– fixed the 6m panadapter display reading for the Anan-10E – fixed a problem with PowerSDR crashing on start-up when the Disable PA for HF/VHF is enabled – fixed an intermittent issue with diversity You WILL need to reset your database. If you have release v3.2.28 dated prior to 3 Oct 2015 you will need to manually uninstall it before installing this release. The installer will not automatically uninstall it for you. This only applies to the pre-release of v3.2.28 and not prior version numbers.

Thanks for Dough, W5WC for his dedication to the development of PowerSDR which can be used on many SDR platforms outside of that of the Apache Labs range. Waters & Stanton (W&S), Europe’s Hamstore are European distributors for the Apache Labs range of products and are one of the longest standing Ham Radio suppliers in the World with more than 42 years in business.

W&S also provide the largest dedicated Ham Radio demonstration facility in Europe with 12 independent operator positions and contest-grade antennas ranging from 160M through to 23cms.

For more information contact: Justin.johnson@wsplc.com