X5105

Recent acquisition is a Xiegu X5105.
The nice thing about the X5105 is that it has it's own built in battery (good for a few hours operating), a built in ATU, built in speaker, built in microphone and PTT button.
This makes it an all-in-one radio for 160m through to 6m with 5W output.

3D printed a bracket to mount a mini telescopic fibreglass fishing rod and made it into an HF 'walkie talkie'.

Click images to go SUPERSIZE...

Need to see how it performs when hooked up to my loading coil...

https://g4zal.blogspot.com/2022/06/a-3d-printer-to-make-loading-coil-for.html

HackRF One SDR

HackRF One SDR

Click image to SUPERSIZE

N2ADR wifi Buffer

 

Initial test of Jim's N2ADR wifi Buffer.

Installed on Raspberry Pi 1 with USB wifi dongle(s) following these instructions from Github...
https://github.com/jimahlstrom/HL2WifiBuffer

All current testing is on my LAN.

As the R-Pi 1 does not have wifi, I tested both of these dongles, results were disapointing, with stuttering in Quisk and unuseable with Thetis.  Both are designed for R-Pi and are 'plug n play' in Raspbian.  The R-Pi was only about 6 feet/2 metres away from the wifi router in my shack.

As always, click any image to go SUPERSIZED!

Next test was with a USB ethernet cabled adapter, and setup (eth1) as the wifi adapter in the hl2_wifi_buffer.txt file.
Results are very encouraging in Rx, but using Thetis in Tx resulted in errors, Quisk rarely threw an error in Tx.  In both instances I was using VOX.

Thetis is rather bandwidth hungry at ~22.6 Mbits/sec download rate (19200 sample rate), whereas Quisk is ~9.9 Mbits/sec (9600 sample rate).

This would explain why Thetis was unuseable on my wifi dongles.

When using Pure Signal, it's advised to use 19200 sample rate.

Also, when using VOX I have an issue where VOX keeps tripping at the end of an over as there is a large 'pop' of audio on reverting to Rx and VOX constantly activates/de-activates until I disable VOX.

This will surely need fixing for me as I quite like VOX as opposed to spacebar PTT.

Multiple instances of Thetis

How to run multiple instances of Thetis or simply segregate multiple installs.

First you will need to organise your install folders and the same for the 'hidden' user folder(s).

I have Thetis for Anan as I have an Anan 200D and also Thetis for Hermes-Lite 2 as I have an HL2.

I install Thetis for Anan as per normal and create a desktop shortcut for it.

Rename the Anan Thetis desktop shortcut to Thetis 200D (for example).

Install Thetis for HL2 into their own seperate folders - I use C:\Thetis-HL2\Thetis_x64....

It's useful to keep seperate version folders so if one doesn't work so well, it's easy to revert.

Click any image to SUPERSIZE!

Inside each folder, find the Thetis.exe and right click on it, Send To > Desktop (create Shortcut).

On the desktop, rename the shortcut to Thetis-HL2-b2 (for example) or Thetis-HL2-b3 etc.

In Windows Explorer type %appdata% in the address bar and hit 'Enter' and then go into the OpenHPSDR folder

Create some new folders such as Thetis-x64-HL2-b2 etc

In my example below, I have one folder for 'normal' Thetis for Anan and then additional ones for Thetis for HL2.

Now, back to the desktop shortcuts, this is where the 'magic' happens.

For each HL2 shortcut, add something like this to the end of the text in the Target field...

 -datapath:"%appdata%\OpenHPSDR\Thetis-x64-HL2-b3"

Obviously, the name after the last backslash ( \ ) part must correctly match each folder name.

The whole line should look something like this...

C:\Thetis-HL2\Thetis_x64_2_10_3_4-HL2-beta3\Release\Thetis.exe -datapath:"%appdata%\OpenHPSDR\Thetis-x64-HL2-b3"

Don't forget the critical 'space' after ...\Thetis.exe above.

You can now start the required version of Thetis and the first time it is run, it will create a new wisdom file for that version - you can copy an existing HL2 wisdom file from one folder to another to prevent the time consuming creation.

A new database will be created inside each new 'hidden' folder so each is now independant of one another.