Fichten Field Day SDR Receiver (FiFi SDR)
W1AEX:
As it turns out, the guys who re-purposed PowerSDR for use with the Genesis software left the hooks for the Console.png file to load if it is present in the "skins" Console folder. This means that you can have a textured surface instead of a simple color to form the GUI console. Using several different Console.png files that I made for various OpenHPSDR and Flex skins and then also pasting those textures into the 4 png files that are used behind the GUI control surfaces it was possible to make some custom GUI displays for the Genesis Radio software that works so well with the FiFi SDR. Of course I used the new s-meter that Jeff - W2NBC came up with!
The skins that I made can be downloaded at: http://www.w1aex.com/fifisdr/gsdr.html#skins
Instructions for creating your own custom skins can be found here: http://www.w1aex.com/fifisdr/gsdr.html#edit
73,
Rob W1AEX
W1AEX:
For those who play around with the Fichten Field Day SDR (as well as many other ExtIO.dll devices that connect through a USB port) the new SDR-Radio Version 3.0 preview release is a very nice piece of software to play around with. You can download either the 32-bit or 64-bit version at the link below:
http://sdr-radio.com/v3_preview_downloads
Note that when using the FiFi SDR hardware, the software runs it as a SoftRock Si570 device and seems to automatically select the "AM (FiFi-SDR DSP)" soundcard device which is the wrong interface. Make sure that in the "Select Radio" screen the "Complex Baseband (I/Q) FiFi SDR Soundcard" is selected as shown in the first screenshot and it will fire up perfectly. The second screenshot shows the software monitoring WCBS (NY) on .880 MHz with the DSP receiver panel open. The default receive filters for AM/SAM range in bandwidth from 5 kHz to 16 kHz with options to edit any of them or to add your own custom filters. The third screenshot shows WTIC (Hartford) on 1.080 MHz with its IBOC data streams on either side of the traditional AM signal.
The second update of Simon's "preview release" was made available on May 20th and I have been using it nearly continuously with no issues at all. The GUI is beautiful and very intuitive. Keep in mind that this is not even at the "alpha or beta release" stage so some features in V2.0 are not yet implemented in the interface. Note that If you are currently using SDR-Radio V2.0 the V3.0 software can be installed and it will not affect your V2.0 installation at all.
A very slick feature that Simon has implemented is the option to let the V3.0 software offload most of the FFT data crunching tasks to an NVIDIA chipset video card. If you look at the taskbar at the bottom of the last 2 screenshots you will see that the CPU utilization is running at 1.0% and the CUDA cores of my NVIDIA TI-560 video card are running between 19% to 22%. This distributed computing feature almost guarantees smooth performance regardless of other tasks that are running even with a very minimal computer. I have not observed any problems with the V3.0 software sharing the video card's processing hardware, even when doing intensive tasks like rendering video. Note that this option is only available if your system uses video hardware equipped with an NVIDIA chipset.
Future releases of SDR Radio V3.0 will be fully functional with TX (utilizing adaptive predistortion if desired) and RX for those who run the Apache Labs ANAN hardware, sometime in the 2nd or 3rd quarter of 2016.
Rob W1AEX
W1AEX:
There's a new piece of free software called "SDRuno" that runs beautifully with the FiFi SDR. The software was primarily designed for the SDRPlay hardware but the designers generously extended hardware support to include the widely used Si570 programmable PLL. This software is incredibly capable with a very customizable modular look. Getting it up and running is not too difficult as long as you are comfortable manually copying the ExtIO_FiFi.dll file into the SDRuno folder once you have installed it. You also need to copy the libusb0.dll file into several folders (Windows, System32, My Documents, and the SDRuno folder) as it is somewhat system dependent as far as where SDRuno will look for it. It's definitely worth the effort to get this program running.
The first two screenshots show the software as it's receiving the AM BCB and the 40 meter band. The last screenshot shows how the memory bank functions are implemented. You can create your own memory banks, as I did for the AM BCB stations I typically listen to, or you can import downloadable databases such as the complete HF SWL database in CSV format that is offered by the EiBi organization. Memory scanning is planned for implementation in a future release. Direct frequency entry with your keyboard is one tuning feature as well as using the mouse scroll wheel to tune around or a left mouse-click to spot tune to frequencies in the waterfall. The last screenshot also shows a combination waterfall/spectrum view that looks exactly like what was being done in CuSDR. You can display spectrum, or waterfall, or both, or you can select the combination view as shown in the last screenshot.
The software and its user manual can be downloaded from the SDRplay play site. (http://www.sdrplay.com/windows.html) There is also an excellent introductory tutorial written by NN4F and KD2KOG that simplifies setting the software up. It has many hints that helped me get up and running without much sweat. It can be directly downloaded from this link: http://www.nn4f.com/SDRuno-cookbook.pdf
After I figured out how to utilize the custom workspace feature I made two videos of this software in action. The first YouTube video shows the synchronous detector being used to receive the AM BCB. Note that with this synch detector you can listen to either sideband or both sidebands. The second video shows various tuning methods in the software being used to tune the 40 meter band.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLggt2hLEuI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8u2E2CSA5E
This is definitely my new favorite SDR software and it has certainly provoked a lot of interest in the SDRplay hardware that it was primarily designed for.
73,
Rob W1AEX