No more than 4 receivers. Network problems?

[Cesc Gudayol]

Hi guys

First of all, thanks for this magnificent piece of technology. Thanks, Steve and thanks Mathew, Alan, Ronald, Joe and all the contributors, I really appreciate your work and mastery.

I've been playing with my new HL2 for a while and, trying to start more than 4 receivers in SparkSDR (v2.0.1.9 and also 2.0.2.3), I come across a problem, when I start a new virtual receiver in a new band (the 5th one) I get nothing (all the rest continue to work normally). At the beginning, I thought that it was a firmware update problem so I updated to the stable 71p3 version with no success. After that, I suspected that my LAN connection was the cause of the problem, so I connected directly my PC (Windows 10) to the HL2 but with no improvement. I used different cables, I forced the Ethernet adapter to 1 Gb but no improvements at all.

My HL2 tells me that the connection is established at 1Gbps (in Idle mode the LED 3 is ON, indicating 1000 Mbps) so everything seems fine. I have started the Windows 10 LAN monitor and I see a constant 90 Mbps consumption (doesn't matter if I start 1,2 or 5 virtual receivers) as you can see:

Am I doing something wrong? Any clue?

Thanks for your help.

Cesc Gudayol

EA3IGT

[Alan Hopper]

Hi Cesc,

Spark can only use the rf bandwidth covered by the receivers in the gateware (4 in the standard one). The virtual receivers allow many per gateware receiver but if there is not a gateware receiver spare to cover another band there is nothing it can do. So typically you can only operate on 4 bands at the same time but with many modes.  If you add virtual receivers that can't be fulfilled, the display uses the wideband data to fill in which does not work very well.

73 Alan M0NNB

[Cesc Gudayol]

Thanks Alan for your quick answer and for your support.

I understand what you say, but I wonder how Joe (LB1HI), and others, get SparkSDR working with 8 or 9 different bands at the same time... 

Cesc

EA3IGT.

[Alan Hopper]

Hi Cesc,

They are using non standard gateware, there are versions for 6 and 9 receivers but no tx. The 9 receiver version is quite experimental and has some restrictions on settings.  You can get the gateware from the github site and upload it with Quisk or Spark.

73 Alan M0NNB

[Cesc Gudayol]

Thanks Alan, understood.

73 

Cesc 

EA3IGT