Phil : There are likely a couple of things that need adjustment. But first off if you are expecting full break-in on CW from the Flex-1500 then you might as well put it up for sale now. Properly adjusted it will work as well (break-in wise as a semi-break-in rig like the Ft-817) but it won't do full break-in CW.
If you are getting latency on the sidetone (which is likely the case) then you need to adjust a few parameters in PowerSDR. Out of the box, PowerSDR should run on almost any machine of sufficient horsepower but it won't necessarily run well on CW. If you read the FLex-1500 manual section on CW and the Flex-1500 part of the PowerSDR release notes (Page 12) they document quite well the three main things that potentially need to be adjusted in PowerSDR to allow for smooth CW operation on the Flex-1500. Note that you must STOP PowerSDR to make these changes and then START again to determine how effective the changes are. The first thing is adjusting the USB Driver Buffer Setting. This is accessed via Setup/General/Options It is a slider the goes from Conservative on the left to Aggressive on the Right. You want to make it as Aggressive as you can without causing drop-outs or distortion in your receive Audio. My suggestion is to adjust the slider only one position to the right at the time, exit the SETUP, START PowerSDR and listen to a station for a while to determine if the change in settings is causing an issues with receive audio. Repeat this process over and over until you either get to the most Aggressive Setting (unlikely) or you start to hear audio drop out or significant distortion on RX. At that point back it off one position. Resist the temptation to go to the most Aggressive setting first as it may cause PowerSDR to hang up or quit (my experience). The second adjustment is the audio buffer size. Repeat the same procedure as above (i.e stopping PowerSDR, but this time changing the setting to one smaller then Starting PowerSDR). Setup/Audio Buffer Size - You want this to be the smallest value that doesn't cause drop- outs or distortion on receive. ( i.e. 256 or 128 if possible) Setup/DSP Buffer Size - CW RX (should be 2048) only reduce this if necessary to further diminish sidetone delay. Changing this value to a smaller one will have an impact on the performance of the narrower CW RX filters. I wouldn't suggest going any smaller than 1024 otherwise you are diminishing performance of the receiver. Adjusting the above three settings should give you reasonable performance on CW with no noticeable sidetone delay. For anyone only using a Dual core machine, if this isn't enough there are a couple of other tricks that help, but I only suggest trying these as a last resort. SETUP/DISPLAY Refresh Rates Main Display FPS (normally 15, can be reduced to 7 with no ill effects). Reducing this should improve the CW performance. If you are really just running PowerSDR (which is what I suggest on a dual core machine) then you can increase the Process Priority by a notch with no ill effects. SETUP/GENERAL/OPTIONS Process Priority (I don't recommend going with a setting higher than Above Normal or High, the default setting is Normal). The other worth mentioning is that if you are using the internal keyer in the Flex-1500, be aware that if you enable Iambic sending it will default to Iambic A. Many people (myself included) learned Iambic B and I couldn't send with Iambic A if my life depended on it. The CW Keyers settings within PowerSDR can be accessed via the Setup/General/DSP level (yeah I know this doesn't make a lot of sense the first time). For CW operation, in my experience with the last two releases of PowerSDR, you need a minimum hardware configuration of Intel Core Duo (2 GHZ), with WIN7 (XP works but you will get more out of your Dual-core processor with WIN7) and at least 4 GB of RAM. If you want to run a lot of other software (loggers, Digimode programs, email etc) then I recommend something like an Intel Core I5 based computer. I am currently using an Acer Laptop with a AMD A10-4500m (Quad Core) and 10 GB of RAM with WIN8 and it works great. Don't forget that the computer is about 80% of the Radio. Best of luck Michael VE3WMB / VA2NB >Message: 5 >Date: Wed, 18 Sep 2013 06:33:23 -0600 >From: Philip Townsend Lontz <phi...@mac.com> >To: Phil Cragg <p...@headstartpets.co.uk> >Cc: "flexradio@flex-radio.biz" <flexradio@flex-radio.biz> >Subject: Re: [Flexradio] Flex 3000 for DX'ing and SDR >Message-ID: <e580e743-7c4d-4355-86b8-09296c044...@mac.com> >Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii >Yesterday I got my 1500 working... But what's up with the CW?? I can't heard >the other stations when I'm transmitting. Plus my fist is all screwed up... >Can't send worth a shit. WTF! >Can't find the side tone vol. >back to the K3 and KX3 real CW machines that just work. >Looks like the 1500 will wind up on eBay... I still give it some more time.. >It maybe that I just don't know how to use it correctly. >It seems to me it needs to be at least as good in CW as the K line. >Phil >K5SSR >Santa Fe >Wanna be SOTA Shack Sloth. _______________________________________________ FlexRadio Systems Mailing List FlexRadio@flex-radio.biz http://mail.flex-radio.biz/mailman/listinfo/flexradio_flex-radio.biz Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/flexradio%40flex-radio.biz/ Knowledge Base: http://kc.flexradio.com/ Homepage: http://www.flexradio.com/
