1. Drivers Flexradio/openhpsdr.org/acquisition Logica
2. Drivers Flexradio/openhpsdr.org/acquisition Logical
3. Drivers Flexradio/openhpsdr.org/acquisition Logic Download

Friday at Dayton was “forum day.” By that I mean that I attended a slew of forums and could have attended several more. That left little time to actually scour the flea market or visit vendor booths.

I started out in the TAPR forum, but only spent a couple of minutes there. I quickly switched over to the ARRL Public Relations forum. There I got to meet Diana Eng (see previous post). I also:

WARNING: WDM-KS drivers are can cause crash issues (DirectSound is the safer alternative). With WDM-KS only 1 device can use a WDM-KS device at 1 time, so If you accidently try to open a 2nd PC program using a WDM-KS driver, the driver will crash, forcing you to reboot your PC. Also the windows Control panel-Sound does not show WDM-KS drivers. The FlexRadio Systems FLEX Firewire driver has three (3) sub-driver components. The first sub driver, the FlexRadio Systems FLEX-xxxx core driver component was just installed in steps 8 - 12. There are two additional sub-driver components that must installed to complete the driver installation process.

learned about the PR resources on the new ARRL website,

received a “Talk on a Disk” CD that includes materials to help you prepare a presentation on ham radio for non-technical groups, and

received free materials from Gordon West, including an instructor’s guide for both Tech and General classes, and CD-ROMS with a number audio clips on a variety of topics.

En route to the Teacher’s Forum, I passed by the Antenna Forum, which looked to be very popular. There were guys standing out in the hallway trying to hear the presentation.

The Teacher’s Forum has been moderated by Carole Perry, WB2MGP, for as long as I can remember. She always has good speakers. This year, the lineup included Gordon West and Bob Heil.

One idea that I picked up is to use a flashing light or LED to demonstrate the idea of duty cycle. By hooking it up to a variable duty cycle oscillator, you could vary the amount of on time versus the amount of off time, and this would make a very good visual demonstration.

This year’s presenters mostly talked about teaching kids. This fall, I plan to teach a class for seniors. If it goes well, I’m thinking that I could talk about that class at next year’s teacher forum.

In the afternoon, I attended the Software-Defined Radio Forum. This forum was also packed. We first heard about the new FlexRadio 1500, which is a $650 SDR. Its output is only 5W, but this looks like a real bargain.

Drivers Flexradio/openhpsdr.org/acquisition Logica

Next up was Lyle, KK7P, from Elecraft. He gave us the Elecraft perspective on what an SDR is and what it’s not. It was interesting, but not very technical.

After Lyle, the TAPR VP (whose name and call I forget) talked about developments with the SDR projects at TAPR. My initial impression is that while all of these developments are well-done, it’s still much less expensive to simply buy a Flex 1500. I haven’t checked the specs, though, to see if they are comparable.

Drivers Flexradio/openhpsdr.org/acquisition Logical

Finally, there was a talk on MacHPSDR, a native Mac implementation of a receiver for OpenHPSDR hardware. I wish that I’d been able to stay, as I am a Mac person, but I had to leave. Despite the availability of this software, you really do need to have a PC to run a software-defined radio. I don’t expect this to change in the near future.

Drivers Flexradio/openhpsdr.org/acquisition Logic Download

Well, that was certainly enough for one day. On Saturday, there were some equally interesting forums, including forums on RTTY, SSTV, antenna-modeling software, and the AMSAT forum. Despite this, I decided to not attend a single one and walk the fleamarket and visit vendor booths. More about that in the next post.