ND2E's Blog

Back in September I ordered a PIC El III from Kanga. I finally started on the assembly a couple of days ago. Finished it this afternoon. Did the basic tests and it seems to be working. The first PIC project will be a recording voltmeter that I need for a solar charger project for the station battery and for a solar heat controller I have promised to build for a friend.

I would change the order of assembly slightly so that the resistors are installed first so that there are scrap leads available for the test points. I would also be careful when installing U1, it is quite close to one of the R1 pads and could be a problem.

I recently finished redoing the ham shack so I now have a permanent workbench for electronic projects. I salvaged a bit of anti-static mat from on of my previous employers when they were redoing their rework center. The bench is L-shaped and has storage for parts and tools. So far I don’t have any bench test equipment but I hope to finish the function generator I started back in the 80s. I thought ahead and put plenty of power outlets in the area as well as a Cat 6 drop. Once I started working on the circuit board I soon learned that my old eyes needed more light. I installed a 4 foot three element track light overhead. Power is controlled using an X10 wireless switch that was leftover from the house in Wylie TX. It still needs more light but it will work for the moment.

My E-Bench in use

Messy Workbench

Workbench - another view

I finished the new computers and was facing the confusion of having 2 mice, 2 keyboards and 2 displays. The conventional solution to this kind of problem is to add a KVM switch and use one keyboard. KVMs are relatively inexpensive if you only need 2 computer ports. But if you are going to go beyond 2 ports you need the expensive variety of KVMs.

Either way it is still an expense and I had just built 2 new computers and purchased a new 24 inch display for one of the computers. I needed a cheap inexpensive means of switching the keyboard and mouse between computers.

I found a piece of software, Synergy+, that allows the sharing without the need for hardware.

I installed it last night and find it is a convenient. Even-though it is still beta, I haven’t noticed any bugs. It must be installed and set up on each of the machines. It is not difficult to set up but the instructions are a bit obscure.

I also use Logmein Free to run the K3 when I don’t want to be in the basement. It is very useful on digital modes where you don’t need to hear the audio. I can also use it with HRD decoding CW since I don’t copy CW very well and I really don’t need to hear the audio (but I should be listening so my proficiency increases.)

For the past few weeks I have been assembling new household computers. For the past year I have been using an older Dell Dimension GX-Series as the main computer for radio and web development. It is an old-style Socket 478 Pentium running at 2+ GHz. HRD and background tasks often ran the machine into the 100% realm and HRD’s performance suffered. However I had not planned on upgrading machines or even replacing the machine since I could use my Dell Studio laptop for web development and for the radio.

I also do some video editing for our local congregation so that the weekly sermon is available on the church web site. In doing the weekly edits, I found that even the Studio with its T6500 2.1 GHz processor was not really as fast as I wanted. It was taking too long to create the clip I needed. So, I needed ; ) a faster machine.

I opted to build a new Socket 775 machine with a 2.9 GHz Pentium Dual-Core (E6500) processor using a 32-bit XP operating system. The machine worked very well and cut the time down to a more reasonable area but I figured I could do better if I overclocked the CPU. That worked, the time was cut down to roughly 75 minutes to load the .VODs and another 90 to write the final clip. This was more reasonable but still not fast enough to get things done on a Sunday afternoon after church. 165 minutes was still better than I had been doing with the Studio laptop but it was still too long.

After using the new computer for a couple of weeks, I decided to investigate replacing the Pentium with a Quad. What could I expect in performance gains if I moved to a Quad? And which Quad would be a better choice? I searched and researched the available 775 Quads and determined that the best would be a Q9550 but the best price I could find was more than I really wanted to pay. My second choice was the Q8400 but it was a 2.55 GHz chip – slower than the E6500 so many tasks other than video editing would suffer and run at roughly 85% of what I had grown used to.

I still don’t know if HRD is multi-processor aware but I did find that many hardware hackers had pushed the Q8400 to 3.4 Gz with little problem other than heat. If my chosen motherboard could handle overclocking the Q8400 to roughly 3 GHz without problems, I would not suffer any execution slowdowns. I tested the overclock capabilities of the MB by setting the overclocking on automatic and going for a 15% OC on the E6500. That worked so I knew that the MB could provide some OC capabilities for the new processor.

All that remained was the heat issue. The E6500, when OCed to 3.2 GHz during a video creation would hit 61 Degrees C. Not really good but under the 70 deg C limit for the processor. That was for a 65 Watt cpu, what would happen when I put a 95 Watt cpu under the same load. Would it break the 70 degree mark? Being chicken, I opted for a non-stock cooler for the quad. I chose a massive cooler that was supposed to be able to handle a 130 Watt cpu at full load. I figured that the OCed quad would be hitting about 130 to 150 watts at full load so the cooler would probably work. It does…under 90% load at 3.1 GHz, the cpu never gets over 42 degrees C. The new processor and DDR3 memory cuts the overall load and create time to roughly 1.5 hours and normal tasks work at roughly the same speed as with the E6500.

So what does this mean to the old 478 Pentium machine? It means that I now have a spare E6500 and memory. I need a MB, case, and power supply to create a fast machine for the radio. I purchased a less expensive case, bought another MB like the first one, and bought a new 500W PS. I reused a CD burner and hard drive I had from an earlier machine so I basically got by with only having to buy the case, MB, and PS to create the new machine. In both instances I used mATX MB so I didn’t have to buy expensive Radeon display boards. I can add them later if I find I need to upgrade the video.

Yesterday I finished the radio machine except for a new after-market cooler which should be in today. It works well and doesn’t slow down when other tasks are running.

The USB Serial device that has given me a problem is the IOGEAR USB to 2-Port Serial RS-232 Converter, Model GUC2322. I reinstalled it and reinstalled the driver on their web page.  Again I noted the major increase in the System Process CPU usage. I removed it and placed an old USB 1.1 Prolific adapter in and the CPU usage for the System task went to 7% on the peaks and stayed down at zero most of the time.

I will eventually contact IOGEAR and Moschip to find out why.  But for the moment the Dual Port device is not usable in my system.

Last year when I lost my big Dimension 8400 to a series of power faults, I started using my old Dell 900MHz laptop. It was horribly slow and was really limping when running the Ham Radio Deluxe V4 package. To fix the problem I bought an older 2.2 GHz Pentium 4 Dell GX270 figuring that it would be much faster than the Dell laptop. Since is was supposed to be so much faster I upgraded to the latest HRD V5 Beta package expecting blindingly fast operation. I was disappointed and started looking for the reason. I somehow got the machine into a state where it was so slow that it took 20 minutes to boot. I finally fixed that problem so I was back to the original complaint that when running HRD it would slow to a stop  for several seconds. I couldn’t run another background tasks without significantly impacting the QSO.

I have spent several hours off and on looking for the cause of the slowdown. I have finally located one of the reasons slowing my computer when using Ham Radio Deluxe.

According to the info on the HRD website, HRD is a very light load on the computer. I concur that it is a very small load but whenever I ran HRD/DM780/HRDlog my computer bogged down. I spent several hours tracking down what was causing the slowdown. Finally, I noticed that the System process was consuming valuable realtime. I searched the web for System process information and came across several articles that indicated USB-connected peripherals such as USB-Serial adapters can cause the System process to balloon.

I changed the interface point to my only serial port and the load presented by the System process dropped from 50-70% to 0-5%.  That is a really significant change that may allow the HRD package to run without hesitation or slowdown that have plagued me since I brought the Dell GX270 on line.

Hopefully this info will be of use to others.

73 de ND2E