ND2E's Blog

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

Well, it isn’t a bad soundcard-just needed to reinstall the software. So now I have to make a decision…do I reinstall the audio lashup to get back on the air or do I wait for the Signalink USB to arrive before I set things up again?

I have installed HRD 5 Beta as well as DM780. They are a significant upgrade from HRD 4 and improve digital decoding (subjective since I have no way of measuring .) One of the neat things that Simon has included is the separate executable for the logbook. It has several database options, right now I am using the default db mode but it has the capability to use MySQL when I grow into that. I have MySQL on the machine but I generally do not start it when running digital.

One of the changes automatically uploads the QSO to HRDLog.net – a great little logbook that can be referenced through a little bit of Java on a personal web site. See www.nd2e.com and click on the logbook menu entry. I currently have it running and displaying the last 250 log entries. Logbook also allows direct upload to eQSL and hopefully LotW when I get that worked out.

So far I am very impressed with Simon’s work even if the release s still Beta.