I have a small windows box to boot into for my amateur radio needs. So far, I have been using my OpenHPSDR based rig via PowerSDR on windows 10. However, transmitting on SSB has been a problem as the mic input on the Penelope board doesn't seem to work and I have been having trouble routing audio via sound card to PowerSDR.

So, I started exploring other alternatives. There are mainly two choices:

  • piHPSDR
  • linhpsdr

Both are written by John Melton, G0ORX and is Free Software. PiHPSDR and its menu system is more suited to smaller screens, so I decided to use linhpsdr. Now, I have used linhpsdr in the past and it works fine with a few issues for which I have some fixes.

The current issues are:

  • PA calibration is not done yet.
  • drive level slider seem to have no effect on output power. PA gives out full power.
  • The dragging of screen for tuning is hard. I feel a heavy drag on the mouse.
  • mouse pointer changes to a weird one and switches the arrow sides when you move the mouse across the screen. I am yet to figure out what is going on.
  • Click to tune is very hard to use and seem broken. Click position is unclear and VFO lands on an unexpected frequency, making tuning hard.
  • PTT mapping to some keyboard (space bar for instance) would be nice and ergonomic.
  • One screen instead of two and an option to use an already discovered radio would be nice.
  • CW sidetone coming out of mercury when used with linhpsdr seem distorted (at low CW volume levels).
  • No SWR protection implemented (swr_protect in PowerSDR).

I hope to address these one by one and submit patches to John.