SunSDR

KC2QMA
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Re: Introducing the ANAN-8000DLE MKII

Postby KC2QMA » Tue Sep 13, 2022 1:39 am


I just found this video today.
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Re: Introducing the ANAN-8000DLE MKII

Postby ES7AAZ » Tue Sep 13, 2022 9:57 am

KC2QMA wrote:I just found this video today.

MB1 is a good, nice-looking radio with a built-in i7 PC, but it has its own weak points. TX IMD3 is -37 dB @ 100W PEP, while the openHPSDR team has achieved TX IMD3 -70 dB. MB1 has server software, but the other SunSDR radios without the knobs need additional hardware to run it remotely. As previously said, PowerSDR and Thetis will remain to look unmodern, but you have to look behind the curtains. The base code is far from it as it was 10 years ago. Open-source software and hardware have advantages, it involves developers all around the globe.
73,
ES7AAZ Riho
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Re: Introducing the ANAN-8000DLE MKII

Postby KC2QMA » Tue Sep 13, 2022 12:11 pm

KC2QMA wrote:
I just found this video today.


You need to watch the entire video as Rick talks about more than just the MB1 he talks about new ESDR software (V3) and much more. A lot has changed in the past 2 years!

1. IMD for MB1 is currently 37db until adaptive pre-distortion is enabled in firmware when the official version of V3 become available in late 2023 (Yes the hardware does support Pure-signal unlike FlexRadio). Also the MB1 is built around a high-end industrial PC that comes within M.2 4X SSD, 16GB DDR4 is upgrade able to 32gb can run an I9 processor, Dual GB LAN ports and much more, that is way more powerful than the basic NUC I5 PC in the Andromeda.
It will also drive 2 external 4K monitors and internal display simultaneously, has 2M VHF and clearly has a much higher level build quality.

2.No additional hardware is currently needed for remote in V3 with the new ERS (Expert Remote System). But if you like the feel of big VFO knob you can also use an E-Coder USB controller.
https://eesdr.com/images/software/ESDR3/ERS_ENG.pdf

3.Expert Electronics EESDR V3 was built from scratch in 2021 and is using the latest QT programming environment that take full advantage of modern processor Cores/threads and GPU using Vulcan API and all other GPU API’s.
V2 & V3 will run on Windows, Linux & MacOS and soon IOS and Android.
Here is a older video from 2020 talking about ESDR3.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YW2clAQ ... nel=RN6LHF

4. TCI. Created by Expert Electronics.

The great thing for all of us is ANAN and Expert Electronics offer us SDR users more options and will drive the market forward witch is good for all of us.
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Re: Introducing the ANAN-8000DLE MKII

Postby K1LSB » Tue Sep 13, 2022 5:00 pm

I did watch the entire video, I'm now lamenting the fact that that's 42 minutes of my life I'll never get back!

That video offers literally NO look (not even a peek) at the actual operation of the software / hardware, or how it's used, or what specific features it offers for the different types of potential users (ragchew, CW or chasing DX), or what options it offers for optimizing the package for the specific hardware in my shack (amp, autotuner, etc.). Those are just a few examples of what I'd want to see in a video of any product, but that video shows us absolutely nothing.

The average (or even serious) user couldn't give one whit what programming environment the application was written in, as long as the application works as advertised. The fact that the QT programming environment is a "universal do-everything-for-everyone" package strongly implies that the code it produces isn't actually optimized for anyone's specific application, including ESDR.

I for one want to know what is the minimum transmit audio latency that package is capable of. I want to know whether there's any service center in America. I want to know whether that radio actually has 2 discrete phase coherent ADCs like the ANAN 7000 (it darn sure better, at twice the price of the ANAN!). From what I'm reading on the SunSDR webpage, it does not (but please do correct me if I'm wrong).

That guy wasted much of the video talking about the things he doesn't like about the Flex (and corporate Flex), and blathers on about how "the underlying code of Thetis is from PowerSDR" (it's most definitely NOT) and "it's time to move on!", but he doesn't actually show us anything at all about the capabilities or operation of his beloved ESDR.

If that guy was the only salesman that SunSDR has I wouldn't be surprised if they never sold another unit.

And regardless of any nebulous claims they may make of any upcoming hardware or software capabilities, that isn't going to make me part with any of my hard-earned money chasing what is today still nothing more than empty promises (kinda like Flex's assurance eight years ago that adaptive predistortion was coming -- that never happened).

I'm done with my rant now, I've just had my fill of 42 minutes worth of no useful information at all. And based on the content of that video, I'm certainly not going to waste any more of my time on an even older video pushing the same material.

Mark
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ES7AAZ
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Re: Introducing the ANAN-8000DLE MKII

Postby ES7AAZ » Wed Sep 14, 2022 9:24 am

KC2QMA wrote:You need to watch the entire video as Rick talks about more than just the MB1 he talks about new ESDR software (V3) and much more. A lot has changed in the past 2 years!

Thanks, but I don't need to watch the entire video. That video was boring from the start. I'm not impressed with either the SunSDR hardware or software.
73,
ES7AAZ Riho
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Re: Introducing the ANAN-8000DLE MKII

Postby KC2QMA » Wed Sep 14, 2022 10:42 am

Here is a video from Richie MW0LGE showing an early Alpha version of ESDR V3. As you all know he is the one who has been working on Thetis and adding all those cool features we all love. I guess if an Expert Electronics radio is good enough for him to own it I can't be all that bad. Also this is how he got the idea to add Expert Electronics TCI to Thetis. His video is 18 minuets hope That it's not too boring for you. :D

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w-u-2-o
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SunSDR

Postby w-u-2-o » Wed Sep 14, 2022 12:22 pm

Moved the discussion out of the 8000DLE MKII thread, where it really doesn't belong, to its own topic here.

I've made some comments on the video in question on Youtube. You can read them there.

I can't speak for Richie, but I'm pretty sure the impetus for implementing TCI in Thetis was an outgrowth of his much more recent CAT over TCP/IP work and had nothing to do with his earlier interest in SunSDR.

At any rate, we live in a world where SmartSDR, ExpertSDR, and Thetis each have things they do wonderfully that the others don't. Unless and until we get all of those wonderful things in a single product, each person will have to choose the product that provides the things that are most important to them.

The things that are most important to me are NR2, seamless RX/TX antenna switching, look-ahead/side channel VOX, multiband audio compression, look-ahead intelligent ALC, and of course predistortion linearization. I can only get those things with Thetis, therefore that is the tool for me even though I have to make other trade-offs to get those things.

Realistically speaking, if someone where to wrap channelmaster.dll and wdsp.dll in a modern, up to date, client/server architecture front end, we'd gain most of the advantages people talk about with Flex, and perhaps ExpertSDR as well (I don't understand ExpertSDR well-enough to really know about the latter).

I'd also like to see VAC replaced by VBAN even though it ties us tightly to relying on the VB Audio infrastructure. Although Warren, Bryan, Richie and others have labored mightily on VAC, it remains a clunky, twitchy beast.

And of course we'd all like to see hardware availability from Apache improve significantly.

BREAK

Funny side story: I found myself unable to directly look at the Expert Electronics web resources. I have to use a Tor VPN connection to get around my own firewall :D

I don't want to start an argument about supporting Russian interests, but I had to implement IP blacklisting on my firewall router because I was getting on the order of 500 intrusion attempts per hour and 90% of them were coming from Russian IP addresses. About 9% of the remaining intrusion attempts were coming from Chinese IP addresses. I've blocked all Russian and Chinese IP addresses from my router and now get about 10-20 attempts per hour, mostly from US IP's interestingly enough.
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Re: SunSDR

Postby w3ub » Wed Sep 14, 2022 1:33 pm

I tried one of their radios about a year or so ago. Many things to like about it, I did miss PureSignal, but for me the biggest drawback was the lack of NR2 and in particular coupled with their lack of a direct AGC threshold control and no graphical interface showing the AGC threshold. I talked with the developers and they seems like it would be added, but I don't think it ever was.

I love NR2 and also the ability to just look at the screen and set the AGC threshold at a desired point over the noise floor depending on how weak the signal is.

/Doug
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Re: SunSDR

Postby S_Car_Go » Wed Sep 14, 2022 1:36 pm

I have been using a SUN and an Anan for about 6 months and I find the SUN to be a great radio is every aspect except one. The Anan has a slight edge in the noise reduction area when signals are approaching the noise level. However there are many many areas that the SUN does way better than Thetis. The UI is very clean and intuitive. Yes the version 3 alpha and beta releases do not contain all features of the last production release of version 2 but they will. The reason for this is that version 3 involved a major re-write using Qt6 as the core platform for the application. The version 2 release was based on Qt5 and there were some changes between Qt5 & Qt6. It was a going to require some wide spread code changes to get release 3 to use Qt6 so they just decided to restructure how the SUN application code was integrated into Qt6.

Qt6 is the most modern UI interface development package available. It is written to take advantage of the multithreading and utilization of the multicore processors we all are using today. The result is a very snappy response and a lower CPU loading since it does a better job of spreading the application execution out over multiple cores. SUN is using Qt6 because they are in it for the long haul. At the moment, SUN is the leader of the pack in both hardware and software solutions for the SDR market. IMHO.

I own a 7000DLE & and DX2. Side by side, AB antenna switch an all the other necessary goodies. I am constantly comparing the two and I find that the hardware sensitivity to weak signals is as identical to the Anan as one can perceive. So the differentiating factor is now in the software.

EE will eventually get the noise reduction equal to or better than Thetis. It just a matter of time. They are still in beta testing and a lot of work is being done. Thetis is stuck & held back from any real improvement by the way its code is written and the fact that the development started 20 years ago. Back then there were no UI development packages on the market to use. The programmers had to do it all themselves. Even the Microsoft tools did not provide much help over the the most basic set of UI tools to build applications. One file in Thetis project named "console.cs" contains 55,000 lines of code. A file of that size is ridiculous. Much of that is strictly to handle the screen presentation related stuff - waterfall, scaling, sizing etc. Now we can use Qt6 and it is easy to integrate a powerful front end to modern UI application development.

I have looked closely at the structure and content of the Thetis project source code. Simply stated It resembles a huge plate of spaghetti. That is the best analogy I could come up with describing what found under the hood. The threads of logic resemble pasta and are just a mess. This results from the many many contributors from the open source communities making improvements to Thetis. Open source projects can be a wonderful thing but it appears to me that there was no gatekeeper, no librarian, no pier review process and no central control of what was done or if it met any quality or coding standards at all. A properly run open source project usually requires a process to do a pier review of any individual's contribution before it is accepted and committed to the repository. That means properly written, documented, and tested before being accepted. This appears not to be the case for the Thetis project. Thetis has almost zero comments in the code. There is some really good stuff in there but there is a lot of stuff just sorta thrown in wherever it was convenient. At this point its a nightmare to modify, maintain or even attempt to clean up.

Anyway, I wonder about the future of Thetis given the state it is in. The EE group has a stable, paid team developing a wonderful product. The SUN radio is not a house of cards like the Anan is. Just look at the way the EE firmware is handled. Its almost automatic. When the code requires a new firmware it just loads it. Anan radio gear is a roll of the dice if you want to change the firmware at times. Not easy, like going down a road full of chuck holes in the dark. Good luck.

I could go on but there is no need. I like both the radios but I am one of the geeks and this situation does not phase me at all. I just think that the SUN has a more complete and stable package and will therefore appeal to a wider market segment in the HAM community simply because its simpler to setup & run. Its closer to "plug & play" whereas the Anan is more "fiddling around".

I like to fiddle and I like to play so I love both.

Just my 2 cents.

Cheers
Last edited by S_Car_Go on Wed Sep 14, 2022 5:06 pm, edited 2 times in total.
Dave - WB5QFZ
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Re: SunSDR

Postby w3ub » Wed Sep 14, 2022 2:19 pm

Good review Dave, I may have to try it again sometime,
Doug
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Re: SunSDR

Postby w-u-2-o » Wed Sep 14, 2022 2:51 pm

S_Car_Go wrote:I own a 7000DLE & and DX2. Side by side, AB antenna switch an all the other necessary goodies. I am constantly comparing the two and I find that the hardware sensitivity to weak signals is as identical to the Anan as one can perceive. So the differentiating factor is now in the software.
That is one of the MOST important things to understand. If you look at Rob Sherwood's receiver performance rankings, you'll see that there is very, very little to differentiate hardware performance between all of the existing direct sampling SDR hardware (Flex, Expert, Apache, Icom) and that even extends to the top shelf superhet designs. This is particularly true when you take them off the lab bench and put a real antenna on them, as the normal HF noise floor, even under the best conditions, greatly minimizes the tiny differences that remain. The only exception is when good preselection is required, such as at a contest site. Then the hardware with the best preselection bandpass filters wins (and that would not include any Apache hardware, I'm sorry to say).

Thetis is stuck & held back from any real improvement by the way its code is written and the fact that the development started 20 years ago. Back then there were no UI development packages on the market to use. The programmers had to do it all themselves. Even the Microsoft tools did not provide much help over the the most basic set of UI tools to build applications. One file in Thetis project named "console.cs" contains 55,000 lines of code. A file of that size is ridiculous....

I have looked closely at the structure and content of the Thetis project source code. Simply stated It resembles a huge plate of spaghetti. That is the best analogy I could come up with describing what found under the hood. The threads of logic resemble pasta and are just a mess. This results from the many many contributors from the open source communities making improvements to Thetis. Open source projects can be a wonderful thing but it appears to me that there was no gatekeeper, no librarian, no pier review process and no central control of what was done or if it met any quality or coding standards at all. A properly run open source project usually requires a process to do a pier review of any individual's contribution before it is accepted and committed to the repository. That means properly written, documented, and tested before being accepted. This appears to be the case for the Thetis project. Thetis has almost zero comments in the code. There is some really good stuff in there but there is a lot of stuff just sorta thrown in wherever it was covenant. At this point its a nightmare to modify, maintain or even attempt to clean up.
What you write is only true about UI and front end code in the "console" of Thetis. Only the UI is old. 100% of the DSP code is much newer, comprised of two major components: wdsp.dll and channelmaster.dll. These were originally developed in the 2016-2017 time frame, are coded in a very professional style, and have seen some significant updates since then. But, yes, the Thetis UI and front end code is awful. Nevertheless, while annoying to developers it has not prevented Thetis from remaining the most technically capable solution in many respects.

Also, the open source nature of Thetis is not responsible for the sorry state of it's UI code. The spaghetti started with the very few authors back in the legacy Flex days, then just got worse. But the reality is that very few people have ever worked on Thetis, and on PowerSDR before it. Very few. Indeed, openHPSDR has, in some ways, been an open source development failure because so few were excited about and/or capable of contributing. If there had been more excitement, more interest, then it would be in a very different place than it is today.

One of the major goals for Thetis was to re-engineer as much of the DSP as possible, to divorce it from the UI. Thus the new version of wdsp.dll and the entirely new channelmaster.dll. But even with all that work, there is still no one up to the major challenge of writing a new UI from scratch to use the quite excellent DSP code.

Anyway, I wonder about the future of Thetis given the state it is in. The EE group has a stable, paid team developing a wonderful product.
I'd love to see the paid EE software engineers make ExpertSDR open source so that they can use wdsp.dll. Then they'd get all the best parts of openHPSDR for free, and it's very doubtful that allowing ExpertSDR to be open source will affect Expert's bottom line in any significant way.
KC2QMA
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Re: SunSDR

Postby KC2QMA » Wed Sep 14, 2022 3:05 pm

Good post Dave!
I like both ANAN and Expert and hope they both have a great long and prosperous future.
My favorite aspects of the anan are:
-Pure-Signal as they are the only one Currently that actually has it!
-NR2 does seem to sound and work better
-NB also seems a bit better in crowded bad conditions
-Like that you can use more than one software package with the anan
We are still in the very early stages of SDR tech and it will only get better from here.
John
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Re: SunSDR

Postby K1LSB » Wed Sep 14, 2022 3:13 pm

w-u-2-o wrote:.
.
If you look at Rob Sherwood's receiver performance rankings, you'll see that there is very, very little to differentiate hardware performance between all of the existing direct sampling SDR hardware (Flex, Expert, Apache, Icom) and that even extends to the top shelf superhet designs.
.
.

I don't see any Expert radio mentioned anywhere in Sherwood's chart:

http://www.sherweng.com/table.html

Mark
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w-u-2-o
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Re: SunSDR

Postby w-u-2-o » Wed Sep 14, 2022 3:31 pm

All the rest of them are. It's not going to be any different.
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Re: SunSDR

Postby K1LSB » Wed Sep 14, 2022 4:23 pm

Yep, I certainly can't argue with that! :)

I've even seen Rob himself make the statement that the performance of all of the top-shelf SDR rigs are so close to each other that the statistical difference between any two samples of the same model may vary more than the measured numbers between two different models.

Mark
sv1jso
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Re: SunSDR

Postby sv1jso » Wed Sep 14, 2022 5:03 pm

I am tired of all the evangelists of the things that will come. We will have a better NR. We will have pure signal etc... We will develop our software better than yours etc. When you do that come here and say that I have a better product than yours come and buy it. Until then please stay in your cloud.
I am having anan 7000 flex 6500 and sun sdr pro. I am still waiting for a functional nr from flex or a nb that works. And if I remember correctly the sun sdr software v3 was going to be ready last year? Any way if you want everything today buy an anan. If you want to wait go buy whatever you want.

Mike SV1JSO

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