Re: Introducing the ANAN-8000DLE MKII
Posted: Tue Sep 13, 2022 1:39 am
I just found this video today.
KC2QMA wrote:I just found this video today.
KC2QMA wrote:
I just found this video today.
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!
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).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.
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.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.
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.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.
w-u-2-o wrote:.
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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.
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