Panadapter & waterfall settings
Posted: Sun Aug 13, 2017 1:30 pm
Right out of the box, you will find that the settings for the panadapter, waterfall and panafall displays look pretty terrible. Also, the metering is quite slow and unresponsive. Here are some suggested settings that will get you smooth and highly responsive displays and metering. It will also optimize the display dynamic range.
As you can see, the main display rate has been increased to 60 frames per second, and the waterfall update rate made a matching 16mS (1/60). The multimeter settings have also been made faster across the board, Pandapter averaging has been set to 30mS. In addition, the Fast Fourier Transform bin width has been set to 2.930Hz, and the windowing set to Hann, although the default windowing is completely fine.
In the Spectrum Grid settings set the Min Level to put the Displayed Average Noise Level (DANL) on the panadapter near the bottom of the display. This will typically be a number around -130dBm, depending on band conditions, your antenna, etc. Once that is done, then set Max Level to -40dBm and a step size of 2. With those settings all signals from the noise floor up to S9+30 will fit on the display (actually, for SSB signals, it's more like S9+40 due to the disparity between FFT bin width and receive passband). Note that these two numbers must be set separately for each band. So you must switch to each band, tune up, and set these settings over again, once per band.
With all that done, the final step is to turn on averaging in the main user interface (turn on the AVG button) in order to make these display settings work well. If you find that your PC is not up to the challenge of a 60Hz panadapter update rate, simply make that setting, and the corresponding waterfall update rate setting, slower. Nearly all PCs can handle 30Hz with no difficulty, and that is still a very fast and smooth display.
Finally, adjust the panadapter and waterfall scaling factors differently for transmit. Adjust the scaling factors in Setup > Display > TX. I recommend 20 max, -70 min and a step size of 2. This will get you good dynamic range during TX, and any IMD products below -70 simply won't be seen by anyone else on the planet unless you are rocking an S9+40 signal.
As you can see, the main display rate has been increased to 60 frames per second, and the waterfall update rate made a matching 16mS (1/60). The multimeter settings have also been made faster across the board, Pandapter averaging has been set to 30mS. In addition, the Fast Fourier Transform bin width has been set to 2.930Hz, and the windowing set to Hann, although the default windowing is completely fine.
In the Spectrum Grid settings set the Min Level to put the Displayed Average Noise Level (DANL) on the panadapter near the bottom of the display. This will typically be a number around -130dBm, depending on band conditions, your antenna, etc. Once that is done, then set Max Level to -40dBm and a step size of 2. With those settings all signals from the noise floor up to S9+30 will fit on the display (actually, for SSB signals, it's more like S9+40 due to the disparity between FFT bin width and receive passband). Note that these two numbers must be set separately for each band. So you must switch to each band, tune up, and set these settings over again, once per band.
With all that done, the final step is to turn on averaging in the main user interface (turn on the AVG button) in order to make these display settings work well. If you find that your PC is not up to the challenge of a 60Hz panadapter update rate, simply make that setting, and the corresponding waterfall update rate setting, slower. Nearly all PCs can handle 30Hz with no difficulty, and that is still a very fast and smooth display.
Finally, adjust the panadapter and waterfall scaling factors differently for transmit. Adjust the scaling factors in Setup > Display > TX. I recommend 20 max, -70 min and a step size of 2. This will get you good dynamic range during TX, and any IMD products below -70 simply won't be seen by anyone else on the planet unless you are rocking an S9+40 signal.