I went and found a page I ran across quite a few years back. I think you will find this page very interesting. Mikael did a really nice job putting this page together. It does a great job of showing off how different modulations are represented with I/Q (quadrature) data. In 3D! I/Q Data for Dummies Note that I wish the title of the page was something different. It sounds insulting. lol. I think this will give some a new perspective on what you are looking at with the IQ plots.Great info on the IQ plot. It has been a long time since I studied complex numbers and polar plots. It took a few reads to follow it all. In some of your future p25rx documentation,perhaps a few pictures explaining what the IQ plots are showing to help the non engineers and us old engineers that need a refresh.
P25RX-II P25RX-II Firmware Updates / Testing
- Thread starter maus92
- Start date
goldmyne99
Member
- Joined
- Jul 23, 2018
- Messages
- 274
Great info on the IQ plot. It has been a long time since I studied complex numbers and polar plots. It took a few reads to follow it all. In some of your future p25rx documentation,perhaps a few pictures explaining what the IQ plots are showing to help the non engineers and us old engineers that need a refresh.
On the subject of IQ plots.
Here is a nice web site I bookmarked a while ago. It has a web browser interactive slide presentation of 3D I/Q data.
As noted on the page, you can use your keyboard left/right arrows and your mouse to spin the 3D I/Q plots in the slides.
https://visual-dsp.switchb.org/
It appears that the DSD talk group file format on RR has changed. I will be working on new releases for everything to deal with it. The WACN, SYS ID are no longer included in the files. I'll figure out what to do about that for the stable releases for the P25RX and P25RX-II. Might want to keep your old files and backup the talk groups until I can get this fixed.
I intended to post this in the P25RX-II thread earlier, but unintentionally posted it in the P25RX thread. Please see this post for details regarding a new release that is a small update to the current stable release. This is for those that aren't currently interested in the experimental release with scanning support. Version 2022-06-01_0432 will become the new stable release after some testing.
forums.radioreference.com
P25RX Firmware Updates / Testing
Hi, I don't see it, shws the slot # but not that sync line. 22 TGs in the list. 1 shows correctly. This started when I did an upgrade back in August. also I didn't mention ONE channel comes across correctly, its one in a list of 20 channels. SITE,PRIMARY,774.906250 $ SYS_INFO wacn 0xbee00...
I've been testing the replacement unit for several days now. I did manage to bork the f/w with the 5-23 release - it may have been related to the attached computer going to sleep because I forgot to plug it in to shore power, lol. Anyway, the radio would drop the connection then re-establish it every 30 seconds or so. Reycling power on both the laptop and P25RX-II did not help. Also, the talk groups that were discovered and I labeled were lost, replaced by garbage characters that continued to repopulate even after erasing the bad data. Reflashing with a later firmware fixed the issue.
I took the radio on the road yesterday to monitor several "foreign" P25 systems (Montgomery County MD and Howard County MD) to see how it would do. I did notice that when stationary, the radio produced very good audio with few artifacts, but when moving the radio did produce some warbles and garbles. RSSI was very good, generally in the -80's. I noticed that when moving, the Total Gains line was flat but not well defined, but when stationary, the line was flat and sharp. Screenshots are attached.
I took the radio on the road yesterday to monitor several "foreign" P25 systems (Montgomery County MD and Howard County MD) to see how it would do. I did notice that when stationary, the radio produced very good audio with few artifacts, but when moving the radio did produce some warbles and garbles. RSSI was very good, generally in the -80's. I noticed that when moving, the Total Gains line was flat but not well defined, but when stationary, the line was flat and sharp. Screenshots are attached.
You should set the AGC step time to something higher than the default for mobile. Try 100ms to start with. That will smooth out the AGC response for the AUTO modes.
I'm continuing to have reliability issues with the radio connecting and disconnecting USB every 30 seconds or so after "touching" the software to make a change. The tgs are corrupted after restarting the program. Probably 200 tgs carried on this site. This happens after several days of the radio running 24/7.
When you say you are "touching" the software, do you mean something that writes to flash memory? The talk groups shouldn't get corrupted unless there is a write to flash memory and something goes wrong. A power glitch during a flash update could cause this. When you say you are continuing to have reliability issues, do you mean with this version of the firmware? Last I heard from you, the receiver replacement was working well. Did the issues start with the version you are running? I haven't heard back from the person that requested the change to allow a user-configured path for the systems folder yet.
Is anyone else having issues with version 06-06_1214 or later of the experimental software?
This is the second time the same thing has happened with two different software loads (see post #546.) The laptop is on a full charge battery power (actually it has two batteries), so no power interruption glitch. The scenario is the radio has been running unattended for several days. The radio decoding works fine. The corruption occurs when writing the tgs ("Write Talk Groups" button) to the radio, or when saving to disk ("Export CSV"). The radio then begins to cycle between connecting and disconnecting to the internal USB controller. Recycling power on both the PC and the radio did not help the first time - re-flashing to a newer version of software ended the issue. This morning's failure also required re-flashing to the latest release, but shortly thereafter it started to cycle the USB connection. I unplugged / replugged the USB cable and noticed some messages about "crc not ok" then a message about resetting. After that sequence, the radio is working and not corrupting the tgs. Is there an error log that records exceptions? The biggest issue is having to rediscover and redefine the corrupted tg lists - a lot of editing by hand as the rrdb descriptions are not always the best, lol (although I did make a csv file of the tgs in case this happened again.)
Last edited:
I wasn't able to reproduce the issue that you are experiencing, but there is occasionally an issue with reading back the talk groups that requires re-starting the java software. No error log options in the current experimental release. You might want to stick with a version that works for you until I can switch over to SQLite for configuration. I'm currently working on a major update that aims to support both models of hardware with a single release (including scanning support). I'm also aiming to make configuration and firmware updates smooth on all platforms. The new release will support talk group imports per system, and flexible view modes for channel configuration, talk groups, etc. I'm in the process of integrating SQLite to make a lot of this much easier.
I checked the USB controllers, and they had their power management enabled so I turned that off. The issue only seems to arise after running unmolested for a few days so perhaps it is going into some sort of sleep state and not recovering properly. Note that the computer audio is the playback source, and the radio is powered by the port, so the port is not completely shutting down
Here's the most recent error after hitting the "write config" button - note the blank lines inserted into the tg list. The radio is not recognized after restarting the program:
I'm going to be moving the radio to the original Dell OptiPlex 3070 Micro desktop back in my office to see if the problem is with the Dell Latitude 5420 Rugged laptop USB port drivers.
I'm going to be moving the radio to the original Dell OptiPlex 3070 Micro desktop back in my office to see if the problem is with the Dell Latitude 5420 Rugged laptop USB port drivers.
It's not the computer as it is also failing on the alternate machine mentioned above. I updated to 6-12-0936, reuploaded tgs from a csv file, did some editing to those, hit "write talk groups", then failed at "export csv" - the program froze and would not close out. Had to kill the Java process in Task Manager, and also re-plug the USB cable for the radio to be recognized. Something is going on with the USB interface - will try a new USB cable.
BTW, the radio is receiving well in my office with the back-of-set antenna.
BTW, the radio is receiving well in my office with the back-of-set antenna.
I would definitely recommend upgrading the the latest software. There have been many changes since then. You won't see that error message in the latest version.
Looking at this again, I see you are running the latest (non-experimental). That is definitely not normal operation. It is almost certainly the USB cable since you tried two different machines. The interface is protected from damage and I really doubt there is anything wrong with it. While the USB Type-C connectors are quite good on the device side, the cables can wear out or be too loose.
I would recommend updating to the latest "experimental". The current release is very close to what I would consider stable. If you continue to have problems, then contact me via email.
