No activity on spectrum or waterfall upon restart V2

John - K3MA

I have noticed a glitch.  On a local LAN Flex 6500 running V2.  Sometimes when shutting down the software and restarting it there is no activity on the spectrum or waterfall but the S meter is showing signal and the audio is coming out of the speakers.  I have seen this a few times so far today and will continue to see if it has a common cause to report.

KENT HUFFORD

I have the same issue with my Maestro. No spectrum or waterfall display. But I can hear and transmit, change freqs, ATU.

Tim - W4TME

John - Maestro or SmartSDR for WIndows?

KENT HUFFORD

The Smartlink Network Test shows GREEN. I just went to McDonald's and my laptop found my 6500 easy, connected easy. BUT, no spectrum or waterfall. Audio good, freq display ok, changes bands, ATU works. Came home. Connected my home PC to the 6500, full display and waterfall. Something not quite right. 

John - K3MA

Tim - SmartSDR for Windows.

Tim - W4TME

If the free wifi provider is blocking the streaming of large packets, this will result in a lack of waterfall data because the large VITA-49 packets are being blocked.

Larry - WA7LZO

It works just fine at Burger King, unless you order the fish sandwich, then the screen goes dark...

Tim - W4TME

Try cold booting the radio (power down, remove power for several seconds, replace power and boot it up)

John - K3MA

Tim, cold boot does not seem to fix the issue from occuring again.  It seems to happen if I use SmartLink to log into a friends account from my LAN and access one of his Flex radios over the internet and then come back to access my local Flex while still logged in to his SmartLink account.  Or if I have logged into the friends SmartLink account, Log out of his SmartLink account and then Log into my SmartLink account and try to access my local Flex.

IF I reboot the local PC or my Flex 6500 and then restart SmartLink it seems to work again.

KENT HUFFORD

Reboot does not help me either. So, there are at least 2 of us with the same issue...

Tim - W4TME

SmartLink is not enabled when you are on the local LAN.  Are you making a SmartLink connection through the Internet or using the local LAN connection?

John - K3MA

Tim, no the local Flex 6500 is not showing SmartLink as the connection.  However other Flex radios that are Smartlink connections are available and show on the SmartSDR screen.  The same problem happen regardless if I am logged into another stations SmartLink account or my own SmartLink account.  Because I am working on the computer that is on my local LAN along with my Flex 6500 the local (non-SmartLink) Flex 6500 shows as available.  It is when I launch this local Flex 6500 that I get the issue.

If you wish me to demo to you via Teamviewer I can do so.  Give me your direct line # and I will call you.

KENT HUFFORD

OK, I’m going to start this from the start. I have a 6500, hard wired via ethernet cable to a router. My desk PC, Windows 10, i7, is also hard wired via ethernet cable to the same router. I downloaded 2.0 and installed it on my desk PC. Then booted the 6500. Bought the license, installed 2.0 on the 6500, rebooted all. Started SmartSDR on my desk PC and it works fine. Spectrum scope and water fall working fine. I can unlink the meters on the right and move them to another monitor, real neat.

I then installed 2.0 on my Maestro. The Maestro is connected to WiFi that is on the other (outside) of the router. The Maestro could not see the 6500 direct. Download speeds are over 60mps and upload is around 10mps. When I logged in with SMARTLINK on the Maestro, the Maestro saw my 6500 ready. I connected to it. So, my Maestro is going “over the internet” to come back and connect to the 6500. It connects, shows freq, meters, changes freqs, changes bands, ATU works, get audio, I can key the radio, look at menus etc, EXCEPT no spectrum scope, other than about 1 inch. And no waterfall at all. Rebooted all a couple of times. Same story.

So, I linked my Maestro to my Android phone hot spot. Same story, can connect fine, no spectrum or waterfall.

I then installed SmartSDR on my MS Surface Book, Windows 10, i7. Connected to my home wifi the laptop saw the 6500 and I connected. No waterfall or spectrum scope. Again this was thru the internet and SMARTLINK.

Next I went to McDonalds with the MS Surface Book and connected to McDonalds Wifi. Had a good wifi connection. Started SmartSDR than logged in via SMARTLINK and the laptop saw my 6500 at home… YEA. Connected. Everything seemed to work but the spectrum and waterfall.

An observation. The waterfall area has about a 1 inch square in the middle that is totally black/empty. Odd. I have photos of the screen and the network numbers. below

David Decoons, wo2x

If the waterfall and panadapter work fine when on the local network but do not work via SmartLink then I would check your SmartLink port settings. If you are using automatic in SmartSDR and Maestro then the router must support uPNP. 

Connect to the router and ensure uPNP is enabled (what model router?). 

If that does not work then you might need to use manual port forwarding..

Dave wo2x

John - K3MA

Kent, your picture of the screen looks exactly like mine except I am using SmartSDR on a windows computer.  I even have the exact same black box in a portion of the waterfall.  Dave, in my case I am connected to the Flex 6500 over the local LAN and it does the same as in Kent's pictures.

Tim - W4TME

Please open a HelpDesk ticket so I can look into this in more detail.

KENT HUFFORD

uPNP is working

KENT HUFFORD

I had. #18926

Tim - W4TME

Kent - this is a SmartLink connected Maestro that is showing the problem.  it isn't on the local LAN with the radio.  The problem is with the Internet provider that is providing the Internet access.  I suspect they are blocking large packets as they are interpreting them as streaming data.  The panadapter display is contained in these large packets.

John - K3MA

I will piggy back on Kent's ticket.

KENT HUFFORD

WELL.. I have a friend in town with a 6500. He gave me his login and password. I changed my login and password to his and log in. I saw HIS 6500 and connected to it. I could control all his 6500 AND I had his spectrum and water fall... yea... sorta. Then I gave him my login and password, and he connected to my 6500 and had full control and spectrum and waterfall... yea... sorta. He and I have the same high speed internet provider. 

So, a couple of things. One. my internet does pass the large packets. Because I could use my wifi and internet to connect and operate the others 6500, and he could connect and operate mine.

Two. But, I cannot get spectrum and water fall with my Maestro or laptop connected to the same wifi and internet provider.  How can this be???

Tim - W4TME

Have you taken your Maestro to a different location and used it to access your radio, not using the same Internet provider?

KENT HUFFORD

Yes.  I have a ATT Samsung Android phone with Hot spot service. I turned on my phone hot spot service, then connected my Maestro to it and saw my 6500. I connected to it. Same thing, everything works but spectrum scope and waterfall. 

I even tried using the phone hot spot and Maestro connecting to my friends 6500 across town. EVERYTHING worked, including the scope and waterfall.

Then I tried my MS Surface Pro book thru the phone hot spot, could not see the 6500 spectrum or waterfall. Connect to my friends 6500 and everything worked.

So, my home wifi was not in use for this. My 6500 is hard wired to the router. And my friend can connect to my 6500 and everything works.  

Tim - W4TME

Understood.  Have you tried the Maestro on an Internet connection that wasn't your hot spot?  

Eric-KE5DTO

If I read the description correctly, a SmartLink connection is not going to work properly when the public IP of both the radio and the client are the same (and I think that is what is being described here).

KENT HUFFORD

Yes, I used MY Maestro connected to my internet to connect to the friends 6500 and it worked.  I did try my laptop from Mcdonnalds and it did not work

Sam Leach

First post ever:  Earlier Tim mentioned "large packet length" for v2.0 VITA-49 packets. The question, I think, is ... do these packets exceed one of the ISP's Maximum Transmission Unit (MTU) limit.  Can you tell us what the packet length is, so we can ask a meaningful question of our ISP?  Along those lines, Some VTC hardware that uses UDP (and I'm just guessing that waterfall data uses UDP) allows the user to set the MTU.  If we could do that, we could duck under an ISP's limits and be good to go.  I'd be willing to accept any losses that come with that. I bought a 6300 (primary radio is a 6700) just for remote operation and am now trying to operate the remote backwards (Newfoundland to Maryland) and we are experiencing the "no waterfall" issue. Otherwise it works wonderfully!
Thanks!
Sam

Tim - W4TME

 ... do these packets exceed one of the ISP's Maximum Transmission Unit (MTU) limit.  

That is one possibility.  The VITA-49 spectrum data (yes, it is UDP) can be larger than the 1500 byte payload of an Ethernet frame, but this is OK because the network stack in the radio is responsible for fragmenting the data into 1500 byte payloads and the network stack on the client end does the re-assembly.  This is a tried and true feature of TCP/IP because not all data quanta fit nicely in 1500 byte chunks.  So we are sending full sized Ethernet frames (1518 bytes).

I have run into this MTU problem before in a previous life where an MTU on a piece of equipment (I'll refrain from rating out the offending manufacturer) was set for 1500.  But a "full" Ethernet frame is actually 1518 bytes (payload + MAC header+ CRC).  Most devices interpret a 1500 MTU as 1538 bytes.  However, in this situation, this was not the case.  Needless to say, when we started streaming full-size data frames from one host to the other, nothing got through.  Packets that had data payloads of 1482 bytes made it through. 

Sam Leach

Thanks Tim,

Assuming that's the issue, If we are very close to a limit (that is imposed by some significant number of  networks out there), could the packet size be reduced slightly to accommodate this?

If there are other troubleshooting actions that you think might address this issue (no Panafall at remote user site), I would greatly appreciate a summary of them. 

Thanks

Sam 

Tim - W4TME

We are investigating options.  The engineering team is on a tour of McDonald's and Taco Bells in Austin to use their wifi so we can reproduce the issue and take a network capture to validate our assumptions.

Peter K1PGV

That's interesting, Tim.

What's the (max) Interface MTU on the radio?  Can we gain some perf in the local LAN case by enabling Jumbograms on our LAN and end system?  Increasing our local MTU to, say, 9K?

Peter
K1PGV