DAX And Remote Audio (SmartSDR 2.0.19)

John M5ET

Hi All,

I've been working with one of the other guys who runs our club station to try to get his 6300 to play nicely with remote audio. At the moment we are struggling with one little ****:

When we have remote audio enabled, the headset works just fine attached to the laptop we're using for logging and control. However, we can't send audio to the rig from N1MM's software DVK.

The answer may sound simple - switch on DAX audio in SmartSDR - but as soon as we do that, the audio stream from the 'remote' microphone is lost. And I mean completely lost. The return audio (headphones) works just fine, but the outward microphone audio is dead.

Is this a deliberate thing (you can't use the PC microphone for audio with the DAX button enabled), or is this a bug somewhere?

Has anyone else managed to get their Flex 6000 series radio to work nicely with N1MM DVK alongside audio streamed through to the shack PC?

The aim here is for us to be able to leave the radio itself in the cabinet at one end of the shack, and operate at the other end of the shack, or in another building linked up on the LAN (we'd love to be able to use a WAN link too, but DAX doesn't work at all over SmartLink yet... here's hoping that gets added in the future). We often find ourselves unable to use the shack itself but needing to run our radios from another part of the site for large events, and it's one of the little annoyances I'd really like to see a solution for!

Many thanks in advance,

John (2E0XLX)

Bob K8RC

DAX is not supported via SmartLink:

https://community.flexradio.com/flexradio/topics/dax-support-in-smartsdr-2-0

To my knowledge, you've never been able to use DAX simultaneously with a microphone local or remote.

John M5ET

Hi Bob,

Thanks for the reply

Indeed, I'm aware DAX won't play over SmartLink - I only mentioned that as an "it would be nice in the future" thing.

There must be someone out there who's using DAX and a microphone, or has an alternative way of running contest logging software with internal DVK features to feed the rig. I tried using virtual audio cables, and the functionality I wanted was there, but there was an extra half a second of latency, which would be impossible to work with during a contest.

If there's really no way of doing this, how would I go about submitting a feature request to get some kind of multi-input audio enabled? Or is there a way to map a DAX channel to the PC microphone somehow?

John (2E0XLX)

Bob K8RC

The only way I know of to have a voice keyer & microphone work together is not remote-able since it involves using the radio's hardware PTT to over-ride DAX with the local mic.

Tnx to Howard, KY6LA:
https://community.flexradio.com/flexradio/topics/the-new-voice-keyer-works 

Mark WS7M

There would be one way this could be done and that would be to write a small program.

I believe it is possible through the API to select the input source.  If not you can certainly select a profile because I've done that.

So one option would be a program that you could perhaps either trigger manually or have it work with N1MM in some way that would sense which input is needed and make the switch for you.

I have no idea how you would trigger this via N1MM but who  knows.  They might help.

John WA7UAR

It's been mentioned on these forums but DogparkSDR works on Mac with the new xDAX and xCAT programs from Mario/DL3LSM. And access to raw iQ data is implemented in xDAX as well so it can be utilized by other appropriate applications. N1MM spectral display over xCAT is supported too. Not a PC solution (yet) but I wanted to document it in this thread.

Marc Lalonde

Hi i find it better to use VPN instead of SmartLink ,this way DAX work remote
this save many problem  ,and permit to control rotator and other station automation via the VPN

K1DBO

Another solution would be to use a virtual sound card like VoiceMeeter Banana.  With it, you can mix the PC mic sound device with a virtual mic device fed with audio from the DVK.