SmartSDR for a touch screen more like Maestro

Anthony Bowyer

This may have been asked before, but a search didn't turn up this exact question.

I recently acquired a Surface Go and find it works very well with SmartSDR (though not on battery for sure). Problem is, SmartSDR is not as easily used on a touch screen as the Maestro version is. Are there any plans to offer the same basic touch screen features available on the Maestro with SmartSDR on a tablet? 

Bob K8RC

You can certainly make suggestions. But asking questions about future enhancements will always be met with silence.

You might want to examine your operating system settings to optimize the fingertip-as-mouse-pointer settings. That will help.

Michael Coslo

There is always SmratSDR for iPads. An iPad Pro and SSDR is a pretty nice thing. 

Scott N8UMW

Another interesting issue when using the surface go built in microphone is that when I key to transmit, it puts a squelch tail type noise at the beginning of the transmission when using ssb. Only way I've found to get rid of it is to put a half second tx delay on it in the radio setup menu of smart sdr.

Anthony Bowyer

I haven't really tried the mic. I figured it would would pick up too much ambient noise, but it's good to know about that moment of limbo. 

Seems a non-hardware dependent version of the Maestro package would work pretty well, but it would add another 'thing' to support.

Scott N8UMW

I'm not sure if that's a driver or hardware issue with the surface go. I have not yet tried an external USB microphone, but I have one and plan on trying it. I have an adapter I purchased with the surface tab that has a standard USB port.

Bob - W7KWS -

I'm pretty sure that this is receive audio from the tablet's speakers entering the MIC. A short buffer stores it then sends it to the radio as delayed audio. When you press the MOX, this short burst is transmitted. I've solved this by using a half-duplex audio connection such as RCForb from www.remotehams.com. I use the Android version but a Windows version is available, however, I don't know if it works the same. Regarding tablet finger touch, if you're using Windows 10 on the tablet, you might try using the built in touchpad function. Enable it by right clicking the taskbar then click "Show Touchpad" in the resulting menu. You'll then get an icon in the right-hand side of the task bar that will turn it in. 73, Bob

Scott N8UMW

I'll have to check into that. I have a few windows 10 laptops and have not experienced this issue on any of them using the internal microphone. And the surface go is a tablet and touchscreen is on by default.

Bob - W7KWS -

By "touchscreen" are you refering to the small, virtual on-screen trackpad? My reference above is to the trackpad function which Windows 10 calls a "Touchpad". I don't have a Surface but instead a Lenovo Thinkpad 8, a couple Asus Windows tablets and an HP 608 G1. None had the "trackpad feature" on by default.

Another app that I like even better is "TouchPad PRO" in the Windows Store. It's a paid app but it's very configurable and is able to be set to use the entire screen as a trackpad. The two-finger scroll function can be configured to be VERY slow which is really helpfull when fine tuning the Flex. As a full-screen trackpad, it doesn't waste any screen real estate.

Scott N8UMW

I don't use a virtual track pad. I just touch anywhere on the screen to activate a button or snap tune, etc. The original poster had issues with touch screen. I just added the audio issue since he was referencing the new Microsoft surface go tablet, which I also own.

Scott N8UMW

I also bought the optional keyboard with track pad that I think works very nice.

Scott N8UMW

As for the laptops I own, one came with Windows 8 which I free upgraded to Windows ten, and a newer one that came with ten, both are HP. I would not turn on any kind of on the screen track pad. Just my preference. But touch screen control was on by default on both of then, meaning that if I Install smart sdr and run it, let's say I touched my finger to the tune button, the radio goes into the tune mode. I think we have a mix up here between touch screen, track pad, and virtual on screen track pad.