Maestro & SmartLink Freeze-on-Receive Question

Mike W8MM

I am experiencing an odd problem and wonder if anyone else has had the same experience and may have found the cause.

When I connect to a radio using the Maestro over SmartLink, everything works FB for some amount of time until the receive audio quits and the spectrum display and waterfall either freezes or is replaced by a blank screen.  It may take only 3 or 10 minutes when using a WiFi LTE hotspot built into my Porsche Panamera or as much as an hour when connected to my office network via ethernet RJ45.  The length-of-time-to-failure can vary quite a bit, but it ALWAYS fails in the same way.  Transmit does not seem to be affected, only receive.

Conversely, when I am connected by ethernet via a local connection at my QTH, the Maestro continues to operate perfectly for periods exceeding a week.

The issue seems to have SmartLink as an item of interest, however, using an iPad or iPhone and SmartSDR for iOS does NOT have this problem.

Why would the Maestro over SmartLink have issues when the iOS app over SmartLink does not?

Mack

Mike, SmartLink ONLY makes the initial handshake connection and then is completely removed from the equation once the client and radio are communicating. The issue is 100% related to your network(s). Something is going into sleep mode or timing out. One way to test this since iOS app works is to use your phone as an Internet hotspot and connect the Maestro via the hotspot. It should behave exactly like the iOS app. 73, Mack W4AX Alpha Team

Mike-VA3MW

Hi Mike

On top of what Mack said, when you see the screen drop away and the data disappear it is due to a network interruption of some sort.

Mike

Mike W8MM

Mack

WX7Y

Mike W8MM

Mike W8MM

km8am

Mike-VA3MW

Ken

These situations are difficult to diagnose as we, the user, have no idea on what is happening between the 2 routers.  Your home one and the system you are on.

Since WiFi is a party line, there are many tools those that install them use to ensure everyone gets a fair shake.  There are traffic shaping tools, deep packet inspection tools, etc. 

You mention it was a robust WiFi.  Do you know whose make it is and how it is administered?   Can you tell if you were connected to the 5Ghz side or the 2.4Ghz side?  Do they have QOS turned on for each user connection?

I know a lot of this due to a previous career in the WiFi business.  Then, we used Meru for all our WiFi installs since it successfully sliced the RF network so everyone got a share of bandwidth.  If I was the admin, I could watch each connection in the control panel.  Cisco does similar things.

If I had this to debug, here is what I do.  (I went through this about 3 years ago and wrote it all up here in the community).

On the Maestro display, I would dial down the frame rates on the Display (Rate and FPS) all the way to the left.  This will reduce the upload from the Radio.  If you have this too high, you can max the upload data stream from the radio and your router will choke, stopping the required Vita49 packets.  (You don't mention what sort of upload bandwidth you are using or what you have available).  Since my remote HF station only has 1mb/sec of upload I have to watch this very closely.   If I bring up 2 slices and full panadapter/waterfall, my Maestro will freeze.

You might want to do a test with someone remote site while someone else actually watches the upload traffic bandwidth.  You may need a better router for this that can actually report data stream usage. 

While I use a pfSense router (as many do), the IQRouter, available on Amazon, is a great router and very plug and play.  Lots use this as well.

This is what I see on a SL connection with 1 Slice open and the FPS set to about 1/4 (measured from the left) and the rate in about the same place.  This is my pfSense router at my remote station.



You can see the 6600 is moving about 3-400kbit/sec.   

Managing the upload data stream is one of the most critical steps.  

If you aren't maxing your upload, I would then try to use a SoftEther VPN on the Maestro (there are many threads on how to do this) and see if that is better.  While it might not give you the answer, it might help solve the problem.  The VPN will help to mask any traffic shaping and deep packet inspection that does go one in our ISPs and may improve your performance.

Unfortunately, ISPs do throttle our bandwidth and we have no control on it.

I hope that helps some.

Mike va3mw

Mike W8MM

In my first post I mentioned that Maestro does the same freeze/no-audio thing when hard-wire-connected to my office network via RJ-45, just less frequently than when mobile using LTE.

My shack internet upload speed is 100 Mbps using 1gbps fiber between the radio and main switch.  My router is a Draytek Vigor 3900 that was sufficient for 1gig down and 250 meg up.

Makes me think that WiFi is not the primary culprit, but the data-drop-out handling algorithm in Maestro.  It's quite possible that my office network data path gets congested once in a while because my connection is shared with many other ports.

Yet, Smart SDR for iOS on an iPhone or iPad doesn't choke on minor data drop outs.  It might buck and snort when in medium distress, but never freezes requiring a restart.

FWIW 

Mike-VA3MW

Thanks for the details.

In your 3900, can you monitor the packet stream at all?  It looks like a higher end router?  Does it show any packet drops or loss while you are connected for the stream coming from the radio?

Does it do any automatic traffic shaping?   

I would set up some QoS rules for the outbound packets from the radio if you can.  You should be able to do that for either of the 2 ports SmartLink is using or from the source IP address (the radio).



Mike

Mike W8MM