DXLab Commander and today's new SmartSDR releases

Dave AA6YQ

Commander 14.0.8, which was publicly released on May 28, was tested with SmartSDR 2.5.0 and SmartSDR 3.0.25. I used the latter to make many QSOs; it performed flawlessly with my 6500

Today, Flex publicly released SmartSDR 2.5.1 and SmartSDR 3.0.27, neither of which I had the opportunity to test beforehand. I successfully made a few FT8 QSOs with each release. In both cases, I initially encountered a failure of my 6500 to activate my amplifier, which I worked around by setting the Transmit Profile selector to SO2R_TX1. I also observed several instances of "spontaneous disconnection" between Commander and SmartSDR, followed by an automatic reconnection; I'll be adding some diagnostics to Commander to track down the root cause of this behavior, and will report the results here.

Note that Commander 14.0.8 also supports SmartSDR 2.4.9.

Pat N6PAT

Dave AA6YQ

I have not tested Commander 14.0.8 with SmartSDR 2.3.9, but I don't know of any reason why it wouldn't work correctly. If you decide to try it and run into trouble, please post a message on the DXLab Discussion Group, which I monitor more frequently than this forum.

Pat N6PAT

My 6700 is in the shop but I'll give it a try as soon as I get it back

Always a pleasure to use your software.

RFord

W9HH - Steve

Dave AA6YQ

As noted in the original post above, while testing SmartSDR 2.5.1 and after upgrading to SmartSDR 3.0.27, I've experienced several instances of "spontaneous disconnection" between Commander and SmartSDR, followed by an automatic reconnection. I have been working to track down the cause of this behavior, but SmartSDR provides no indication of why it has dropped the connection to Commander.

SmartSDR provides a "keepalive" option that, when enabled, will automatically disconnect if it hasn't receive a "ping" message from Commander within the past 15 seconds. Depending on network speed and congestion,  it's possible that conveying a large number of callsigns to SmartSDR  - after a band change, for example - could result in 15 seconds elapsing without a "ping" being sent. I have a new version of Commander that prevents this by automatically sending "ping" messages while conveying callsigns to SmartSDR. So far, I haven't seen a spontaneous disconnect while testing this new version.

If you have Commander controlling a Flex Signature transceiver, have been experiencing spontaneous disconnects, and would like to try this new version of Commander, please send an email message to me via

aa6yq (at) ambersoft.com