In praise of a Macintosh to decode lots of FT8

Ted VE3TRQ

This evening I just happened to decide I would listen in on the cacophony of FT8 on 40m - I don’t usually bother because I like conversations.. It was wall-to-wall signals for 3 KHz or more - no more than a few hertz between QSOs. I figured my poor old (late 2012 ) iMac would have to chew **** all those signals and might just choke a bit. But it wasn’t dropping a single conversation, and it went on and on like a firehouse, sometimes 40 or more decodes per time period. I decided I should look at the CPU busyness with Activity Monitor - and lo and behold, the CPU was 90 - 95% idle! This whole swath of 3 KHz of FT8 was taking an average of 7% of the system CPU resources, of a 7 year old computer. I don’t have a 6700 and can’t run 8 slices, but the utilization says I probably could. To be fair, when I bought it in 2012, I wanted something to last - it’s a 3.4 GHz Intel Core i7 system with 32 Gb of memory, an NVIDIA GeForce GTX video chip with lots of VRAM, plus a Fusion drive (spinning disk with a TB of SSD cache in it). It’s running xDax / xCat and wsjt-x 2.0.1. The radio is a 6600M, with the front panel handling the panadapters and slices. The iMac did not need to manage a spectrum and waterfall, but could certainly run dogParkSDR with all four slices and wsjt-x on each. I don’t need no stinkin’ Windows :-) (Please don’t flame me if you love Window and hate Macs - we all use the tools we feel comfortable with!)

Lee - N2LEE

Ted, something most people do not understand about the Mac OS is apps written for this OSX are typically smaller, more efficient and require a lot less memory. Most Windows guys look at cpu, speeds and memory and discount the Mac on that basis. But the fact is I have old macs that still run great because of the difference in the OS.

Windows is full of DLL's and bloatware at every turn. This is not the case with the OSX but again everyone thinks speeds and feeds and not OS architecture.

OSX is basically a derivative of Berkeley (BSD) Unix and Unix is and has always been a more robust and efficient OS.

So it doesn't surprise me that you are getting this kind of results.

Lee

Michael N3LI

That's been my experience Ted as well. I prefer WSJT-X on my Mac to my PC. One thing I do know, is that the next time I have an update pooch my DogPark/WSJT install on my Mac will be the first time it happens. 

Also, I run everything from the Mac when doing WSJT. My mid 2011 i5 Mac doesn't even breathe hard.

K3SF

i have 6600m running v2.4.9
and
have run 4 instances of wsjtx to decode FT8 using mac min i5
and
i used ipad pro to bring up the panafall of all 4 slices on 4 different bands
and
even have used my iphone to do the same thing...

when mario gets xdax/xcat working with SSDR V3,will be better able to use all the slices the 6600m has to offer...

Paul K3SF...avid mac user since 1984 ;-)