SmartSDR on Windows 11 Surface Studio Laptop

swirsky

Just installed SmartSDR for the first time on a brand-new Windows 11 Surface Studio Laptop (32 GB Ram, NVIDIA graphics). There's was no other software running on this machine other than what Microsoft provided out-of-the-box.

A few things I ran into that I thought I'd post to help others:

1. SmartCAT and SmartDAX did not install. There was an error, and if I clicked though the error a help page appeared that advised me to turn off "Core Isolation". Unfortunately, that was not possible on this machine. The option can't be changed.

I uninstalled SmartSDR and reinstalled without SmartCAT and SmartDAX. (These drivers load on my Windows 10 machine).

2. The Panafall display did not update. It didn't move at all even though the rest of the app was functional. I fixed that by changing the option in System->Windows->Graphics from "Let Windows Decide" to NVidia GEForce (see screenshot).

Jim KJ3P

Welcome to our world...that is, installing SmartSDR on a new Microsoft Win11 laptop. Same issue on my new Surface laptop 3. Evidently it's the DAX driver (at least) that needs rewriting, and I've been told by Flex that it's on their to-do list, and there's not much we can do about it in the meantime. I don't think it affects Win 11 installations on some other machines...not sure. Maybe Flex has an update for us.

For me, it only affects third-party programs (WSJTX, FLDIGI, etc.), but I only use the laptop for remote operation, and it works OK for SSB and CWX. But I sure wish I could use WSJTX...

--jim KJ3P

swirsky

I got DAX and CAT to install following the instructions here (https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/forum/all/how-to-enable-vt-x-on-surface-book-3/b9057c59-eb8a-4221-85c4-90a3d44edd55) from Frank Battaglia. This is for a Surface Book 3, on Windows 10, but it's the same procedure for the Microsoft Surface Studio on Windows 11.

After changing these settings, I was able to install DAX and CAT and they worked. (Please be careful and back up first before trying this.)

However, after disabling "Virtualization Based Security" and "HyperVisorEnforcedCodeIntegrity" on Windows 11 on this Surface Book 3, other software I needed would not work -- like Microsoft's WSL.

So I backed out these changes, and went back to using an older Windows 10 laptop for running SmartSDR with DAX and CAT.

It's disappointing that FlexRadio's product won't run on the latest version of Windows on Microsoft's flagship machine. You would think this configuration would be priority #1 for FlexRadio's software team.

Ted S

The internal IrisXE GPU on many of the newer Intel CPUs requires the very latest intel graphics drivers to work with SSDR, or you will get the frozen panafall display. When you forced the app to use the NVIDA GPU you probably worked around the bug, but the latest drivers also fixes this problem. There is a long thread regarding this linked below. You will need to see if you have a CPU with the IrisXE internal GPU.

You can use task manager to see which app is using which GPU to confirm if SSDR was using the internal Intel GPU or the external NVIDIA GPU. There is a tab in task manager that shows the tasks each GPU is executing.

No Waterfall & Pan Display but everything else OK on brand new HP Win10 LT - Page 2 — FlexRadio Community

Michael N3LI

Looks like another Windows OS change train wreck. My SmartSDR for MacOS has worked through several updates and an OS change. I wonder what the difference is? For my own outlook, it is not the fault of Flex Radio Systems. Lots of stuff is getting broken. 🤔

The latest update on W11 and W10 has nuked my VPN, Which makes a real pain to administer our remote site . I think that things constantly breaking is just part of the Microsoft ecosystem.