Anyone else having issues connecting with SmartSDR?

Mitch

Suddenly, I'm getting an error message when trying to connect to SmartSDR.

SmartSDR shows my station and shows I'm logged in, but refuses to connect.

Are there any issues with the service?

KD0RC

Hi Mitch, are you trying to log in on your LAN, or are you trying to log in over the internet using SmartLink?

There is no service involved if connecting over your LAN.

Mitch

Trying to log in over the internet using SmartLink.

KD0RC

Ah, OK. Here are some videos that might help. If these don't get you what you need, I would submit a helpdesk ticket. Flex support has resolved a lot of networking issues.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmkejJWIQpc&t=8s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfvm056YRes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMbi3dAiMi0&t=153s

Tony Garland N7DX

Hi Len,

I'm a friend of Mitch's and often connect to his station using SmartSDR.

I've been connecting about once a week (for CWT) for many months with no problem. We operated M/2 last weekend using SmartSDR (I was remote) and worked flawlessly. No so this evening. Between Sunday and today, something has changed.

Thanks for posting the video--I watched it to see what else it might mention. The one thing mentioned there that I'm not sure Mitch tried tonight was rebooting the router/gateway. Last I knew uPNP was enabled on it and has been for many months. So that's probably something to try--and should have maybe been first on the agenda along with rebooting the radio (which we did). I'm not certain Mitch hasn't rebooted the router, but I don't recall him mentioning it--so maybe need to give that a try.

I do know that when he pressed the [Test] button he got a red (failed) result.

Thanks for reaching out to help.

Tony Garland N7DX

A bit more: after resetting the router, nothing has changed. Still not working. And it did have uPNP enabled. Mitch had SmartSDR working fine earlier today and now it's not working for either of us to connect via SmartLink. Is there a way to verify that the SmartLink server (through which the two connect) is working fine? Like a status page?

KD0RC

Hi Tony, I don't know of a status page. The SmartLink server has gone down in the past, but it is pretty rare. If it goes down, there is usually a flood of posts here, so I doubt that is the problem.

You mentioned rebooting the radio. Have you also tried doing a factory reset? If not, export the profiles and do a factory reset. I don't hold out much hope for the reset working, but you never know...

If that doesn't work, I would submit a help desk ticket.

Tony Garland N7DX

Hi Len,

One of our issues is that we haven’t had full access to the router in order to verify whether UPnP is (still) enabled—or to see what may have changed in its configuration. We are going to try and rectify that situation before we go further with a trouble ticket. (Tough to investigate further anyway without that visibility.)

KD0RC

Ah, understood. Best of luck getting it resolved.

Tony Garland N7DX

Just to close the loop: we wound up replacing the router with a new one -- which we had full access to -- and after configuring UPnP things began working again. Able to connect using SmartSDR from off-site.

Having said that, we are now struggling with another issue where we have strange issues when running two slices. SmartSDR seems to show the slices and their frequencies as expected, but there is something amiss in that both slice 1 and slice 2 on the SmartSDR end act like they are both controlling slice 1 on the radio.

In one situation, the radio stopped working and had to be rebooted (and even factory reset since it wouldn't boot up anymore). In another situation it turned itself off on its own and the local op had to power cycle it to get it going again.

Works just fine with a single slice. Unable to get basics to work with two slices via SmartSDR (was aiming toward SO2R, but can't even get basic TX/RX working and switching between ant1/ant1 with SO2R_TX1 profile on slice 1 vs ant2/ant2 with SO2R_TX2 profile on slice 2 to work).

This is all without N1MM or SmartCAT involved. Just SmartSDR remote over cloud into Flex 6600M.

Tony Garland N7DX

Correction: when I said it required factory reboot because it "wouldn't boot anymore" that is not strictly correct. It would boot, but as soon as the local op attempted to open a slice, it would go south --blink a red light. To get past that, the reset was required--at which point all appeared to return to normal. (I may have some of the details amiss as I am always remote so can't see exactly what transpires local to the radio.)

KD0RC

Hi Tony, that sounds very strange... I can't think of anything that would cause that issue. It is probably time to submit a help desk ticket.

Mike-VA3MW

In the video I talk about checking the entries in the uPNP tables in your router.

Check the manual for your router and post the what you see here in the chat. This will allow us to confirm if the tables are correct and that they are pointing to the IP address of the radio.

If you can post these 2 screen shots, it will tell the entire story rather than just guessing.

The Dark screens are from my station to give you an idea of what we need to see.

Tony Garland N7DX

Hi Mike,

Thanks for the images.

I don't believe uPNP is an issue for us any longer--at first it was because we didn't have login credentials on the earlier router. But we replaced the router and now we do. So all that is set up fine and working.

And everything works perfectly so long as I am only using a single slice. Once I follow the instructions (https://edge.flexradio.com/www/uploads/20200818185011/SO2R-Mode-with-N1MM-for-the-FLEX-6700-How-to-Guide.pdf) to set up two slices to attempt SO2R, that's when we start seeing strange behavior--which I could only describe as "cross-talk" between slices.

It's as if slice A and slice B, defined and controlled by SmartSDR, are not corresponding properly with slice A and slice B on the radio itself. In particular, moving transmit focus from slice A to slice B on the SmartSDR end caused slice A on the radio to change frequency and didn't seem to affect slice B. There were some other funnies too -- slice A on the SmartSDR end appeared to get disconnected from its antenna when switching to slice B on SmartSDR. (The two slices were configured as A/ant1-ant1/SO2R_TX1 and B/ant2-ant2/SO2R_TX2.)

I may be getting some of the subtleties wrong since I'm only ever at the remote end talking to Mitch who is local to the radio :-) And, as I mentioned above, we've had the radio turn off by itself once--after switching to slice B and transmitting. In another instance, it wouldn't resume normal operation (could not create a new slice after reboot) until we went through the factory reset procedure documented in the manual.

I've recently uninstalled and reinstalled SmartSDR (Windows) just as a precautionary step. I'm running SmartSDR in Parallel VM on a MAC. Haven't seen any other issues in over a year of running remote almost weekly with a single slice.

I suppose another experiment would be to get the Mac version of SmartSDR and avoid using a VM.

We are going to investigate a bit more later this week and see what else we may be able to determine.

Mike-VA3MW

Can you do a video of this please.

Uninstalled and reinstalling doesn't really fix anything, at least in a SmartSDR Configuration.

It would help if you can take some time to write this up, in a step by step outline that others can follow to attempt recreate what you are seeing. This can be time consuming exercise.