Need help Eliminating Occasional Windows PC Audio "shuttering"

Steve_AJ6TL

I’m a new flex user and I enjoy the radio very much. However, I’m experiencing occasional drop-outs (shuttering) in my audio I can’t eliminate completely. I connect to the radio via wireless LAN, the only practical way for me, which was a problem initially, but I don’t believe this is the problem anymore; while running Windows Task Manager, I noticed many drop-outs coincided with spikes in Wireless Activity and/or CPU usage. So, I created a standalone Wireless Network (5GHz) for the radio (which is located in close proximity, and the flex 6600 and my PC are the only devices connected), and the WAN port of this network is connected to my shared home network (at a fixed IP address) I use for ISP access only. I also turned off as many background Windows applications I could. After doing that, latency is 2-3 ms typically (which is better than before, 5-7ms) and WiFi signal quality is excellent. But still the problem occurs, albeit much less frequently. Next I tried changing HW audio sources (I tried the built-in PC speakers, wired headphone, and pre-5.0 bluetooth headphones). Bluetooth is “maybe” slightly worse, hard to tell, but irregardless all have the problem. Sometimes these dropouts occurs when I move the mouse (especially after long periods of inactivity) or open a window, but not always. Another point to mention is under the Smart SDR network diagnostics the “network dropped packets” rate is very low (2 out of 6784000 packets, as an example).

Recently I installed SDC skimmer (I did this after conducting the above experiments) and noticed something that seems to suggest the problem maybe a Windows Sound problem, or perhaps related to audio drivers I have installed. The reason I believe this is because whenever these drop-outs occur, as far as I can tell, it doesn’t seem to affect CW decoding on the skimmer (which is using the IQ stream, not audio). This is one area I need help, PC Audio is an aspect of the system I’m not familiar with.

I’m hoping someone can tell me what else can I try to narrow down the problem and fix it. Or at the very lease, improve audio performance (or CPU priority) to minimize this as much as possible.

Here’s what I have for hardware:

Radio = Flex 6600 HW ver 3.8.23.35640 installed
PC= Lenovo IdeaPad 5 w/ 12 GB RAM 12th generation i7 Intel Processor (~ 2 years old)
OS=Windows 10
Audio = factory installed Realtek® Audio

Thanks

Steve AJ6TL

KD0RC

Hi Steve, Even if you can't normally use a wired connection, I would suggest trying it temporarily to see if it fixes the problem. This will help you to determine if it is actually the wireless or not. If it still happens, try plugging your computer directly into the radio (link local). This will tell you if it is your computer or the network. To connect link local, you will need to restart the radio and the computer so that they are both on the 169.254.x.x segment (i.e. no DHCP from your router).

Steve_AJ6TL

Hi Len, It will be a few days before I can revisit this problem. I'll test your idea, but first I want to see what happens if I disconnect the WAN port with my existing setup. If disconnecting the WAN port works, I can focus on getting internet access to my PC another way. Bluetooth tether to my phone is one way (not ideal); I prefer another way, I need to investigate. If your experiment works, and the router is to blame, can you suggest a wireless router known to work?

Steve_AJ6TL

UPDATE

I think I solved my problem (time will tell).

First, I noticed I posted my question in the “SmartSDR CAT” discussion subfolder. I’m hoping a moderator can move it to something more appropriate.

Here are my findings:

1) Disconnecting the WAN port had no effect.
2) A direct wired local connection also did not help.

Going back to my original suspicion, my issue may be Windows related, I did the following:

Under “Adjust the Performance of Windows”:
3) I changed "Visual Effects” to Performance.
4) I changed the processor priority from “Applications” to “Background Processes”.

Under Power Management:
I changed it from “Balanced” to “Performance” (Which I had to enable it as an the option).

So far, this is working well.

At the moment, I’m slowly restoring the Visual Effects options I disabled, beginning with “smooth edges of screen fonts” (which is nice to have).

-Steve