SliceMaster and radio slowdown

Mike-VA3MW

Hi All

I have been chasing a problem that I think SliceMaster is contributing to. This has shown in in v3 and up to v4.1.3 of SSDR.

The symptom are that your Network health drops from green to yellow, even on a local LAN. Next, if you have Genius devices, you see them loosing network connections to the radio and you see them trying to reconnect every 4 seconds. You can see this in SmartSDR PC (not sure if MAC shows this).

Next, the radio can seem a bit lethargic when you are tuning around.

I had Hayley dialed into my radio one night while we got to the root cause of the problem. We never really did, but one thing I did notice was that I had no transmit focus and I was using SliceMaster. We could not find anything out of place in the actual radio.

Once I terminated SliceMaster the symptoms went away.

I only mention this in case you see something similar and terminating SliceMaster resolves it.

Mike va3mw

Chris WX7V

@Mike-VA3MW I’ve confirmed the same behavior since last summer and raised a few issues in Don’s github project. From my testing, anytime the radio becomes sluggish, I see the network latency in the radio spike 100x or more from normal levels - ie, normally 10-50ms, RTT becomes 1000ms - 5000ms, making the radio unusable.

Terminating and restarting slicemaster returns the radio behaviour to normal. I’ve tried digging thru logs and and not exactly sure what causes it. Were you able to find anyway to work around this? Restarting SliceMaster works but its a pain to do if you’re in the middle of a CW QSO or working a station during a contest.

73, Chris de WX7V