Strange effects of dragging the panafall

Matt NQ6N · April 2018

I have noticed that when scrolling/dragging the panafall horizontally when zoomed out there are sometimes sudden changes in the amplitude of the pan adapter section. At first I thought it was the receiver switching the BPFs in and out, but upon further experimentation it does not seem to be occurring in a predictable way, and there appears to be some distortion on the high amplitude noise.

I have recorded a video (including audio) of the phenomenon. If you watch for a few seconds as I scroll back and forth the issue occurs, and then goes away after I drag again.

Video is below:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/tqgrcpzv07rewsg/strange_panafall.mp4?dl=0

Is this the intended behavior? What is going on? There are no changes on my end except for dragging the screen with my mouse. The slice remains on the same frequency throughout with the same passband width, etc.

I'm wondering if I'm missing something, if this is due to operating the rig remotely, or if it could be some kind of bug. It's a 6600 connected via SoftEther, 29ms RTT typical, all bars green.

Advice much appreciated.

Matt NQ6N

Wayne · April 2018

Might it be related to the fps setting?

Bob N7ZO · April 2018

I see your preamp setting jumping to +8 and +16db. (Upper right of screen near the WIDE indicator) Don't know why though.

Matt NQ6N · April 2018

Bob -- Interesting. I had not noticed that. I know that I have set different preamp settings for different bands, so not sure why it would be getting changed to one of those "band" settings when in wide band mode, but there may be some logic to the behavior. Thanks for pointing it out. I will investigate further.

Bob N7ZO · April 2018

I also noticed that your bars are sometimes dropping to yellow while you are panning. May or may not be related.

For reference, I have never seen this behavior with my 6700. I mostly operate locally but have occasionally operated through some poor remote connections.

Matt NQ6N · April 2018

Good catch. I hadn't noticed that either. My rig has the behavior where rapidly toggling the TX focus on a slice while remote results in network quality degradation. It appears that scrolling the panafall may cause this too but I will test this more carefully to verify that the degradation correlates with the dragging gesture and isn't happening randomly.

Eric-KE5DTO · April 2018

Matt,

I haven't ever seen behavior like this before. As someone else mentioned, it may be the preamp switching inline as the Panadapter scrolls through different bands and restores the settings last used (likely calculated from the center of the Panadapter). Does this happen if you connect on the LAN (no SoftEther)?

Matt NQ6N · April 2018

Eric -- I tested again, this time using Smartlink instead of softether. I also turned off the preamp when it was on. Here's another video. It still changes the amplitude of the signals, though only if a slice is active. When it's just the waterfall display then dragging does not cause the amplitude change.

I have a PC connected to the LAN which I will test with later today. This issue (if it is one) is not causing me any problems, I would ideally like to understand what is going on and verify that my hardware is working properly, etc.

Here is video 2:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/1hgnj8upj4f2kkm/strange_dragging2.mp4?dl=0

73,
Matt NQ6N

Eric-KE5DTO · April 2018

Something I noticed in this video is that the limits of the display is part of what is causing the display difference (see right edge when it changes from a peak of 0 dBm to -92 dBm). This combined with differences in the FPS and Averaging settings seem to explain most of the change to me. I'm not sure why it wouldn't happen if you close the Slice. This may just be the way that we determine which band the Panadapter is in.

Strange effects of dragging the panafall

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