What could be causing slice and rx panel out of sync

Lionel · August 2020

Powered 6400 first thing this morning and it came up fine and on 40m profile as it was left yesterday on power down. Prior to power down yesterday I did a reset to factory defaults. I selected my 80m profile this morning and this is the result, Slice A and B out of sync with the RX panel. Slice A and B will not tune with the mouse wheel, mouse click, or flex control. RX panel tunes with the mouse wheel and flex control. Audio from 6400 is CW from the 40m band.

By manually entering 3850 (any frequency would work) slices and RX panel instantly synced, HOWEVER, audio remained CW from 40 meters. Click tuned to 3855 or so and CW audio stopped and 80m RX SSB is now normal.

I've been seeing this intermittently for what seems like several months but frequency of occurence is increasing.

Short 4' Ethernet cable from the computer to 6400 direct is always working at < 1 ms latency. No other data errors seen.

6400 Slice and RX Panel tracking.JPG

This has been intermittent but seems to be heading for chronic. See the attached screen shot JPEG with notes.

Tim - W4TME · August 2020

@Lionel FYI: I am moving your post from the FLEX-6000 category to the SmartSDR for Windows category to give it higher visibility and since the radio hardware is not controlling the slice with your mouse. It's the software running on it.

Lionel · August 2020

Thank you.

BTW: The new site is great.

Lionel · August 2020

I hesitate to report this since it has never affected any use of my 6400. These oddities seem to follow me around. It is curious and reminds me of chasing a squeak in my truck, it affects nothing but I just have to find it.

This morning the RX panel did not match active slice frequency. This is the power up for the day.

PS on overnight, 6400 off

Boot up 6400, solid green

Start SSDR

...............Active slice and RX panel show same frequency

Select another profile (brings up slice A and B on single band, TX profile, mode CW)

............Slice A and B move to selected profile band

............RX panel frequency does not follow - it remains on the previous frequency.

Select another profile

............RX panel now shows the same frequency as the selected profile band.

This behavior is repeatable on the first start up of the day. Once the 6400 and SSDR are running, the RX panel follows except for intermittent RX panel frequency not matching active slice frequency.

My theory involves communication between the 6400 and SSDR on startup. Evidently, some hardware is not setup on startup and does not follow the first profile or band select leaving the RX panel and active slice with different frequencies. Perhaps this is specific to my windows setup (19041.450); perhaps computer Ethernet hardware. At this point I have no reason to suspect the 6400 hardware.

Has anyone seen this kind of behavior, intermittent or repeatable?

Unless something disabling occurs I'll leave it at this. Consider it information, not a problem.

Lionel · August 2020

Further info.

I have both slices on 75m, now I see that the RX panel is showing 7.033.56. Also, I'd expect the front end filters to be inline. However,

Slice A 3.925 SSB active/TX

Slice B 3,850 SSB

Changing the slice A frequency using the mouse wheel, or the flex control and the inline filter drop out and WIDE shows on screen.

At this point the 6400 has been running for well over an hour. I have shutdown/restarted the 6400 and SSDR once over this time.

This has to be SSDR and the 6400 out of sync for some reason. Network on SSDR shows Excellent, latency < 1ms.

Ok! Now same set up as above except that I moved the mouse and my rx (voice) audio dropped out (noise floor remained). I could move the audio slider and when I did the audio volume came up, but still no SSB audio. Clicking on the desired frequency returned the audio to normal - note - the RX panel is still showing 40m with active slice on 75. But inline filters are in. Slight move of mouse wheel and they drop out and wide appears, and SSB audio drops out (rx noise floor remains).

Once slices and rx panel match all of the above anomalies disappear.

Now I'm going to ignore it, though theories are welcomed.

Mike-VA3MW · August 2020

Lionel

It is not impossible that your radio may need a full reset. I would recommend exporting your profiles to your PC for safe keeping and then doing a radio reset. See if that clears the issue.

There also could be data loss (I guess) between the radio and the PC. This packet loss sort of describes what you are seeing in your last post. I can see this sort of thing when I run remote and I start to saturate my uplink maximum speed.

The 3rd thought is your PC could be just very busy, either cpu bound or i/o bound. And, just to make a more confusing, a bad hard drive could be in a repair mode (and, there is no way to tell) and this can slow down the entire PC.

If you had another PC to test with, that would be a good data point.

Mike

What could be causing slice and rx panel out of sync

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