Is anyone having better luck with ESC with v4.2.18?

Hi Keith and Phil,

Keith, I posted on this a few days ago. I've never been able to get ESC to do anything either. But I finally found a couple of signals where it clearly made some difference. It was consistent and repeatable so there's that - at least it is doing something now. I bought a TimeWave ANC-4 several years ago which is specifically designed to handle the noise cancellation case and found it extremely sensitive to choice of antenna and noise types. I spent some time trying to rig up suitable noise antennas and finally ended up with two versions that I switch between. But truth be told, I rarely get noise at my QTH that it makes any difference on. Other's report cases where it makes a big difference though. Point being it's hard to assess how well ESC is working without a lot of experimenting with antennas and checking out a lot of noise sources. Note that it isn't enough for both antennas to be hearing the noise, the signal antenna needs to have significantly greater signal (to noise) than the noise antenna for it to work.

That said, as Len states, Flex is saying they're still working on ESC. They have a delay between the two ESC channels that impacts its performance so at best, it's not working correctly yet. And there's this too:

Phil, I'm not able to reproduce the issue you describe with either DIV or ESC here for what it's worth. But there's definitely something pretty **** up with ESC creating a howling sound in TX but I'm seeing it pop right back to RX after TX. I'd suggest starting a ticket on that ? DIV works just fine here, however. I've been using it for years.

Flex says while they've made a lot of progress with ESC, they're still working on it so hopefully they'll nail it in the next rev !

GL Russ KR6W

Yes I did open issues and defect numbers have been assigned to them. There are several things I think going here. In my case it had to do with CW mode and QSK and during a fairly long QSO the problem occurs, try sending CW with QSK for 5 to 10 minutes.

It appears to me as an old programmer that they are probably in the process of rewriting SMARTSDR at the same time having to resolve the security related issues of DAX and other code. Not being able to have storage protection active as with the old DAX violates most corporate and Department of Defense requirements, that appears to be out of the way and now other things can be addressed.

I did use DIV ESC on SSB and it did provide some tuning using the phase control and made a noticeable change. Maybe I'll try it on FT8 but who knows if it works for that.

Phil