Setup: Early Macbook Pro (actually the model before they changed the
name to "Pro" but no significant difference here) 13" laptop, running
Windows XP Pro SP3 as a dual boot under Boot Camp. E-mu 0202
soundcard. USB to Serial converter USBG-232MINI (From
http://www.usbgear.com
. Based on FTDI FT232BM High-Speed USB UART IC as recommended by
Larry, N8LP.) LP-Bridge 0.0.85 and Power SDR-IF Stage 0.92. Elecraft
K3.
Tricks: (1) Go to the Device Manager and click on View:Show hidden
drivers. Find and disable the driver "Apple HAL". This may require a
reboot. (This is mandatory if you want audio. This driver just about
maxes out the latency measured by the dpclat.exe utility <
http://www.thesycon.de/eng/latency_check.shtml
>.)
(2) Right click on the WiFi icon in the taskbar and disable the WiFi.
(The WiFi is not a very bad actor. It causes the audio to drop out
from time to time, but it returns if you restart PowerSDR.)
Results: After these two drivers are disabled, the audio is clear
with no dropouts and the panadapter works well at 192kHz. The CPU
usage shown by Power SDR-IF Stage is around 22%, maybe peaking to 25%
when tuning rapidly. It seems that one could also run CW Skimmer and
several other programs simultaneously with no problem, although I have
not tested this.
Caveats: I dual boot the machine. I would not advise trying this
setup with Parallels. I do not know what the function of the disabled
driver "Apple HAL" is. It means "hardware abstraction layer". I
haven't done a thorough test to see what functions are lost by
disabling it. The machine seems to continue running perfectly well
under XP, however. It would probably be best to re-enable that driver
before doing other things on the machine under XP. (But the disabled
Windows driver should have NO effect on the machine when booted into
OSX, so you could leave it disabled and use the XP boot exclusively
for your radio work, as I do.)
Note: The latest drivers for the USBG-232MINI are found at <
http://www.ftdichip.com/Drivers/VCP.htm
>. They are "CDM 2.04.16.exe" for Windows,
"FTDIUSBSerialDriver_v2_2_10.dmg" for the MacOSX, and
"ftdi_sio.tar.gz" for Linux. If you also install the OSX driver, you
can use the 232MINI to update your K3 in MacOSX using the update
utility from Elecraft.
Note: If you do not care about the audio, the two drivers above do
not need to be disabled. The panadapter works fine at 192kHz even
with them enabled.
73,
Oliver Johns
W6ODJ
______________________________________________________________
Elecraft mailing list
Home:
http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraftHelp:
http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htmPost: mailto:
[hidden email]
This list hosted by:
http://www.qsl.netPlease help support this email list:
http://www.qsl.net/donate.html
Locked
