http://www.telepostinc.com/LP-PAN.htmlFor anyone considering N8LP's LP-PAN, here are a few observations using a beta unit:
LP-PAN works very well on the K3, but you must be careful in choosing a sound card. So far, the best results seem to be with the M-Audio Audiophile 2496 and E-MU 0202. The former only goes to 96 kHz sample rate (or spectrum bandwidth) but uses PCI which is most efficient (for slow computers like my 1.1 GHz P3 with 1GB). The E-MU will go to 192 kHz but requires USB 2.0 which is inefficient for older machines. If you have a 3 GHz Pentium 4, you're good to go with an E-MU. Both of these cards are available on eBay for ~$100 shipped. I also tried the M-Audio Delta 44, which has a very good reputation and was the primary card for the SDR-1000, but found it had a spur at 0 Hz which was very annoying for PowerSDR-IF, CW Skimmer and Winrad applications.
I mainly operate on 160m where 48 kHz is usually sufficient for the CW band. In a contest 96 kHz would be useful but I cannot see where 192 kHz would be necessary for CW (except possibly 10m at the sunspot cycle peak). I'm inclined to stick with my old computer system until as I learn LP-PAN and the various software programs. Here are the CPU loading results I've observed with my 1.1GHz P3 1GB CPU and Audiophile 2496 card:
HRD/PowerSDR/48 kHz: ~60% CPU (with Firefox, AVG open)
HRD/PowerSDR/96 kHz: ~75%
Winrad/48 kHz: ~75%
Winrad/96 kHz: ~85%
CW Skimmer/48 kHz: ~45% uncrowded band (20 decoders active)
CW Skimmer/48 kHz: >100% crowded band (>100 decoders active)
Conclusion: PowerSDR and Winrad work well on my slow computer but Skimmer will need more CPU horsepower for contests.
You can learn more about the software below:
PowerSDR-IF (free):
http://www.wu2x.com/sdr.html#powersdr (requires HRD...also free)
Winrad (free):
http://www.winrad.org/winrad/CW Skimmer ($75 after 30 day trial):
http://www.dxatlas.com/CwSkimmer/Larry will be at Dayton and is getting close to production shipments. I have no connection with him other than being a satisfiend customer for both LP-PAN and the LP-100.
http://www.telepostinc.com/LP-PAN.html73, Bill W4ZV
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