Same thing happens to be depending on which mode I am in. Will have to enable debug flags to see where the error is in the code..

Hi Dan,

The short answer is not without a lot of metalwork.? That would mean it is not worth it to me.??

Currently, HFSignals does not sell kits with just the case and board as they did with the V2 and DE.? That means the best bet today is to order the fully assembled sBitx.? Eventually, the demand for cases may become manageable, and they will offer them separately as they have done.?

You should be able to sell the Raspberry Pi 4b and display them as they are still in short supply.? I am not sure about the value of the DE, as only 150 or so were made.? I have a DE that I am keeping for nostalgia reasons.? I did upgrade it to handle the V3 software except for the SWR/Power sensor.? It works well with the V3 software, about the same (with a little more power output) as the V3 I have.

Above are my opinions.? Others may differ.? You decode/
73
Evan
AC9TU

Hi to all. I have a DE version. Will I be able to install a V3 board in it? Would it be worth it? Is it a good idea? I've been out of the loop for awhile so I'm way behind. Thanx.

73'
Dan KD3CEU

Dave, I’m not a real Linux guru, here are the changes that we made that turned our raspberry pi remote deployed digipeaters into years long service beasts—



gordon Kx4z?

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John, what I would be concerned about is that possibly you have +12 on the output of the mosfet switch (IRF4905) just like I had…. possibly due to a failure of the 7002 on the output of the mosfet swhich (which is what happened to me) and that is causing continuous current through your output LPF diode control resistors and inductor, and may have already burned out your input diode control inductor which might be why the resistors on the input are cool — all speculation on my part but possible

This might have been covered before but when I touch? the keyboard window on the sBitx screen, the program will close. I can not get the keyboard to come up on the screen.?
Ideas?

Okay, D27 was bad, I raised one lead and checked it and found it open. I measured the forward voltage on D28 and found it to be .204mv forward so I found another one that matched it and installed, now all is good and my SWR now shows quite accurately. Now to move on to next problem, crackly static which I have just identified, it was totally wiping out the 40 meter band while I was testing the SWR problem. I started by wiggling things to see what stopped it, when I got to the 5V buck regulator it would completely go away just by touching the module. The problem isn't mechanical, the module is actually generating the static. I seem to remember someone, (I think Evan Hand), saying there was some filter to stop this. Must search to find out.

Joel
N6ALT

This may or may not have anything to do with Gordon’s R201-R202 smoking, but I notice that at power up R203-R204 run pretty hot, even without PTT or even without starting the sBitx program. Somewhere there’s abou 500-600 ohms from the anode side of D30 to ground. There is almost a 12 volt drop across these resistors. R201-R202 run cool without any voltage drop. Is this normal?
Jack
N6LN

The only time /sbitx/data/user_settings.ini is read is when sbitx_gtk.c starts up (around line 4527). If the file isn't found, the radio starts up with some harmless default values that may or may not reflect what the radio was doing last. It doesn't seem necessary to keep the 'state' of the radio saved at all times in order to restore on startup. We should save the state of the radio when we do a normal shutdown, and then on startup we could find the radio in the state we left it.

--
Mike - kb2ml

Okay, I finally got some time to test the two diodes, D27 and D28 look fine, however D27 measures .545mv forward and .746 backwards, D28 measures .204 forward and .743 backwards. If in fact these are germanium diodes they should both measure .200mv forward not .545, so there must be the wrong diode in D27 place. That's the best i can do without removing one lead to measure them. I will look around and see if I can find a matched set of germanium diodes in my shop.

Joel
N6ALT

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On Thu, Jan 4, 2024 at 02:07 PM, Gordon Gibby wrote:

Many years back, we used the Linbpq System on raspberry pies on remote deployed digit peters. We were stunned when one of those failed at only six months. ?The SD card was done in by all of those writes. ?I quickly learned how to use a RAMdisk for the swapfile etc. and now our systems go years & years & years

RAM disk for swap file?? Maybe I'm missing something, but I thought the swap file is used when you are out of RAM so dedicating RAM for a swap file doesn't sound useful.

I have seen cases where people use RAM disk for log files, and that helps avoid excessive writes.

Since you say you have experience, maybe you can look at your sbitx board and come up with some recommendations?

I'm not using sdcard so I'm not sure my recommendations would be the correct ones.

?

We only use high endurance cards

It would also be useful to have recommendations of which cards you use.

If people have their radio go dead after a few years it’s going to have a very bad reputation. ?They will have trouble replacing it because many people don’t understand much about Linux. ?They think it’s a radio; they don’t understand it’s a computer!!! ?

I think the product web site and related internet content are pretty good at explaining what this radio is and is not.?

It's not an IC-705.? The price should be a clue that it is not.? It's not a Xiegu.? If you want a cheap closed box radio, then Xiegu might be for you.? As people say these days, do your own research.

I have 5 Heathkit radios under repair right now and a good percentage of them worked just fine even though they are almost 50 years old.?

My 80 year old mother has several fifty year old sewing machine made of cast iron.? New sewing machines aren't like that.? And don't get me started on major appliances.??

I don’t think people need to have everything memorized every half minute! ? I would suggest that you make it much less, so that the radio lasts for years and years and years, and then have some configuration that people can choose if for some short period of time they need more and understand the offsetting problems!

Maybe some day we'll be there.? For now, this is a radio for home brewers and tinkerers, just what it says on the tin.
--
Regards,
Dave, N1AI

The simplest solution I've come up with so far: Write the file to a RAM Disk. Then let a cron task copy the file from the ram disk to the SSD (if changed) every minute or so.

The file on the ram disk will be there even if the sbitx app is shut down. It will only disappear when the Pi is powered down or rebooted.

73; Steve, N3SB

Missed some updates while I was typing - yes, of course you are going to lose some data if the user shuts down between updates. So immediate writes is the only 'simple' solution. That said, the sBitx code (and probably a modification at the OS level) is required if data needs to be saved. There can be a healthy discussion how to fail-safe saving data before an intentional shutdown but the simplest (but not fail-safe) method would be to write out data whenever the sBitx app is closed.

Given that this is an open system (aka not a closed box), it's finally going to be incumbent upon users to make sure the data is saved before turning off the machine.

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Many years back, we used the Linbpq System on raspberry pies on remote deployed digit peters. We were stunned when one of those failed at only six months. ?The SD card was done in by all of those writes. ?I quickly learned how to use a RAMdisk for the swapfile etc. and now our systems go years & years & years

On Thu, Jan 4, 2024 at 10:38 AM, rdg wrote:

Is sbitx making good use of RAM disks to cache disk writes thus extending SD card life and improve performance??

To expand upon this query, I would propose: 1. Malloc some memory in the heap (or get really fancy and use a memory-mapped file). 2. Write changes to memory 3. Update the SD Card at some reasonable interval (as has been discussed in this thread)

FWIW, I'm sure there's some code floating around on Github to do exactly this...

Extra points: Determine if the SD Card is being used for main storage, or there's an attached USB/NVMe drive (used for boot, so it's not going to be detached), and bypass the memory-stored settings since speed/latency and storage 'health' would not be a factor.

Hi Gyula — no, I have never used the built-in FT eight facility. ? There are so many different aspects to our hobby, more than just FT8. ?Our local group does emergency communications, we use Wynlink, voice, data, JS8 , Federal communications with our government agencies on non-ham frequencies, and multiple other systems. ? I also do a lot of CW. ? Our group has recently participated in field day and will next to do winter field day. For those kinds of activities, we will use multiple screens and well-known systems such as N3FJP logging, which can handle three or more stations simultaneously.

there has not yet been a perfectly capable Linux version of Winlink. ?Certainly not RMS relay or TRIMODE, server systems that I run but users would not normally run. ??

I think it’s fine to have considerable functionality built right into the radio, which the xiegu systems do not have— but that is paling in comparison to the ruggedness, built-in antenna tuner and general functionality of those radios in the eyes of most of those in our club!?

?What people want first is a radio. A radio that keeps working doesn’t have glitches, you get the idea. ?All the other stuff is icing on the cake. ?We’ve been working hard on this radio and eventually it will get to that position but having mine blow up even when I was trying to build a box around it was disconcerting. ?Having unnecessary writes to the SD card is also a problem. -/ we ran into that situation with raspberry pies years ago and some of our deployed digipeaters and we quickly realized we would not have reliability until we switched to less disc writes. ?VARA Is not yet available on the Linux platform. And it probably never will be. Yet it is one of the most popular ARQ protocols right now.?

so I’m just concerned that putting a lot of your eggs in the basket of writing all of the ham radio domain of software over again onto one radio is quite a tall order.!!! ?First, I would make the hardware bulletproof!!!!! ??

what I think is great is that now I am seeing lots more people jumping in and testing things like yourself and finding problems and bringing them up and finding great solutions. I think it’s impossible for Ashhar to do “all things for all people” and I’m glad to see more people jump in

but realize that you can buy a very tiny computer, the evolve three, for cheaper than an antenna tuner and it can do an astonishing mount of things for you on a deployment!! ? So trying to rewrite everything that has already been created by really bright people, onto a new platform is quite an effort!

gordon

On Thu, Jan 4, 2024 at 01:38 PM, rdg wrote:

Is sbitx making good use of RAM disks to cache disk writes thus extending SD?card life and improve performance??

The hard part to answer is "good use".

Data in RAM disks disappear when the power goes out, and since sbitx is attached to batteries a lot, power is not necessarily reliable.

Again, what I found appears to be a coding error, the intent does seem to avoid excessive writes.

Other than that, though, given the battery situation, it might be better to write to sdcard relatively often for important data updates.

The question I was asking was about the importance of having up-to-date user settings.

--
Regards,
Dave, N1AI

I think the intent of the code was to only write 30 seconds after the last tuning update, it just wasn't coded correctly.

I'm not sure using a swap file or tmpfs will change things too much because I think the intent is to have settings to use the next time the radio starts rather than having a database for other parts of the code to access in real time.? Other parts of the code access the in-memory data not the on-disk data.

I think after fixing the coding error the logic will be okay, it's now just a matter of asking people what their expectations are about how often to write to disk vs what kind of data retention they have.? If they change the dials then shut down the radio immediately or the sbitx app crashes, any changed settings will be lost.? I guess that's not the end of the world so maybe keeping the logic set for 30 seconds is OK.

Actually that raises another point,? I don't see the code writing the settings back to disk when the app is closed, so you lose any changes you make in the 30 seconds preceding app shutdown.

--
Regards,
Dave, N1AI

I tested my V3 and found the power to read about 1 watt low and the SWR to read about 0.2 lower than an external meter.? It still follows when I go from one antenna to another and connect two dummy loads parallel to the output.? I ran a number of tests and found that the variation between bands is such that a calibration process would not be viable with the significant differences in response.

It is a good enough indicator to show when you have a problem.? It is not a tool to measure accurately.? The location and wiring of the sensors may cause this.? I will try putting a shielded wire instead of the bare wire for the primaries of the two sensors (L401 and L403).? This is the best way to construct these sensors:


It may take a few days to a week to make the change and test.

73
Evan
AC9TU