Hi Maxwell,
I'm using Direwolf (version 1.7) primarily for "connected mode" sessions and I can confirm that it does handle those very well. I only remember two instances were Direwolf failed and in both cases the most likely root cause was an underpowered laptop (weak CPU and insufficient memory) doing too many things all at once.
Your computer sounds more than adequate for the purpose unless you are doing some other compute or memory intensive work at the same time (e.g. participating in distributed computing networks that are designed to maximize the use of your resources).
Another very important (and often overlooked) aspect of packet radio is the antenna and once again what you describe for your setup is more than adequate for the purpose. The antenna sounds like a X50A or similar and being mounted up high is a good choice. Perfectionists would like a better feedline than RG-8X for that distance but I don't see this as a problem (you lose about 2dB on 2m and about 3.5dB on 440MHz).
Things to try:
- as David already suggested, try to tune the audio settings especially transmit audio which has a direct impact on the amount of FM deviation (you want to stay close to the maximum deviation allowed without having your signal clipped in the radio).
- some Chinese radios are really slow switching between Transmit and Receive. Try listening on another radio to see if you hear the remote station answering before your own radio is ready to receive it (you may have to watch the Direwolf console for that). If that is the case, there is really no fix except a different type radio. While the remote station will eventually try again, a radio that has such poor turn-over will accumulate a significant number of retries in a short period of time and eventually the remote station will just give up.
- some cheap radios are "pushing the limits" to get the maximum output power. It is worth trying if you get better results when you switch to a lower transmit power level.
73,
Thomas
KK6FPP
