[Elecraft] LP-PAN Panadaptor Beta Results

[Bill W4ZV]

http://www.telepostinc.com/LP-PAN.html

For 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.html

73,  Bill  W4ZV







  
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