BATC Forum

Picture and sound from DL6YEA using VLC.

Hi Martin

The QO-100 beacon has a timing problem at the moment, so the picture on MPlayer is jerky. Neither of the other players (VLC or omxPlayer) have ever been able to decode the beacon video; it is something to do with the data structure produced by the beacon encoder.

I have reported the beacon timing problem to AMSAT-DL; the behaviour that you are seeing on the Portsdown is exactly what I would expect.

Thanks

Dave

Martin, Dave,
I can confirm I can get sometimes a very jerky image on MPlayer and audio the the others.
I was able to decode signals at 333 and 250 (h.264 and h.265) with VLC and OMXPlayer only.

Claudio

I have just released a "Development" build that has a greatly improved set of graphics for the Portsdown on the Raspberry Pi 4 Langstone. It looks a lot more like the traditional Portsdown and should be easier to use. Although I have spent the last 3 days working on it and testing it, there are probably still bugs, so that is why I have classed it as "Development" for now. Please report bugs here.

To upgrade, go to Menu 3, Check for Update, and make sure that you are on the latest version. If not, you do need to update to the latest production version. Once you have dioone that, the "Dev Update" button wil appear. Select that, confirm and sit back and cross your fingers.

Preview of what to expect below.

Thanks to Phil M0DNY for developing the fonts package and to Colin G4EML for prompting me to get on with it!

Dave, G8GKQ

Just done the update Dave,

Looks excellent, definitely a worthwhile improvement!

I have a Lime Mini, Pluto, Minitiouner and RTL-SDR dongle so can plod through as many facilities as you think it's worth testing. Are there functions which are known not to be working or any tests you think may be particularly useful?

73, Martin - G4FKK

Hi Martin

Pleased that it worked for you. As for testing - just play with it and try to make it do what's useful for you. I'm particularly interested in logic faults in the menus, or any captions that are misplaced or could be improved.

Thanks

Dave

So far the menus seem to work well and I see you've got rid of the screen refresh between key presses when entering data.

I'm not sure if Ugly is supposed to be working yet but, for what it's worth, I found this...

Switched from Langstone to Portsdown
Selected Preset 4 - 437-Ugly - Source TestCard
Went into transmit ok and showed testcard on 7" screen
Stopped transmit
Started transmit again. This time no picture - TX button red.
Pressed TX again - button went back to blue.
Switched to Langstone
Pi crashed and needed a power cycle.

Tried the same again but with Source = PiScreen
Same result.

Apologies if you've already said somewhere that Ugly doesn't yet work.

LongMynd seems to work well as mentioned before. I was getting some proper hifi music and a hi-def test card from an Italian station about 15 minutes ago.

73, Martin - G4FKK

Couldn't resist just updated (even less data left now till the 2nd ) and looking great, will play later and let you know. Well done Dave and thanks for all your hard work

All best John

P.s yes please for tonight and I'll monitor AW

Hi Martin

I had meant to delete the "Portsdown" [filter-modulator board] and "Ugly" Output buttons as neither of these will work due to design changes in the Raspberry Pi 4. Very experimental on transmit at the moment (Lime or DATV Express (?) only).

I do not intend to do any work on the "Portsdown" [filter-modulator board] and "Ugly" modes. These are well supported by the Raspberry Pi 3 and Portsdown Buster 2020.

Dave

Hi Dave
The new buttons / text look great.
Testing today to see what was functional.
Could not get IPTS monitor working. Is this on the known issue list?
tried it on PORTSDOWN 2020 to check it worked there.

Many thanks to you and Phil for the latest update.

Terry