DATV-Express Project – February update report

[KenW6HHC]

The initial sales of DATV-Express boards have gone well…and rather smoothly. The initial production batch of 24 boards are all gone. Art WA8RMC ordered the assembly of another batch of 50 production boards, and they came in during the last week of February. Art is currently testing each of these new boards. Boards can be ordered from the PURCHASE link on the web site.

Charles G4GUO made a number of tweaks and clean-up of little bugs in releasing v2.01 of the software during February. The v2.01 software is available on the DATV-Express.com web site under the DOWNLOADs link. Details of the actual changes are described in the README document, also located on the DOWNLOADs page.

Ken W6HHC made use of feedback from early owners of the DATV-Express board to improve and add missing details to the User Guide. Draft33 of the User Guide now contains 44 pages and can also be downloaded from the web site. It is satisfying to see that there were a number of first-time linux/ubuntu users with the early board owners…and they have made their way through successful installation of the software and have their board running. The only area of difficulties has been with the old Hauppauge model PVR-150 PCI-based video-capture board. G4EWJ and G7OCD of the DigiLite team had explained on the BATC Forum and CAT2012 that the video bandwidth design of the PVR-150 was less than that of the model PVR-350. The PCR-150 resulted in somewhat poor colors, until it was configured to use the S-Video stream with the DATV-Express software (instead of the expected composite-video stream). The DATV-Express project team has been using mainly the Hauppauge model HVR-1900 USB2-based unit for PAL cameras, and the HVR-1950 for NTSC. If you can’t obtain a USB2-based Hauppauge unit, then the PVR-350 and PVR-500 seem to be better choices than PVR-150.

Charles G4GUO has now turned his software attention to porting more of the DVB-S functions into the board FPGA code to allow the DATV-Express board to be run by a Raspberry-Pi processor board. (Warning – the Raspberry-Pi effort is a much bigger effort than one or two months.) Finally, if you have questions about capabilities of the board and software or are having questions setting up or using a board, please contact our support team by using support@DATV-Express.com

“full speed ahead”…de Ken W6HHC