DATV-Express Project - December update report

[KenW6HHC]

Charles G4GUO is trying to get his LimeSDR TX/RX board running correctly. After resolving the earlier Windows driver issues…he has the LimeSDR “sort of” running. He inadvertently had loaded a tool needed by GNUradio that is statically-linked, not dynamically-linked. Now he can not seem to remove the statically-linked tool?? Not much customer support from LimeSDR project yet for early adopters. LimeSDR is currently expecting to begin shipping production units of their board in early January.

Charles G4GUO is now officially taking a rest from DATV-Express project for a few months. Can you believe that he has been working constantly on the DATV-Express project since he first sent an e-mail to the TAPR organization (digital communications group) in July of 2010 asking if there was any interest in designing a “low-cost SDR-based DATV transmitter”.

December turned out to be a bit of “chaos” for the project’s Manufacturing/Testing manager, Art WA8RMC. The team had found enough interest from hams to build another lot with 50 boards…officially we had standby-orders for 42 boards. The 50 assembled boards were delivered for testing in mid-December…BUT…

• • Initially none of the boards would work. There were two values of capacitors that had been interchanged on the board. They were all fixed within a couple of days.
  • Then we ran into a second unexpected testing problem on 16 boards. The problem turned out to be the modulator chip was soldered in with a rotation of 90 degrees. These 16 boards should be repaired by the first week in January.
  • We have ENOUGH good boards to send to everyone on our standby list a good board, if they order NOW.
  • New hams (NOT on the standby list) have discovered that PayPal is working again to order boards and are paying for new boards. The project team does NOT want to ship these orders from new hams until more non-working boards are fixed.

Ken W6HHC has sent out e-mails to everyone on the official “stand-by orders list” asking them to help the project team by following through on PayPal ordering their reservation by January 10. This will help Art sort out his chaos. Ken reported that in the last week of December (since PayPal became active again), the project team had received additional new orders for 10 additional boards from seven different countries. It seems the DATV-Express board has really become a world-class product!

Ken W6HHC had enough time to install his MiniTiouner USB-based receiver/analyzer board for DVB-S protocol on Windows10.


The MiniTiouner design by F6DZP is an excellent analyzer and receiver for DVB-S.
Shown in analyzer-mode (AKA “Expert” mode).


The MiniTiouner shown in receiver-mode for DVB-S. The toolbar at bottom can also be removed.

Two of the most important advantages of the MiniTiouner (currently v0.4c software) design are:

• • The MiniTiouner is a ham-radio analyzer tool for DVB-S. As Jean-Pierre F6DZP clearly explains: “On commercial receivers the DATV video is either good or missing…perhaps only with a signal strength reading to guide you. With MiniTiouner, Digital transmissions are not really ‘all or nothing’, in between there are many things that can happen; it's important to be able to observe and define the various stages.”
  • The only DATV receiver around that can receive RB-DATV (Reduced Bandwidth) signals with SymbolRates less than 500 kSymbols/sec

The MiniTiouner receiver will now allow Ken to test RB-DATV transmissions signals being produced by the DATV-Express board and software.
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"Project speed set to chaos" ...de Ken W6HHC

[KenW6HHC]

The DATV-Express project team has now run out of boards again. We never expected that so many people would try to order boards, so soon. As of today, Art WA8RMC has shipped out all 48 working boards. These include shipping boards to all of the PayPal orders that had been received from those “on the standby list” by the January 10 ordering deadline. There are only two boards remaining after failing the hot/cold heat cycling tests that Art performs on all production boards….we will probably reserve those as spare boards.

We are pleased to say we have already started to purchase blanks and component parts in order to build up another production DATV-Express boards.

We are sorry to announce that the PayPal ordering button HAS BEEN REMOVED from the www.DATV-Express.com web site. We will again allow ordering by PayPal after this next production build has been assembled and tested.

“Project speed set to Working Hard for more production”…de Ken W6HHC