[time-nuts] Re: SDR radios - Loran-C & WWV

[Wilko Bulte]

hello Scott,

I have an rx888 in my posession for quite a while now. Initially I used it with an older HP laptop, i5 @2.3 GHz. That worked, but only if I stayed at 16 MHz wide sampling. Going wider bandwidth made for lost samples.

Meanwhile my shack has an HP i7 @ 3 GHz, a hexacore I think. That works full bandwidth without skips.

I found that having a fast USB3 interface (as in a sensible datapath on the  mainboard, not just a blue USB connector)more important. 

So, I would stay away from the Atom boards, the i3 and probably the Xeons (are those server mainboards). Pick the i7 boards and try.

73 Wilko
PA1WBU


> On 13 Mar 2024, at 02:44, Scott Newell via time-nuts <time-nuts at lists.febo.com> wrote:
> 
> At 09:57 PM 3/6/2024, John Ackermann N8UR via time-nuts wrote:
> 
>> WWV tracking (and CHU as well) is a major experiment in the HamSci (https://hamsci.org) community, where they've built low-cost hardware to monitor multiple WWV frequencies simultaneously.  There's a major effort lined up to get data from hundreds of stations during the eclipse on April 8.
> 
> Do you happen to know if it's too late to get in on this? And if totality is required? (My QTH will only be 99.997%, but work will be in totality for 3:44. Steel building and no easy window access for an antenna, though.)
> 
> 
>> There's an ~$250 device called the RX888 that's available on eBay and Amazon that does this (no link because there are multiple providers and I can't vouch for any of them).  And Phil Karn has developed a completely new client/server based radio that uses multicast to allow many clients receiving hundreds of channels to connect to one receiver server.  Check out ka9q-radio at https://github.com/ka9q/ka9q-radio
> 
> (Sorry to pile on with the questions...) This looks very exciting, but I'm concerned I might not have any PCs fast enough. Everything I've read just mentioned recent i5/i7, which is suitably vague. Any idea if there are benchmarks for guidance as to should work/might work/won't work?
> 
> Looking through the e-waste piles, I see the following:
> 
> CPU                           Geekbench 4    5           6 (single/multicore score)
> i7-4790 CPU @ 3.60GHz         4802/16033     1073/3967   1377/4374
> i5-6500 CPU @ 3.20GHz         4238/12841     910/3187
> Xeon E5-1620 v2 @ 3.70GHz     4079/14979     901/3750    765/2822
> Xeon E3-1240 V2 @ 3.40GHz     4257/14133     913/3550    773/2707
> Xeon X5650  @ 2.67GHz         2618/12433     541/3243    524/2317
> i7-2920XM CPU @ 2.50GHz       3734/11556     792/2926    670/2207
> i7-5500U CPU @ 2.40GHz        3929/7399      837/1781    1096/2123
> i5-4200U CPU @ 1.60GHz        3368/5944      701/1423    914/1781
> i3-5005U CPU @ 2.00GHz        2687/5176      538/1222    709/1495
> Atom x6425E @ 2.00GHz         2753/6585      687/1673    548/1272
> Atom E3950 @ 1.60GHz          1426/4401      311/1129    264/835
> 
> How to know if any would be suitable?
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> 
> --
> newell  N5TNL
> _______________________________________________
> time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts at lists.febo.com
> To unsubscribe send an email to time-nuts-leave at lists.febo.com