Panadapter & waterfall settings

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w-u-2-o
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Panadapter & waterfall settings

Postby w-u-2-o » Sun Aug 13, 2017 1:30 pm

Right out of the box, you will find that the settings for the panadapter, waterfall and panafall displays look pretty terrible. Also, the metering is quite slow and unresponsive. Here are some suggested settings that will get you smooth and highly responsive displays and metering. It will also optimize the display dynamic range.

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As you can see, the main display rate has been increased to 60 frames per second, and the waterfall update rate made a matching 16mS (1/60). The multimeter settings have also been made faster across the board, Pandapter averaging has been set to 30mS. In addition, the Fast Fourier Transform bin width has been set to 2.930Hz, and the windowing set to Hann, although the default windowing is completely fine.

In the Spectrum Grid settings set the Min Level to put the Displayed Average Noise Level (DANL) on the panadapter near the bottom of the display. This will typically be a number around -130dBm, depending on band conditions, your antenna, etc. Once that is done, then set Max Level to -40dBm and a step size of 2. With those settings all signals from the noise floor up to S9+30 will fit on the display (actually, for SSB signals, it's more like S9+40 due to the disparity between FFT bin width and receive passband). Note that these two numbers must be set separately for each band. So you must switch to each band, tune up, and set these settings over again, once per band.

With all that done, the final step is to turn on averaging in the main user interface (turn on the AVG button) in order to make these display settings work well. If you find that your PC is not up to the challenge of a 60Hz panadapter update rate, simply make that setting, and the corresponding waterfall update rate setting, slower. Nearly all PCs can handle 30Hz with no difficulty, and that is still a very fast and smooth display.

Finally, adjust the panadapter and waterfall scaling factors differently for transmit. Adjust the scaling factors in Setup > Display > TX. I recommend 20 max, -70 min and a step size of 2. This will get you good dynamic range during TX, and any IMD products below -70 simply won't be seen by anyone else on the planet unless you are rocking an S9+40 signal.

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AB2EZ
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Re: Panadapter & waterfall settings (and why your waterfall looks terrible on TX)

Postby AB2EZ » Sun Aug 13, 2017 3:51 pm

If you prefer to have the waterfall produce useful information when transmitting:

In the settings=>display=> RX1 window...

Set the "high" level of the waterfall to +20dBm.

This will provide a useful waterfall on transmit... at the expense of a pretty much useless waterfall on receive. However, in the digital modes that I use... the appropriate receive waterfall is provided in a separate window by the digital mode application.

I find that having the transmit waterfall set this way is particularly useful when using digital modes... when the waterfall display will show you if there are "glitches" in the digital audio signal being provided to the transmitter... which will appear as brief "glitches" in the transmit waterfall display.

Stu
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Tony EI7BMB
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Re: Panadapter & waterfall settings (and why your waterfall looks terrible on TX)

Postby Tony EI7BMB » Wed Sep 06, 2017 11:52 am

Great info guys thanks . I have made the changes and now have a much better looking display
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w-u-2-o
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Re: Panadapter & waterfall settings

Postby w-u-2-o » Fri Feb 16, 2018 8:41 pm

Split off the discussion of transmit power levels in the panadapter into its own topic. Please follow this link:

https://apache-labs.com/community/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=2729
46flatlander
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Re: Panadapter & waterfall settings

Postby 46flatlander » Sat Feb 23, 2019 2:41 pm

Scott,Thank you very much for your settings which you kindly posted. Thanks to your examples I like my panadapter a lot better,large
learning curve coming from Flex-6500! Jack
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w-u-2-o
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Re: Panadapter & waterfall settings

Postby w-u-2-o » Sat Feb 23, 2019 7:48 pm

:)
K9RX
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Re: Panadapter & waterfall settings

Postby K9RX » Fri Apr 26, 2019 2:27 pm

just a quick note re personal settings:
-I find that a FPS of 30 shows no real difference visually compared to 60... and would rather not use up CPU time for what seems to be no real advantage...
-I don't use the waterfall to 'decode' anything so I find a slower setting is more useful - I use it to see past signal presence - and thus have the time set to 430mS. This gives me I believe 3 minutes of on screen indication. This shows even a quick blip on CW and has the longer time span as well.
-I see you created a separate thread for the TX settings so I'll respond there as well - but since you mentioned it here I find that a top setting of +10 is better than 20 ... setting it to 20 wastes space at the top that will never be filled as it seems it's always referenced to 0 (assuming PS/feedback is in place) and using a value of 10 means that the top of the signal is at the top grid line shown and is 0 dbm (there's more 'space' above this that it can go in to - but adjusted as such it will not). Also there is a bug (fixed in Thetis?) in the TX display STEP size - it displays twice the value selected. I'd prefer a displayed increment of 5 ... but can't get it so I set it to 5 which gives a display of every 10 db.

Gary
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dieseldawg
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Re: Panadapter & waterfall settings

Postby dieseldawg » Mon Oct 21, 2019 1:35 pm

How to get both waterfall and panadapter to display as a spit screen? Choosing from the main window dropdown only will display one or the other.

Greg
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w-u-2-o
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Re: Panadapter & waterfall settings

Postby w-u-2-o » Mon Oct 21, 2019 1:38 pm

dieseldawg wrote:How to get both waterfall and panadapter to display as a spit screen? Choosing from the main window dropdown only will display one or the other.

Greg
Select "Panafall".
dieseldawg
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Re: Panadapter & waterfall settings

Postby dieseldawg » Mon Oct 21, 2019 2:27 pm

In Thetis D3 selecting 'panafall' brings up only the panafall, panadapter disappears, In my install at least. Didn't expect this to be a Thetis issue, so I posted here.

Greg
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Re: Panadapter & waterfall settings

Postby NC3Z » Mon Oct 21, 2019 2:42 pm

Greg, can you do a screen capture to show what mean? Here is my D3:

Capture.PNG
Capture.PNG (502.08 KiB) Viewed 43632 times
Gary NC3Z
dieseldawg
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Re: Panadapter & waterfall settings

Postby dieseldawg » Mon Oct 21, 2019 2:56 pm

Scott, I reinstalled D3 and now it is working OK. But berfore, the entire area was waterfall with no Panadapter. Can't get it back now. Wiil post if it happens again.

Tnx Scott

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