Friday, September 27, 2013

v0.16.4 lookin' good

0.16.4 was released this week and seems to demonstrate that Flex are nicely closing on their goal of a solid V1 in a few days.

Aside from simple UI bugs, there were clearly a few important issues with the prior builds.  One of the most obvious for me had been the ineffectiveness of the noise DSP features.  With 0.16.4 these seem to be functioning as I'd expect in terms of actually having the expected effect.

The radio is a pleasure to use and really seems to pull signals off the air.  Once V1 has dropped, I shall attempt to perform an A-B comparison with the IC-7800.  That will also be the time for another test session with Adam Farson.

SmartSDR is very easy to use, if still a little vanilla in terms of features and convenience options.  For instance, the obvious dragging of a receiver slice to tune it has no snapping feature.  So you typically have to drag then twiddle the scroll wheel on the mouse a little (which does have a snap) to get the 'whole number' frequency that the transmitting station is invariably using.

Of course, we're not getting a number of fairly 'basic' radio features until January, with a completion of the originally specified feature set delivered through the balance of 2014 - but Flex appear to be doing the Right Thing - consolidating the core functionality to an acceptably high quality before building out new features.




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