New Installation - Looking for advice

[wake]

I have been working with PDW for years with 2-level slicers off of serial ports to decode POCSAG and had excellent success. I am now trying to convert to new computer hardware, implementing  multiple instances of PDW.  I have one instance connected via a serial port to a 2 level slicer.  It is working well.  I have another instance connected via USB to one of the RS232/Slicer circuit boards obtained from Rene (Rene did the assembly and testing).  I have not had any success using the new interface so I am looking for some advice on how to figure out what is wrong.

• I am using a Windows XP box with 4 CPUs running at 2.8GHz
• I see "Prolific USB-toSerial Comm Port (COM4)" in the device manager, so I think I have the USB to serial driver installed correctly
• I have tried two different receivers (using disc tap), both of which are successfully driving the "slicer" instance of PDW giving reliable decode of POCSAG 512
• I have the PDW interface set to Serial, COM4/Pocsag and RS232
• both of the dip switches on the RS232/Slicer board are set to off
• The options are set to "Enable Pocsag Decoding" and 512
• I am not getting any decode, but the little signal strength meter is wiggling slightly
• I shutdown PDW and started hyperterm on COM4 at 19200 (8-None-1).  While no page is active, I get a steady stream of garbage. When a page is active, the stream of garbage characters does not appreciably change on the screen although the LED on the RS232 board does light up more brightly.  If I disconnect the disc tap from the board, the stream of characters changes to what seems to be all spaces.

Does anyone have any ideas about how I might go about further debugging the problem?

[VidarParry]

Hi,
One thing - Do you have separate PCs for each PDW stream?  I believe that only one instance of PDW can run on a PC at a time.
Cheers
...Steve

[Discriminator]

One thing - Do you have separate PCs for each PDW stream?  I believe that only one instance of PDW can run on a PC at a time.

No, not really. With the USB enabled interface, a user reported 11 concurrent instances.

Will dig into this shortly.

-Rene

[wake]

OK, this is going to sound strange.... I left it alone for a while and it started working.  Well, not exactly.  About 30 minutes after I last started up PDW, it started working.  That is when I changed power supplies from a 5VDC supply to a 9VDC supply.  I am going to guess that the 5 volt supply has noise on it.  So I think things are working now.

[Discriminator]

That is when I changed power supplies from a 5VDC supply to a 9VDC supply.  I am going to guess that the 5 volt supply has noise on it.  So I think things are working now.

Great! Please also check the manual - 'Power Supply: 8 – 15 Volt'. 5 V is not sufficient.

[VidarParry]

One thing - Do you have separate PCs for each PDW stream?  I believe that only one instance of PDW can run on a PC at a time.

No, not really. With the USB enabled interface, a user reported 11 concurrent instances.

Will dig into this shortly.

-Rene

Hi Rene,
This might need to be a new thread, but can you confirm that you can have, say, 4 instances of PDW on a single PC with 4x USB interfaces each on different frequencies and baud rates?

Any minimum spec for CPU speed, RAM etc to ensure no data loss due to resource conflict?

Cheers
...Steve