Installation, continued

The purpose of this short write-up is to warn you of a couple of ‘gotchya’ moments you will inevitably face during initial installation.

Here is the key point: your radio will not start on initial power up. Plugging in LAN cable to router, powering up ON button and starting the software won’t make it happen: SunSDR2DX is not a Flex.

1. Connect the SunSDR2DX directly to pc via LAN cable (not to router!).

2. From Expert Electronics website, download pdf file “Setting up SunSDR for dummies” by Pete MM0TWX. Follow the instructions.

3. Basically, you would be going to Ethernet connection settings to assign an IP address.

4. Go to Windows firewall and allow ExpertSDR communication on both private and public network.

5 Start the ExpertSDR2 Sun software. Go to OPTIONS->DEVICE. Click DISCOVER then USE. The IP address will be different than one you’ve set in step 3 but that’s ok.

6. That’s it. Restart all, turn the radio on and it will come to life. If it doesn’t, repeat steps 1-5.

Receiving, antenna selection, tuning:

The RF box has 3 antenna inputs 1, 2 and 3. The input 1 is reserved for 2m band. Default HF antenna is 2. Tune to FT8 segment on 20m or 15m band and you should be able to see and hear plenty of signals on the waterfall. No signals? Check the antenna selector.

Spend some time learning how to tune around the band, play with various mode settings, window resizing, zooming in, filtering, really, just listening to voice and Morse signals. No transmitting!

Getting straight into FT8!

It took me less than 30 minutes to make my first FT8 contact. That included downloading LOG4OM and JTDX.

There are a number of videos which explain the setup process in detail, however I recommend one created by Darren, N4VFR titled “SunSDR DX setup for FT8 – how to setup JTDX and LOG4OM”.

The instruction video is straight forward and intuitive. The only ‘what the hell’ moment: while the signals were clearly visible on the waterfall, initially, they failed to decode. The culprit: PC clock widely out of sync! Download Dimension4 and let it run in the background. Easy!

Small curiosity: my SunSDR2DX actually pushes 117W on 10m. But there is absolutely no reason to exceed 50W on FT8, especially if you have a decent antenna.

Next instalment: SunSDR2DX vs. FLEX6000 neck to neck decoding digi signals.