6 Channels are here

[acarslogger]

Hi Peter

The interesting thing is that you can cursor onto SDR1, a mouse click will select it and bring the numbers on that display to bright. Equally SDR 2 - 4 are similar. However cursor on SDR 5 or 6 and SDR1 lights up!

I get the same here and have emailed Kinetic support and reported it as a bug in this latest Beta firmware/software.

Sorry - don't know if this bug would affect AIS reception.

Regards
Stuart

[stonosnr]

Thanks Stuart, it seemed a bit odd to me which is why I mentioned it. I've played with the audio mixer etc, but as I'm coupled with Ethernet, I don't believe that figures in the equation either. I had planned to write the firmware in again, but as you, and possibly others have this oddity, I'll hang on!
Thanks also to Anmer for taking the trouble to reply from his holiday location, hopefully Chris will latch on to this and deliver a verdict so that we can eliminate this glitch and try a different tack.

Cheers

Peter

I've done some interesting tests over the last hour. Maybe not completely scientific, but enough for food for thought!

Both Shiptrax and SBS-3 share the same AIS aerial through a high quality splitter and have worked like this perfectly OK for nearly 9 months. Because I run on Ethernet for both, I can easily swop over from receiver - receiver into SP and previously there was little to choose between them in my location plotting just my own reception areas.
The Shiptrax runs dual channel, I'm not sure about the SBS-3, but maybe it did when on SDR4 as performances were similar. Tonight, the range of signals plotted by the Shiptrax showed reception of about 60 miles over a period of 5 minutes. The SBS-3 plotted more or less the same vessels, but took 15 minutes to achieve the same total. Is this because it now decodes on a single frequency, or what is different running on SDR6? I have tried to run on SDR4 and got nothing, which of course is correct. I have swopped the leads around on the splitter, but the Shiptrax outperformed the SBS-3 in terms of speed exactly as previous.

The only difference apart from the IP addresses is that the Shiptrax runs on port 10110, but the SBS-3 runs on 30007. As it used to be fine, this cannot be anything to do with the sudden change.

Peter

[Chris-G0WTZ]

We are working on it and Peter you need to use channel 6 for AIS and yes it receives two channels simultaneously

Regards

[stonosnr]

Hi Chris

Would that slow the decoding / plotting rate down a bit because that's how I first twigged something was not as it was last week?

Peter

[Chris-G0WTZ]

No reason it should
Email me your issues Peter and I will try to replicate and fix it

Regards

[stonosnr]

Will do tomorrow. Getting 90 miles range on ShipTrax tonight so nothing amiss on aerial.

Peter

[stonosnr]

I have to admit being baffled by this one. The firmware was definitely build 116 and software exe file v173 according to "About BaseStation". I've had every lead out to check, swopped over connections on the CAS-900 splitter, swopped over ethernet leads, but no progress whatsoever.
There was only one thing left to try, re-flash the firmware! Nothing looked any different to last time on the screen during upload, it just stopped on completion and the screen disappeared exactly as before.
The big difference is it now works! It is now ratcheting up decodes at a similar rate to feeding PP from my Shiptrax receiver so whatever went adrift was presumably during the firmware upgrade. We still have the glitch with SDR's 5 & 6 as previously described, but these are merely cosmetic and I'm sure have no effect on the actual workings of the unit.

Thanks to all who came back

Peter

[Anmer]

Peter

Did you re-flash firmware 116?

[stonosnr]

Yes. It definitely showed firmware 116 before I started, and 116 after I'd finished, the only difference being that it worked at full speed now!
An interesting point is that I had computer problems with IE9 last week after I'd extracted a virus protector which was proving to be a pain. So the first firmware install was working within the partially broken IE9 which would not allow flows of information to say "on line banking" , social networking etc, but it did allow access to the Kinetic site to download and upload the new firmware / software versions.
IE9 could not be repaired, we are guessing an essential dll was taken out by the Kaspersky uninstall programme, so I got over that by installing Firefox. When I went to download the firmware upgrade today, Firefox offered to upload it, i.e. no messing about trying to find the firmware upload programme, it just got on with it, and it worked.
Makes you wonder if something essential was not loaded on the first attempt, but you would have thought that it wouldn't work at all if it was corrupted. Anyway, it's happy now until the next upgrade comes along!

Thanks

Peter

[Chris-G0WTZ]

Peter a new software update will be better for you if you are using all 6 channels

Regards

[stonosnr]

Hi Chris

I'm using 4 x European ACARS + 1 x AIS and they all appear to be happy. I did put the new exe. file in previously with the 1st firmware upload, do you mean a full reload of BaseStation?

Tnx

Peter

[Anmer]

I think Chris means replace the Basestation.exe with the new beta version 174.

http://radarspotting.com/forum/index.php/topic,1443.msg6459.html#msg6459

[stonosnr]

Thanks. Pat has just given me a heads up on this one as well. I'll try it out very shortly!

Thanks again

Peter

[Mature68]

Hi

I have updated my sbs3 box with 116 firmware and the 174.exe for basestation,
i have found that AIS is running slow to what it use to,i have 161.000 set up in tuner B as middle freq and
161.975 FM set up in SDR6.
I tryed AIS on 10 mins on SBS3 box and pick up  8 ships ,i then put on AIS Engine with same arieal and
pick up nearly 20 ships in 10 mins.
I have reflashed the firmware too.

Brian