It's all about the Software

Hi Simon,

I just received my RX-888 and tried to use it with latest SDRConsole. As a result, audio is always stuttering and RAM usage is constantly adding up to 20G (!) within a short period of time and thus stopping the complete system, which is an i5-1035G4 CPU with 16GB RAM. The same computer using RX-888 @30MS with HDSDR works without any problems. See appended screenshot.

Is there a memory leak?

73

Eckhard

Try it at 32 MHz bandwidth, attach a screenshot.

As you don't have a GPU reduce the FFT: Ribbon Bar, View, Waterfall, Resolution, Reduced.

Tried before and now again. Stuttering audio, whatever I reduce or what buffer I set to maximum. RAM counting up ...

73 Eckhard

I need to know about your computer: https://www.sdr-radio.com/computer#ComputerDescription

Please enable Statistics in the waterfall, your CPU is very high, I can only assume due to FFT: Ribbon Bar, View, Waterfall Extra, Statistics.

Here it is ...

73 Eckhard

Hi,

I don't understand where the CPU is being used. Please show me the Performance window (example below) with a waterfall speed of 40 lines / second.

Ok, that made me wonder ... I stopped Windows search, than still synchronisation of offline files is running but this seems to be ok. Now, I can run the RX-888 at full bandwidth and all is fine. Also, the RAM is arround 1.8GB, not sure if it increases anymore, I'll let it run a while and watch it. So, it seems that other processes did occupy too much CPU load and that caused the problems.
However, the RAM eating was a real problem. I had to stop Console before passing the 20GB limit, because this stopped the whole system. That's strange.

Thank you very much for your support!

73 Eckhard

Another observation: I set the waterfall resolution back to default, stuttering is back and RAM eating also. There seems to be a correlation between CPU overload by waterfall FFT, stuttering and RAM eating.

73 Eckhard

Your big problem is FFT - you really need a GPU to offload such a wide bandwidth, failing that you must used reduced resolution.

At ~8 or 4MHz bandwidth you should see a big difference in CPU load.

See my RX-666 notes: https://www.sdr-radio.com/rx-666

I know ... thank you very much for helping!

73 Eckhard