I may not be able to make the meeting tonight. If I can then we will discuss in person, but just in case here is my progress report.
I have the blinky board in Canada. I discussed it with the customs officials at the airport and no duties needed to be paid because it is not my property and they did not consider it a commercial device. So that was good.
The board comes up fine and I can flash new software. The transmitter appears to work fine in the lab. I can decode 1200 bps AFSK and 9600bps GMSK packets at my ground station. Good job Bob and Burns getting this all working.
I can start all 4 receivers and each seems to pull the right chip select line as measured at the debug connector Bob put on the board. When I transmit a packet or an FM carrier I can see the RSSI change like this:
RSSI-0: -123 dBm RSSI-1: -135 dBm RSSI-2: -81 dBm RSSI-3: -77 dBm
Where RSSI-0 is from Ax device 0 or RX 1 or what Bob calls the chip in position 2. So Devices 2 and 3 or the chips in positions 0 and 3 receive a signal. The other two do not.
It is worth noting that the values above do not really change if we switch the antennae from differential to single ended. I set all the receivers up with the antenna configurations that Bob specified, but saw no increase in RSSI, which seems odd. I would have to compare to the launchpad to see if it is the same. I rrecall that the tx fails if the antenna is wrong.
I will also note that the test routine to transmit on the receive frequency produces no output for any of the receivers. But maybe that no longer works.
With that said, I can receive a packet. Here is the first one through: AX5043 Message 10
Interrupt while in FULL_RX mode
RX Bytes: 28:ac 8a 64 a8 86 a0 f6 ac 8a 64 a8 86 a0 61 3 bd 10 f4 0 1a 57 d3 65 RX- UI: VE2TCP>VE2TCP-11 Cmd pid:bd pf:0 |len:12| 10 f4 0 1a 57 d3 65 ff ff ff
But it does not seem to be very sensitive or reliable. Only very occasional packets are decoded. So something is not setup correctly.
For the launchpad I get RSSi of -50dBm in the lab with my ground station radio set to min power and a dummy load. I think that is 500mW on the FT-817. If I increase the power then packets do no decode because of distortion. On blinky the RSSI is -77dBm. So that needs investigation.
Anyway, much more to do here but there is progress. I have pushed the changes to setup all of the receivers to main.
73 Chris