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