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Home→ANAN-200D→Documentation, lack of

Documentation, lack of

Posted on by December 31, 2016

Over and over again, I get so frustrated with PowerSDR. Frustrated with its lack of documentation in the face of its necessary complexity. Frequently I recall that some setting exists, and then have difficulty finding it. A couple of times I’ve given up, figuring I’ll stumble upon it later. I’m tempted to say that the various Setup options are not organized well; there are certainly a lot of tabs, and subtabs, and various and different arrangements of controls on each “form” (that’s what PowerSDR calls its UI dialog boxes that appear in Setup). But there are so very many options, and many can be thought of in connection with one operation aspect and some other aspect also. I’m not sure I could do any better organizing the setup tabs, subtabs, and forms. There are some obvious areas for improvement, though. Here are two that come to mind.

  • The General tab has 11 subtabs, more than any other tab. So many, in fact, that only 10 of them can fit on the subtab row. Way over on the right of the subtab row is a small, easily-missed, pair of left-right arrows for revealing either the left-most or right-most subtab. Until I learned this trap, countless times I was looking for something and couldn’t find it because it was on the Hardware Config subtab. And the subtab row was scrolled to the right, rendering the Hardware Config subtab invisible. In a cruel twist, the position of this subtab row is remembered, even if one closes and reopens Setup or even if one switches to another tab and back to the General tab. And, by the way, the main Setup window cannot be widened to expose all 11 subtabs simultaneously.
  • The main PowerSDR UI has a menu bar at its top. I have been tripped up several times trying to find something in Setup when it’s been on the menu. Like the equalizer settings. I think these should be in Setup, but I can see how some could think they belong on the menu. They’re likely to be tweaked at least occasionally, more often than setup items which should be the set-and-forget type. But what about the “XVTRs” menu item? This is where one enters settings to set up PowerSDR’s flexible transverter interfaces. This clearly belongs in Setup. Maybe it’s on the menu because its form is way too big to fit in the Setup window. Well, make the Setup window resizeable. (And of course make the window remember its sizing across sessions.)

 

The problems caused by the large number of setup options and the various difficulties finding a particular one could be solved by the presence of a setting index — a now-novel concept that used to be present in books (remember those?) and would be a great help here.

I can understand that I’m coming at PowerSDR all at once, after years of development by volunteer developers. I understand that PowerSDR is necessarily very complicated, since one of its goals is to exploit all the capabilities of the SDR hardware. PowerSDR’s complexity probably grew over its years of development as features were added. I am very grateful to the developers for the awesome performance and options present in PowerSDR. (I have just touched on some of this awesomeness in my posts so far; more awesomeness is coming in future posts.) It’s just too bad about the documentation. I think Apache Labs, which is profiting from the sale of very expensive hardware, should step up and hire a good technical writer to produce and maintain good documentation. But in the meantime, I’ll do what I can to help: Here is a list, with links, of all the useful documentation I’ve found that has helped me learn my ANAN-200D SDR and the PowerSDR software. I’ve ordered the list, more or less, from basic and general to advanced and complicated.

 

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