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ANAN-7000DLE MKII Plus Thetis Combination

ANAN-7000DLE MKII plus Thetis

It’s time to dig into the ANAN-7000DLE MKII plus Thetis software combination. You will see a combination of open source hardware and software that works really well.

Other than being a two channel radio, ANAN has another major difference with my Flex 6300.  My ANAN relies more on the PC for signal processing – it’s what they call a “fat pipe” radio. I find the main effects of this difference is greater load on the CPU (15-20%) plus a smaller sampling bandwidth of 192,000 samples per second. This provides about 150 kHz of bandwidth display, rather than several MHz with the Flex, SDRplay and Perseus gear.

On the other hand, the ANAN-7000DLE MKII plus Thetis combination is just made for excellent diversity reception, especially with wideband loop antennas.

For starters, the ANAN has great bandpass filtering and variable attenuation before the ADC. You will find this puts an end to local broadcast interference when using a wideband loop antenna. Reception on 160 and 80 meters is now free of artifacts from strong local medium wave signals. And, if you add 10 dB of attenuation to both receivers, you can do wonderful MW DX beamforming without any ADC overload.

Overall, my ANAN’s front end architecture is similar to the Perseus, except with 16 bits of conversion rather than 14. So, you get a bit more dynamic range, even with nearly +5 dBm local broadcasters.

Thetis, the new version of PowerSDR software works with a new Ethernet protocol. Otherwise, it is very mature and well maintained software that’s been around for a long time. Interestingly, PowerSDR was originally created to power the early Flex Radio models before it went open source.

ANAN-7000DLE MKII Plus Thetis Discoveries

Thetis installs and works fine. You will find a big learning curve, though, as the software has tons of features. Also, it is highly configurable. In theory, I should be able to transfer more than 192,000 samples per second over my Gigabit Ethernet, but Thetis seems to limit me here. Not sure why.

My main discovery for diversity reception is the need to keep antenna and bandpass selection in mind for the various bands. It’s not hard to do this, but there are a lot of buttons to push as you move along. Fortunately, I am experienced with its cousin PowerSDR mRX PS which I have used with my Afedri dual channel for years.

All in all, this combination does pretty much everything for MF/HF diversity reception with multiple antennas!

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