Time for the first run of my new diversity receiver, the ANAN-7000DLE MKII. A few hiccups as I swung into action.
I always get butterflies with the first run of a new piece of gear. You can read specs as much as you want, but the actual first run is the big test. After all the preparation, it was time to push the big button and see what happened.
Nothing. My Thetis software, the flavor of OpenHPSDR designed for the new ANAN radios, could not find the radio on the LAN. I had downloaded and installed Thetis Version 2.6.9 from front page of the Apache Labs web site. So, I went looking on GitHub to see if I could find an updated version. And there it was, Version 2.8.11 released a year ago.
Install. Push the button. Success! My new diversity receiver is running and sound great. Take a look for yourself.
In this two-minute video, I have the ANAN-7000DLE MKII running in diversity mode with my two loop antennas. My main test is always the 25 meter band which is covered by RFI from my neighbor’s poorly installed halogen kitchen lights. The west loop is closest to the noise and on Receiver 2. The east loop is another 100′ away from source on Receiver 1. As you can see and hear, diversity combining of two antennas makes the interference all but disappear. A 15-20 dB SNR improvement.
Also included is a demonstration of the two noise reduction algorithms. I find the NR2 spectral subtraction particularly effective.
ANAN-7000DLE MKII as New Diversity Receiver
I got this ham radio transceiver mainly to use as a new diversity receiver. Of all the brand names, only ANAN provides real I/Q baseband diversity combining with a pair of 16 bit analog-to-digital converters.
Now, my ANAN costs ten times as much as my SDRplay RSPduo? Does it offer ten times the performance on HF diversity. Probably not. You can decide for yourself. But it does offer superior performance at a price. Plus, it is also a fully fledged ham transceiver.
Was I unhappy with my Flex 6300? Not really. In single channel mode they are comparable. But with two coherent channels, the ANAN-7000DLE MKII provides amazing beamforming and noise reduction. I will post more videos in the months ahead.
Greetings from the Cotswolds, England John. I am curious whether you asked your neighbor about fixing his halogen lights! Back home on Friday. Talk soon- Jeff K
Hi John,
I have been following this with interest and I must say the video says it all! Nice work and super demonstration, really helps me understand more and appreciate diversity reception with RFI issues.
I have tried to use/test a QRM Eliminator with limited success but have just finished a RF AMP kit to add to the auxiliary antenna hopefully for a more effective performance. Noise in our area in Airdrie is half I of what I experienced in Calgary. Likely to come to an end soon as they are developing a new housing community next to us which was once a farm land.
I am thinking whats he going to do next? Maybe some kinda halogen light zapper ha-ha.