I thought I would try out a UHD monitor for my Radios PC. It works fine, but with a few quirks and tweaks required.

For my years, I have used my Radios PC with a pair of 22-24″ full HD monitors, 1920 by 1080 pixels. My dual monitor setup is pretty typical. It allows lots of different windows to be open at once. Typically, I do work like programming on the left monitor, and run radio software on the right.

But since my new Bosgame Mini-PC supports 4K displays, I wondered what it would be like to have even more desktop space available.

I managed to pick up a used 32″ Samsung U32J590 monitor to give this a try. Running my Radios PC as a single monitor with the UHD display of 3840 by 2160 pixels is very interesting. Above, you can see me running three SDR applications at once. These are Thetis with ANAN 7000 upper left, SDR Console with Perseus upper right, and SDRconnect with RSPduo lower left.

All of these are doing diversity reception, either directly or using my NCC-1 with my loop array. Incidentally, my new mini-pc works so well that CPU load barely hits 10% with all three running at once.

Graphics are fine, but the print on the controls is a bit small. Typically, people using a 32″ UHD monitor will set Windows to do scaling of 125% or 150% to improve readability from a distance of 2-3 feet.

UHD Monitor for My Radios PC – Back to Dual Mode

So, is it possible to do dual monitors of different resolutions, e.g. FHD on one side and UHD on the other? Yes, definitely, but with some quirks. Without scaling, things get confused when you try to move an application between monitors with different pixels per inch. Some software just isn’t designed to handle this kind of change dynamically, and kind of blows up.

With scaling on the UHD monitor, I can get some improvement, although this reduces the available display space.

Also, adding a 32″ monitor will probably require you to rearrange your operating position to accommodate the larger size. A bonus for me is that the new Samsung monitor with HDMI is RFI silent.