Hello everyone.
First of all, Rick, if you have a question for me, you could ask me directly, as you always did, or ask it via email, I would miss this branch entirely if I wasn't tipped. I do not read everything what is posted on the Forum and do not read GitHub until I'm asked to read something certain. GitHub is for programmer, but he doesn't answer anything there, he's busy programming.
At this point, I've read many speculations/demands/threats here and there about Duplex/Predistortion and that is why I want to address this. Anyone could use the following information as a reference to what is going on in this area at the moment and what are our plans for it.
1. First of all, in the referenced video I clearly state that any of these functions will be considered
ONLY after we implement all basic functionality, thus the release of ESDR3 1.0.0 final. I've mentioned the same thing many times in Telegram and other Forum posts. Here is the snippet of information I shared with Rick in early June:
"...Our main goal is to make ESDR3 identical to ESDR2 in terms of functionality, it's already way more stable and easy to develop and it's a great advantage in the future. The next step will be duplex and predistortion.
SunSDR2 QRP firmware has duplex, it was the latest firmware developed from scratch, so this indeed was prepared some time ago,
but again we'll implement it in MB1, DX and PRO after the ESDR3 is ready. This time we want to move forward step by step, gradually, with ESDR2 we jumped from one feature to another, which greatly complicated the development on later stages."
So any discussion about these features until the release of ESDR3 1.0 could be purely speculatory, or so I thought...
2. As you all know, recently we've implemented two major changes in the ESDR3 and TRX's firmware:
1. New data exchange protocol between a transceiver and PC
2. New CW-core
Both features are absolutely awesome, but require a lot of processing power and current FW/HW combination hit its limits. In the following months, we've tested different combinations of potential Duplex implementation, which led us to a similar idea we came up with 2 years ago in relation to ESDR2 - we need a completely new firmware. To be able to implement Duplex, ALC, Predistortion, and many other cool features (DHCP, ADC overload indicator, unified sample rate as in NANO/QRP, TX frequency correction, SWR log, TX time limit for DX, etc.), we require a unified firmware based on the new architecture, similar to what we have now in ESDR3.
3. We implement and work on many many different things at the same time, some may have higher priority than others at some point, it doesn't mean we forget about them. For example, I know that some users are happy with the current ESDR3 functionality and all they need is remote operation. They don't care about Duplex, Predistortion, ALC, VLC plugins, ESSB audio and other stuff, what they need is proper/reliable remote control and that's it. ERS is one of our main goals for the 2023, it means that while we work on ERS we won't be working on many other things and vice versa, I want to emphasize this.
Thanks to everyone who shares suggestions/opinions and questions with us, we do appreciate it