How I set up Contour Design's Shuttle Express to manipulate the Expert SDR 2 software with my SunSDR2Pro.
Main steps:
1) Install drivers and control software of the Contour device.
2) Decide what you really want to use this controller for, and how it should work. Play a bit with the device while not connected, try to imagine you are actually operating. What are the buttons would you use most frequently? Which VFO or which RX should the jog dial tune? What would you like the outer shuttle ring for?
3) Go to the Expert SDR software, then Options/Shortcuts. This is where you need to create keyboard shortcuts for the functions that you will later assign to the buttons and dials on your Contour device. Test that the keyboard shortcuts actually work the way you want it to work. (I found and actually reported a bug that VFO tuning on RX2 cannot be assigned a shortcut, so I on RX2 I canot tune the VFO, I can only move the frequency which is not that nice. I hope it will be fixed in the next update.)
4) Go to the Control Panel menu of the Shuttle Express software. There is a dropdown menu there, with pre-defined settings for a number of software, mainly video editing software. There also is a "Global settings" set, which is used mainly withing Windows itself, for example the jog dial is used like the mouse wheel, so you can scroll in the bowser, etc.
Press the OPTIONS buttons and from there you can create setings for a new program. (Create new settings). Once there, you have to select the program that you want to control wth the device, in our case, navigate to the folder where Expert SDR 2 is installed and choose its exe.
5) From here on the thing is quite intuitive I believe, you have select the button or dial knob you want to define, choose whether you want to assign a keyboard shortcut, a mouse action etc, tell it what it really is etc.
6) The trickiest to set is the jog, but especially the shuttle ring. The shuttle for example has 7 positions in each direction, and not only can you assign actions to the positions but also set what the ring should do when you are in transition between two positions, further, you can set what it does between positions when you are moving up or when you are moving down.... You can also set for each position whether you emulate one keypress or multiple, and if it is multiple, how fast it has to repeat it....
Experiment with this. What I did here is the further I pull the shuttle ring, the more quickly it will send the VFO A down/up keyboard shortcut, so in effect, if I turn it fully left, it will tune very fast, if I just move it slightly, it will just tune slowly. I have tried to make it even better by assigning shortcuts to half positions backward and upward which set the tuning steps up and down. It did work, but I wasn't 100% happy with the result, but I believe you can experiment with it a bit.
7) Don't forget to save your settings each time you change something, do it both in the ExpertSDR profile and in the Contour Device's control panel.
8) The software of Shuttle Express automatically recognises the program that has the focus, and if i is ExpertSDR, it will apply this profile automatically
9) You can have several sets of settings for the same software. I have for example set up shortcuts for both RX1 and RX2, shortcut sets for VFO A = VFO B, but you might want to have profiles based on the type of operation (contest, pileup handling, etc...) The interesting thing is that you can nominate a button on the Shuttle Express to change these profiles in rotation. I have for example assigned the middle button to swap between tuning VFO A and VFO B for example.
The above is by no means a manual, but I hope it takes you closer to setting it up yourself.
Good luck, and I will be curious how others have set it up, what buttons you use, etc.
In my setting, the leftmost and rightmost buttons zoom in and out, the jog tunes the VFO in fine steps, he outer ring move frequency in a coarse way, the middle button swaps profile to another one where the difference is whether the jog/shuttle manipulate VFO A or VFO B and the remaing two change filter width.
