So the Anan 7000DLE that I was working on before gained a new host computer. No problem – it just needs to be configured to run correctly. This time round, the owner had specifically requested VoiceMeeter Banana as an audio bridge – this isn’t a bad choice, as it’s a full virtual mixer, but it needed a little bit of thinking about to get set up correctly. The process to set everything up this time was much less difficult, and in fact I’d go so far as to say was fairly painless!
First the system got a full reinstall with a fresh copy of Windows 10 Pro. The machine had a digital licence for this, so it was all fairly painless and easy. The drivers were all installed automagically (I did fetch a couple manually due to old habits, though), and the system got the latest 1909 upgrade etc. A painless start! Then all the standard applications were installed (as few as possible – mostly just Chrome for web browsing, and a few other little helper applications. Then it came to the radio applications necessary to get everything set up.
I couldn’t remember whether the radio was previously configured for a static IP address or not, so I grabbed a copy of HPSDRBootLoader (the Anan 7000DLE needs Bootloader rather than Programmer), hooked it up, booted the radio in Bootloader mode (with the switch on the bottom that’s not normally documented, but we previously labelled up properly!), and read the IP address. It was indeed a static, so I re-wrote it as 0.0.0.0 in order to get the rig to talk DHCP nicely. I then powered the rig off, flicked the switch back to ‘normal’ mode, and continued.
PowerSDR mRX is the preferred flavour for controlling the Anan 7000DLE – Apache Labs go so far as to link it from their webpage even. When you first run it, it sits there for a long time doing calibrations and so on, but then starts up and works once you tell it where to find the radio, and what the radio is. In the case of the Anan 7000DLE, all you do is tell it that it’s an Ethernet device, and the software (assuming it all works correctly) goes out and finds the radio on its own. You’ll see an IP under “ANAN Address” at the bottom right, a version, a MAC address, and an ID, and this tells you it’s all working properly.
Before you can configure VAC or CAT you need to install a couple of extra applications – for VAC we opted to use VoiceMeeter Banana, and for CAT we use VSPE. I’ll go through configuring each one separately for the way I did them, though it’s not necessarily the way everyone else would choose to do so.
When you open VoiceMeeter Banana, the first thing you need to do is set a hardware output device for A1 – at the top right corner of the screen you’ll see three buttons labelled A1, A2 and A3 just above the big picture of a tape. I set A1 to be the Realtek HD Audio output, but you can pick whatever you like that suits your individual system setup. Banana won’t work without this being configured, so it’s got to be a starting point. I then set two of the hardware inputs to match the software for another radio, but that’s not strictly relevant for what’s going on here. The key thing was making sure that virtual input 1 (the column labelled “Voicemeeter VAIO”) has the “B1” button ticked, to route its audio out of the VoiceMeeter primary virtual audio output, so that it acts as a cable passthrough correctly. I strongly recommend disabling all the other routing (clicking the A1, A2, A3, B2 buttons on that vertical “channel” so they aren’t lit up), which stops the audio being duplicated to other devices that you might not want it to be sent to.
Once you’ve configured this bit, go into PowerSDR’s setup, head to the “Audio” tab and the “VAC1″ sub-tab. Tick ‘Enable VAC 1”, then choose a driver. I chose Windows DirectSound, and set the input to “VoiceMeeter Output”, and the output to “VoiceMeeter Input”. This is the correct way around (even though it sounds backwards) because the output from the mixer needs to go to the rig input, and the input from the mixer is fed from the rig output. You should choose the same settings in WSJT-X, JTDX or whichever other software you wish to feed the audio into.
Now we come to setting up CAT. This is a bit more fun, as I wanted to be able to have multiple apps reading/writing CAT simultaneously, so I used a slightly more complex setup than is strictly necessary for one-rig-one-app use. Here’s how I did it though. I started by grabbing VSPE (which is free, but they like you to pay for the 64 bit version). It works fine, if you can tolerate the nag screen each time it opens up though. In VSPE I added the following devices:
COM6 (Connector – creates a virtual serial port that can be opened by precisely two applications)
COM5 (Splitter – takes a ‘real’ serial port (in this case COM6) as its source, and splits it to multiple applications as COM5)
I then went back to PowerSDR’s setup, and the “CAT Control” menu. I didn’t bother with CAT+ (which allows extra virtual serial ports too), as VSPE is handling that for this setup. You could do it that way if you wanted to though. To set it up, I first chose COM6 in the “Port” dropdown under “CAT Control”, and set the baud rate to 4800, which is the standard baud rate for a TS2000 (that’s what the rig emulates in PowerSDR by default). I then ticked “Enable CAT” which allowed me to select a PTT port (in this case I also chose CAT – you can choose either CAT or a serial port for RTS/DTR triggering), and hit OK. This saved the CAT config on the radio side, to talk to the Connector port configured above. In the apps which need to talk CAT to the rig, you need to select COM5 throughout, as COM6 won’t accept any further connections from other apps due to the second side being taken by itself.
So that’s it – the easy route to setting up an Anan 7000DLE with PowerSDR mRX, VoiceMeeter Banana, VSPE, WSJT-X, JTDX, and any other logging software or similar that you want to use (just tell them all to talk to COM5 the same way WSJT-X and JTDX are configured).
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