Software news and reporting bugs
Work is continuing towards our year end plan to release SDRconnect (the multiplatform version of SDRuno formerly known as SDRuno V2.0 )
In parallel we are releasing the features promised in SDRuno V1.42 of our Roadmap where you can see details of what has been released and what is yet to come.
Reporting Bugs and social media
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Facebook and other online forums can be incredibly useful tools for disseminating information. Many people are able to get valuable help and information that can make hobbies such as ham radio and radio listening so enjoyable for so many people. We are grateful to all those members of the community who tirelessly help others with their expertise.
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However, these same forums can also be a significant source of misinformation which can confuse and frustrate.
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Whenever we put out a new release of SDRuno, we always see a substantial spike in people reporting problems and ‘bugs’ which they associate with the new release. This is completely understandable, but the problem occurs when people imply that the ‘bug’ that they perceive is an actual verified fact.
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In the overwhelming majority of cases, these reports whilst well intentioned are erroneous and the stated ‘bugs’ simply do not exist. In almost all cases, the problem relates to simple user error, a misunderstanding or a problem with the individual’s hardware or system setup.
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Since the first release of 1.42-0720, we have only been able to verify two new bugs. The first was a problem with memory panel scanning on the slave tuner for the RSPduo, which we fixed in 1.42-0728. The second problem appears to be a Unicode problem associated to non-English Locales. This is quite subtle and we have only had three reports so far. The problem manifests itself as an access violation upon exit which is in fact related to saving information to the SDRuno.ini file.
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In all other cases, new ‘bugs’ reported to us have not been bugs at all.
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So far, there have been around 13,000 installations of 1.42-0728, so the notion that it is in some way “unstable” does not appear to be bourn out in practice.
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As a company, we take bugs very seriously and genuinely try very hard to thoroughly test software before releasing it. We need to know about problems that we have not been able to find in testing, but we also want to avoid a situation where we spend considerable amounts of time trying to validate ‘bugs’ that turn out to be no such thing.
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If anyone finds what they believe to be a problem associated with our software we urge them to use the following procedure BEFORE reporting their issue on Facebook or other social media as if it were a verified fact:
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1. Check the release notes. Is the issue listed as a known bug? If not, does the problem seem to relate to any of the listed changes?
2. If the answer to 1 is no in both cases, please check your own setup and settings carefully.
3. If you still believe that there a problem, PLEASE contact SDRplay. If you can find a repeatable sequence of steps that triggers the problem, send an email to feedback@sdrplay.com
4. If you are still not certain as to whether what you are seeing is a bug or not, please open up a support ticket via the Help sectin of our website and we will work with you to try to understand the issue. Please always give a detailed description of the problem and illustrate with screen shots if at all possible.
5. Once we have verified that your issue is indeed a bug, please feel free to post as widely as you want!
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What we are keen to avoid is the ‘wall of noise’ that can drown out the facts and cause considerable confusion. We also want to get good clear information so that we can understand and fix problems. We do NOT sit monitoring forums looking for bug reports. When we see such reports, it is usually just as a result of casual browsing.
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The next release of SDRuno will add custom band framing. That is all that is planned for this release and that is currently in testing. We don’t meddle with stable code for the fun of it, so if your sensitivity suddenly seems well down, it is almost certainly not related to the new release. The release after next will attempt to address all know (and hence documented) remaining bugs.
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Thank you for reading and enjoy the forums – links can be found here – click on “Community Links” : https://www.sdrplay.com/misc/