[Fourlanders] Interesting computer problem with WSJT

[w4zst at windstream.net]

Like I need more problems to take up my time, but this is really strange.

I have been messing with the new version of WSJT, which is WSJT-x.  It is not yet full featured, only doing JT9 and JT65, but is really much simpler to use and get set up.  Ray turned me on to it and I have installed it and have been playing around.  Very interesting and Joe says he'll eventually put FSK441 and the other modes into it as well.

How I got started was just running WSJT to check things out for the contest and I was listening to Q's on 20m as there was nothing in 6m when I was testing.

First put WSJT-x on the 6m Dell Optiplex with the contest 6m station and though I could see signals in the waterfall, there was no decoding happening in the decode box.  Went back to WSJT9 and things were OK on that same computer.  I then put WSJT-x on an HP laptop that was handy and another radio set up across the room and it worked just fine on the decoding.  So I went back to the 6m station and put another Dell Optiplex on (my #1 we've been using for panadaptor) with the same result.  Everything looks OK in WSJT-x, but no decoding going on and WSJT9 is normal.  So to further investigate, since it looked like a Dell Optiplex problem now, I put the 2m Optiplex on the 2m station HF radio (FT-920) and once again, WSJT9 worked fine, but in WSJT-x I got the waterfall and no decoding going on.

Since we're not going to use WSJT-x for the contest anyway, I'm putting it aside for now and continuing on with the contest set-up with the regular radios and Dell Optiplexes with WSJT9 installed and testing for the weekend.

It appears that there is some sort of hardware or software malfunction going on in the Dell Optiplexes that is not letting the audio get from one program box to the other in WSJT-x on those computers.  By boxes I mean in WSJT, there is a screen box with the waterfall display and another box with the messages and decoding going on.  In WSJT-x, Joe has eliminated the DOS command box that showed the audio streams set up and now only has two boxes, one called 'WideGraph' that has the waterfall and panadapter display and another with the messages and decode boxes, etc.  "What we have here is failure to communicate!"

I have also installed WSJT-x on another desktop computer here and the program is fine. Ray and others have installed WSJT-x on lots of other computers uneventfully.

Any thoughts from the group would be welcome.

Thanks, Bob