I was little bemused at the summary given of my homebrew entry this year. It was for a semi-automated tester for our foxhunt systems, and we actually did end up using it quite a few times over the Mt Gambier foxhunting weekend, amongst our multiple gear failures.
The description given of the tester itself was fine, but the SDR timing problem that prompted the tester in the first place was a bit misrepresented.
The issue had nothing to do with SDR software ‘not keeping up’ due to lack of PC resources, but more the discovery that the particular SDR software I was using, GQRX, has what can best be described as an underlying design flaw, rather than a software bug.
It’s a bit of task to re-write GQRX to remove the fault, so at present I get around the problem by effectively automatically restarting the SDR periodically; whenever the fox channel is changed, or every 10 minutes, before any time delays can manifest significantly.
As our SDR rotating system was only available less than half the time, due mainly to water ingress problems, I can’t say for sure, but I believe we didn’t experience any more timing problems.
Here is the Homebrew entry documentation. Of particular interest may be the story of the hunt for the timing issues in Appendix 1.