Jim,
That's awesome! My only question is, why dot 1 for the noise floor instead of dot 6? Just wondering why you started at the top, no criticism at all intended.

73

Ron Miller


-----Original Message-----
From: For blind amateur radio operators [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Jim Shaffer
Sent: Thursday, May 01, 2014 1:06 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Fw: Braille Pan Adapter

Let's try this message format.  Honestly I'm getting pretty disgusted with the way this list can't manage to handle our messages without throwing a lot of garbage in them.
--------------------------------
Well my pan adapter project has born fruit.  It is working pretty well.  I specify a frequency range and pan increment, usually 1 KHZ, and it creates a braille graph of the band activity.  The braille graph is on my 40 cell Pacmate display.

I use the characters “a b l p q =” to show the relative signal strengths. 
Those characters are dot 1, dots 1 and 2, dots 1, 2, and 3, etc.  A single dot 1 is the noise floor.

I put up a new pan graph every 3 band scans, in other words, I scan the band
3 times, and then generate the braille, scan another 3 times and generate, etc.  I generate the graph using the maximum value I got from those 3 scans. 
This hopefully minimizes missing a CW op whose key just wasn’t down when I scanned the last time.

Here is a sample display.  Note that if you’re not using a braille display, this won’t make much sense.

aaaabbbaaalqap=baaaaabbbblbaaaalllaaqaaa

The “q” and “=” show strong signals, the “p” less strong, etc.

With the TS-590 at 115200 baud, I can scan around 40 points per second, or
40 khz per second scanning 1 khz at a time.  That seems to be fast enough, well for me at least.

Oh, and perhaps the most important feature of this is that when I see on the graph a spot I want to go to, I just click the routing key, the program stops panning, and sends the rig to the corresponding frequency.  This frequency is approximate, depending upon how many KHZs are represented by a cell, but it’s in the ball park of the signal I’ve spotted.
--
Jim, KE5AL
From: Jim Shaffer
Sent: Tuesday, April 29, 2014 11:12 PM
To: For blind ham radio operators
Subject: re: Braille Pan Adapter

Well, I’ve done a proof of concept, and it works!  I don’t have it in any shape to really be very useable yet, but I can make my TS-590 scan and return s-meter readings fast enough to do a reasonable job of showing a band or band segment.

Stay tuned.
--
Jim Shaffer, KE5AL
Pflugerville, TX
www.jjshaffer.net
www.pgramblers.com