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.
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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
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