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