On Wed, 23 Jan 2002 12:26:42 -0400
"Dave McClafferty" <ve1adh@accesswave.ca> wrote:
>
> > Further, in the Windows environment, running more than the
> > control program alone, which is highly convenient with digital
> > communications and other support programs, requires shifting the
> > Windows focus to the control program for every change you want to
> > make to the radio. This becomes very time consuming and frustrating
> > after a few hours of operating.
Time for another plug for Linux :-) Focus policy under X-windows is user
configurable. If you're running a KDE or GNOME (Windows-like)
environment, these are easy control-panel settings. That's also true of
some other window managers and desktops (Window Maker et. al.), though
sometimes using a separate utility. Under *any* X environment, you can
always edit your .Xdefaults file (ugh!) with any text editor though
that's not for the faint of heart.
> I have that to be true even though I am not really into contesting and
> seldom spend more than an hour operating in one session. One reason I
> wanted ti try my hand at programming for the Pegasus is so that I
> could create a progam that would do it all, operating, logging
> whatever. However I found my programming skills were just not up to
> the job.
Again, simpler under Linux using HamLib API calls and TCL/Tk or Python
or Perl or Ruby or... to write the actual program. Even C/C++ if you
_really_ want to.
This does bring up an important point: with "software-defined" radios,
the ham community is pretty much reduced to programming external control
programs unless and until the manufacturer(s) release source to their
internal DSP code or provide some alternate method of altering the
behavior of the DSP istself. Want to change the AGC time constant(s)?
Unless a menu choice is provided (I think TT does) you're out of luck.
No easy equivalent to changing a resistor or capacitor value. Want to
muck about with alternative mixers? Same problem. Worse, actually, since
at best you could only choose from a list provided by the manufacturer.
The days of "mods" largely come to an end.
Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing depends (like everything
else) on where your priorities and "jollies" lie. If you want to just
_operate_ your rig (to contest, DX, rag-chew or whatever) it's no big
deal. You probably never modified your traditional rig either. If,
however, you like to tinker or experiment or simply customize your rig,
your ability to do so is severely limited if not eliminated entirely.
Perhaps some enterprising "hacker hams" will develop an available
platform with the entire source code for the software definition of the
radio released under the GPL or some other Open Source license at which
point tinkering becomes possible (though radically different) again. I'd
work on such a project but although I've got many, many years of
programming experience, I know diddley-squat about writing DSP code.
No change of technology comes without *both* gains AND losses. That's
life. Hopefully the gains will vastly outweigh the losses.
--
Bill Meahan WA8TZG wmeahan@wa8tzg.org
"Always do right. This will gratify some people
and astonish the rest." -- Mark Twain
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