Hi! All,
Steve brings up a very good question (see below) but in light of his
reported (in his latter post) "few microseconds of glory" it makes me
wonder...
spl@szechuan.ucsd.edu (Steve Lamont) wrote:
><snip>
>BTW, this is probably a dumb question and please don't think me rude
>but why would you want to replicate the interface (front panel) of a
>piece of ham gear on a computer screen. It would seem to me that the
>best interface for operating a radio would be the radio.
><snip>
Why? For many reasons. We are talking about Communications Receivers
that have MANY options and controls. Some of these have a frequency range
from 100KHz to 2000MHz. That's from below the AM broadcast band to up
where the satellites broadcast. And many demodulation options.
A major reason to control a radio from a computer is to obtain a user
interface/functionality that the radio mfg. didn't provide when the radio
was designed.
Using XForms, I can design multiple virtual "Front Panels" for a
radio and switch between them as the need arises. For different listening
situations a different set of controls are more important than others. A
custom GUI can emphasize those functions that are important and
hide/preset those that aren't. Not to mention that I can redesign the
control types (i.e. I can set the frequency with a slide control, dial
control, key pad or some combination of the above).
Another radio application is scanning. In this we search a portion of
the spectrum looking for active stations and when an active station is
found, record/look up the frequency in a database. This searching
usually takes place over a long time period (days...) and thus lends
itself to computer control.
XForms makes "trying out" new designs fast, easy and the end product
looks like it took many days to create when in fact it took only an hour
or so.
I agree that duplicating the original radio front panel seems to be a
waste of computer time if that is all you do, but there is so much more
that can be done that it is worth it in the long run.
Mike...
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