Hi Elliot.
Well here is a mystery about switching between HRD and wfview. I never would want to run them together, but I can see doing it sequentially… shut one down, then start the other, for a number of reasons. HRD can run cleanly right after a system reboot even when I leave the CI-V transceive set to on with the 7300. If I run wfview first, then shut it down… then try to start HRD, HRD can’t even see the COM port. If I run HRD first and shut it down, before trying on hi to start an instance of wfview, wfview can’t find the 7300.
If I reboot the Win 10 PC first, I can then run the other program… which tells me that either some residual COM port state is left set wrong, or some process is holding on to the driver, locking the other program out so the software can’t see the 7300… even after either program has been shut down. I haven’t the time to try to look at the process list to figure out what processes might be left running.
Interestingly, I don’t seem to see this behavior with the 705 or 9700… they just work… so whatever the problem, it is associated with the 7300 or the iteration of its driver. Frustrating.
Hope you have some thoughts about why this might be the case… more below inline with your questions.
Jack - KD4IZ
Hi Jack,
This is great info, thank you for the detailed report!
The issue with HRD and many other programs, is that they rely on polling the radio every few ms to find out what controls have changed. wfview uses the radio’s built-in telemetry stream enabled with “CI-V Transceive” on the rig. This also lets us auto-discover the model number of the rig, so that the user doesn’t have to type it in. We’re looking at alternatives though, as a number of users have had difficulties with this setting getting toggled by other programs.
The bandstacking issue stems from some early code that didn’t parse frequencies properly. A few bits and pieces of that code are still hanging around, and I’ll remove them next time I work on it. It should be pretty straight forward.
Multiple rigs: We’re working on it. We have some ability to do this with command-line arguments, but this feature isn’t complete for network rigs. Eventually we’ll have “rig profiles” that one could select between using a menu or command-line arguments on startup. Stay tuned.
nice to have:
Auto-ranging frequency markers: Can you explain a bit more here? We are looking at adding overlays to the scope plot, maybe we can work in what you’re talking about too.
So here I mean that the freq display on the WF seems to be widely spaced and doesn’t increase or decrease the increments shown as is commonly seen with most SDRs when the display range is changed.
Also the indicator line for the “center” or tuned frequency is a bit dim, it would be nice if a brighter color could be used to make it easy to see.
Indicator of MHz, we could do this, there’s certainly room. Also note that if you omit the decimal point, it will attempt to set that frequency as KHz – nice for SWL guys that tend to operate that way.
Perhaps make it switch from KHz to MHz at some threshold frequency?
PTT: There’s the “Transmit” button on the main tab. The dedicated PTT On and PTT Off buttons are available should you need it on the settings page. I just didn’t want to clutter up the main tab with too many things, and figured a single transmit button was ok since the rig has that as well.
Power buttons: Likely this will get moved to the front panel. Any suggestions as to where you’d put them?
Almost every ICOM radio has the on/off button at the upper left or mid left side of its front plate… I think about putting it there.
Thanks again. Let me know about that IC-7000, I don’t think we’ve tried that one yet. Expect to see some features using their defaults rather than being tailored to the rig (such as attenuator and preamp levels, bands, etc).
Let you know when i pull it out of the rack next.
Will you be putting in a custom macro command database? That way a user could put together control macro strings and increase flexibility of the controls.
Too many ideas, not enough time.