Here we are getting ready for the two upcoming solar eclipses as we are directly in the cross hairs of both. I have a IC-7300 and just started using wfview. The signal strength is displayed. Is there any way to record the S onto my win 10 or win 11 computer as we are planning on doing some NVIS recording before and during the eclipses? Also looking into just recording WWV strength at 10 MHz and maybe 15 MHz. The files may be simply ASCII with a time stamp for each reading separated by semi-colon or comma. Any help is appreciated. Also there may be one or more engineering students at the local university that may take part of this on as a senior project. Thanks John
Hi John,
wfview does not have that capability. However, you can easily poll the radio’s S-Meter via wfview’s pseudo-terminal port (“virtual serial port”). A few lines of python code could do it.
The command to grab an s-meter reading is:
0xFE 0xFE 0x98 0xE0 0x15 0x02 0xFD
And the expected reply would look like this:
0xFE 0xFE 0xE0 0x98 0x15 0x01 0x23 0xFD
(for an s-meter reading of 123 out of a possible 255)
The python script just needs to open a regular serial port to wfview’s pseudo-terminal port and then poll at regular intervals.
Alternatively, it is probably even easier to use the rigctld support within wfview and poll over TCP/IP. The rigctl command is simply:
l STRENGTH
(that’s a lower-case l as in LIMA)
Here’s an example with rigctld enabled in wfview:
eliggett@machine:~$ telnet localhost 4533
Trying 127.0.0.1...
Connected to localhost.
Escape character is '^]'.
l STRENGTH
-13
l STRENGTH
-18
A simply python script can connect over TCP/IP and issue that command at regular intervals pretty easily.
–E
de W6EL
Thanks for your quick response Elliott. I will investigate both methods and post the results.
It may take me a bit. thanks John N7MM Kerrville, TX