WFView general feelings

[Neptune (Ilya)]

Hello there!

First of all, I want to start with praise and kind words to developers of this great software, which I use almost 5 months in a row. I forced to use my IC-7610 through remote connection. Almost an year I used original Icom software RS-BA1, but main lack of it - flexibility to share virtual ports with logging and other software, which are using Omnirig. But in WFView it is nicely solved with RigCTRd.

Maybe with some points I will go wrong, but I will try to list of what I really like and what I want to see upgraded.
Most of the time I was on stable 2.03 and past weeks moved on weekly build. Windows 11 here.

Pros for me is:

• Single app, instead of running 2 Icom apps.
• Ability to shorten audio buffer in compare with Icom app.
• RigCTL on board which give opportunity to use OmniRig with this app.
• Heavily customizable.

Cons:

• Using Icom RC-28 for tuning dial gives a quite different filling in compare with RS-BA1 Software. In RS-BA1 visually and acoustically it runs absolutely smoothly, it never had and hops between frequencies when sweeping. In WFView it seems like before changing actual tuning position on spectrum, it waits until packet reaches TRX with respond which is resulting not even and non-smooth frequency sweeping (tuning with small hops, sometime bigger). Average RTT is 35ms.

• I’ve tried many approaches to save settings in Settings and Main Window, but WFView never stores position and size of band selection window and frequency dial window as well.
  

  
  
  After restart it reset it’s size and position. Would be nice to fix it.
  
  

• Band stack selection would be nice to be store last option selected or having default Icom behavior when each continues click switches on next stored frequence and mode.

• Spectrum measurement values on left side should be real world dBm. And nothing for waterfall.
  

  

• Very strange behavior for waterfall speed that has bad affection of spectrum. It should be set up independently.

• Regarding audio output devices it would be nice to switch them in default windows mixer in Windows 11 it is win+ctrl+v. In my case I use headset for working on air and speakers just for listening broadcast stations. Now to switch I need to disconnect from radio, change output device where is no Default Windows Device.

• Also would be nice to see implemented TX bandwidth filters like wide \ mid \ narrow for IC-7610.

• Able to save settings to external file, rather than using RegEdit export approach.

• After exiting sleep mode for monitors application start to be laggy and needs restart.

If I just missed something in your beautiful program and some of points above already implemented just let me know
Will be grateful for any advices or feedback.

[eliggett (Elliott Liggett)]

Hi Ilya,

A good list of ideas.

I too would appreciate being able to recall the last position for all the widgets. Not a bad idea.

I would like a dBm scale too, for the spectrum. But we will need calibration data for each radio as Icom does not specify the units. We would then need to take into account the preamp, attenuator, rf gain, and so-called “reference” level. Or not, we could just make it “relative”. But we’d still need to know how to convert their DN scale into power decibels (and knowing Icom, they may have made their own scaling up, who knows). The vertical scale on the waterfall is simply there to keep the image lined up with the spectrum shown on the top. A hack for sure.

Tuning with the RC-28 should be more fluid either now or soon, I can’t remember which branch we made the change in. The idea is to predict the frequency we “should” be on and trust that we’re there while the knob is in motion, and to only make any needed corrections after a moment has passed from the last knob movement. I just can’t recall which branch we did that in, maybe it needs to be merged to master.

The band buttons do read the same band stack that the radio uses, but what surprised us is that the radio does not update the band stack register when the user changes bands/frequencies using the computer interface. Why this is I have no idea.

I have wfview set to my default audio device, and whatever device happens to be plugged in and selected is the one it uses. That may be something that is working on linux but not on windows. Not sure really.

If you prefer a plaintext ini-style preference file, use the --settings argument. Just pass in a string (for example: wfview.exe --settings myradio.conf and wfview will create a blank settings file for you automatically in the correct application’s settings directory (this exact directory name escapes me, something like “AppData” – it’s in the manual). Make sure to press “Save Settings” in wfview. Then close wfview and you can go edit the file manually if you wish. You can even have several settings files for different radios or audio settings. Make a windows desktop shortcut for each version. This is covered in our online manual.

I haven’t experienced the sleep mode issue, but I would not be surprised if there could be some issues with that.

Not sure what you mean about the waterfall speed. We get the waterfall data at one of three fixed rates from the radio, at regular intervals. wfview plots all this data onto the waterfall. As you know, you can adjust the waterfall length to stretch the waterfall, which makes the apparent speed change. This adjustment is under the little “>” button. As for the spectrum, it’s drawn each time we get a new line of spectrum from the radio. If you like, you can turn on spectrum averaging as an overlay. I usually do this. And on noisy bands, I make the spectrum plot a darker color so that the averaged (smoothed) overlay is more visible. Give it a try. This is covered in the manual but it’s also demonstrated in a video on youtube explaining some of version 1.5’s new features.

–E
de W6EL