[hpsdr] Signal level discrepancy RA Utility / Multimeter

[Joe Martin]

Wolfgang and all, 

Thanks much for the feedback.  I’ll consider everything.  

Of course the data file has the creation date/time already imbedded in it just as all Windows files do and you may access it by using the file “info” feature in Windows.  It would be no particular problem to write the date/time into a header for each data file though, of course; just a bit redundant in my view.  Including comments can be a bit trickier unless we specify how many bytes a comment may use, etc so that the READ function will work properly, and I’m sure whatever I would select as a number of comment bytes will not make everyone happy as some people tend to be more verbose than others in creating such comments and making it a variable length is more trouble than I had hoped to put toward the modification effort.  I’ll think on it.

For my information, if comma is used in the EU region as decimal point is used in the US region then what symbol is typically used for separation between columns of data in a text data file that can be read by EU Excel please?  Is there a standard one for the EU region?

73, Joe K5SO

On Feb 11, 2016, at 4:05 PM, DK4RW wrote:

> ***** High Performance Software Defined Radio Discussion List *****
> 
> Warren, Joe,
> 
> Thank you for your explanations and your very useful hints to the software
> details. 
> With my rather old signal generator of unknown level accuracy a level
> calibration would probably do more harm than good. For my purposes a
> reasonably accurate absolute level of the RMS power of different signals in
> the passband is more than sufficient.
> I am aware that FLEX and HPSDR code are completely different. However,
> knowing no other "User Manual" I looked up the FLEX manual, as suggested in
> the Hermes installation guide. 
> 
> FYI, the adaption of the decimal separator in the output file to the local
> separator definition does its job, as shown in this example: 
> time (seconds), Rx1 signal (dBm), Rx2 signal (dBm)
> 0,000, 0,000, 0,000
> 0,062, -84,565, -404,230
> 0,125, -84,780, -404,230
> Excel, however, cannot differentiate between the comma as a decimal
> separator and as a field separator. So it imports each line as text. This is
> not a big issue, since with a few Excel text functions I extracted the
> numbers.
> 
> In a previous thread, Georg, DL2KP, suggested adding date and time
> information and comment lines to the data file. During my recordings I
> missed these, too, and added them manually. The data format could stay the
> same, just start time and date of the recording in a file header would be
> sufficient for off-line calculation of the time for the data points. Comment
> lines could be left empty so that the recordings start always at the same
> line. I know, this is an antique way of doing things, but it would make
> importing into a spreadsheet easy.
> 
> Thanks again for your help and the incredibly large amount of work you put
> into the openHPSDR project.
> 
> 73, Wolfgang DK4RW
>