[hpsdr] Signal level discrepancy RA Utility / Multimeter

[DK4RW]

Joe, 

Thanks a lot for considering some modifications of the data file.

Probably I was not clear enough when suggesting some changes. The main
reason is to have important information in the data file, rather than
relying on file system information or manual data entry, which is always
error prone. 

Maybe an example helps to get my point across. Below are the first 10 lines
of an example data file. The line numbers in parentheses are added here for
reference only and should not be part of the file.

(1)Radio Astronomy data collection utility  v1.2 (29 Aug 2014); PowerSDR
OpenHPSDR mRX PS v3.36 (16 Nov 2015)
(2)2016-02-13 18:25:32
(3)
(4)
...
(9)
(10)time (seconds); RX1 signal (dBm); RX2 signal (dBm)	
(11)0.000; 0.000; 0.000	

Line (1): data sources and version information; good to have for
traceability
Line (2): date and time of the start of the data collection; time preferably
in UTC, but local time will do
Line (3) to Line (6): presently empty, but reserved for possible later use
by the utility. E.g. for RX1 and RX2 frequencies, filter bandwidths, etc. 
Line (7) to Line (9): empty; to be filled by the user, if desired
Line (10): start of the data section - same as we have it today

So, only Line (1) and Line (2) would be new data. Lines (3) to (9) could be
left empty for now. As George suggested, using dot (.) as decimal separator
and semicolon (;) as field separator the file would be easy to import into
spreadsheets for further processing. I verified this by importing the above
example into Excel with German settings. 
This is just a suggestion. Probably more versed RA users have other and
better ideas.   

Thanks for your great utility.

73, Wolfgang DK4RW

> ------------------------------
> 
> Message: 3
> Date: Thu, 11 Feb 2016 16:40:16 -0700
> From: Joe Martin <k5so at k5so.com>
> To: DK4RW <dk4rw at darc.de>
> Cc: hpsdr at lists.openhpsdr.org
> Subject: Re: [hpsdr] Signal level discrepancy RA Utility / Multimeter
> Message-ID: <F5FE2DA0-F315-490F-A798-4A63288C995B at k5so.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252
> 
> 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
> >
> 
>