[hpsdr] Signal level discrepancy RA Utility / Multimeter

Sat Feb 13 13:23:38 PST 2016

Hi Wolfgang, 

Understood.  I will put something like that into the program. 

I’ve been extra busy the past week with non-radio science things that have kept me from working on the RA utility.  After next week I hope to have more time to devote to the RA modifications.  In any case, I’ll get to it as soon as I can.

Thanks for the feedback. 

73, Joe K5SO

On Feb 13, 2016, at 1:28 PM, DK4RW wrote:

> ***** High Performance Software Defined Radio Discussion List *****
> 
> 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
>>> 
>> 
>> 
> 
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