Re: [amsat-bb] FT-847 and USB-to-Serial Converter

[Margaret Leber <maggie@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Monday 04 March 2002 19:43, Phil Karn wrote in "Re: [amsat-bb] 
FT-847 and USB-to-Serial Converter":

> Badly designed computer interfaces are endemic in devices originally
> designed to operate standalone...the designers
> seem to assume that the only use of the computer interface would be
> to reproduce the device's original control panel on the computer
> screen for manual use by a human operator. What's the point in that,
> especially since so many devices now come with remoteable front
> panels?

That's what I've seen in too many rig-control programs. I've put the 
JavaDoc for what I have so far up at 

 http://www.geocities.com/maggieleber/JHamTune/doc/index.html

...it includes a screenshot of the program as it was a few days ago. 
The documentation is falling behind the code again. (That's not my 
*personal* site; that's still at http://voicenet.com/~maggie )  

> I haven't seen a radio with more than one VFO in probably 20 years.
> What modern radios call "VFOs" are really just CPU memory locations
> selected with a front panel switch; there's only one actual hardware
> VFO inside the radio. 

Well, being full-duplex, the FT-847 can walk and chew gum at the same 
time. Of course, it can't walk in two different directions or chew more 
than one piece of gum. :-) 

> Basic DSP functions like mixing, filtering and frequency shifting are
> very well documented in the literature. Modern PCs are already plenty
> fast enough to perform these functions in C at audio sampling rates
> (Java may be too slow, though). 

We'll see. Modern Java VMs are surprisingly fast. I haven't dug deeply 
into the Java Media APIs to see what kind of DSP might be possible yet.

 73 de Maggie K3XS 

-- 
-----/___.   _)   Margaret Stephanie Leber    / "The art of progress  /
----/(, /|  /| http://voicenet.com/~maggie   / consists of preserving/
---/   / | / |  _   _   _    `  _AOPA 925383/ order amid change and /
--/ ) /  |/  |_(_(_(_/_(_/__(__(/_  FN20hd / change amid order."   /
-/ (_/   '  K3XS  .-/ .-/    ARRL 39280   /___ --A.N.Whitehead ___/
/____ICQ 7161096_(_/_(_/__AMSAT 32844____/ <maggie@voicenet.com>

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