Hi Mitch,
Mitch Baum wrote:
Dave,
Would it be possible to open the WEFAX receive viewer window in place of
both the normal receive and transmit windows?
> It seems like a waste of real estate to have to open another window.
There has been some reflection about the decision to create these two
windows, here are some elements:
- It was needed to have a fully scrollable window. The normal receive
window does not provide that. Many other widgets are necessary for fax only.
- It was massively inspired from sending/receivign MFSK images.
- In order to reuse the existing window, many changes are necessary in
code which is used by all other modes so it is a bit dangerous (At this
time, 99% of the fax logic is in two files so it is safe for the rest of
the code).
- I thought also about writing text to these two windows, for example
when an image is received (Maybe some quick OCR scan of the fax ?). Or,
give the possibility to send free text by fax, just like Hell. This
would decrease the feeling that display space is wasted as you pointed out.
What you describe would be easier if there is an easy way to insert the
fax receive window in the normal window (and hide it when not in fax
mode), without changing anything else. Same for the transmit window.T
his needs reflection but you have a point in my opinion.
Also would it be possible to "lock" the WEFAX receive bandpass bars to
what the decoder is looking for? This would make tuning a lot easier if
we could use the waterfall with some actual "markers" like the other
modes make use of.
- In my opinion you are right too, the thing is that I did not fully
understand how the bandpass bars work and how they can be controlled.
Other people had about the same idea. An alternative is to freeze the
bandpass bar like in MT63 but I did not find how to do it at the moment.
If this can't be done, could we make the WEFAX decoder operate like the
other decoders, and pass the center frequency value to the decoder so
that we could adjust the balck/white levels (and the other elements)
relative to the decoder bandpass? The "sweet spot" for my radio is not
up at 1900 Hz and the audio passband starts to drop off at around 2000Hz
with the 2kHz filter in-line. It would be much better if we could shift
the decoder center down to 1500 Hz (or so - in my case).
Sorry for the question: I do not understand why it cannot be done simply
be tuning ? Normally the frequency does not have to change much, does it ?
Also the tuning
bars added to the latest WEFAX don't really help as the time constant is
too short and they bounce around from nothing to full scale. Adding
about 10 seconds of time integration to the reading would stabilize the
indications and allow these to be more useful as a tuning indicator.
wefax/wefax.cpp : return decayavg( avg_pwr, pwr, 10 );
Yes this coefficient (10) could be increased. The current level seems to
be OK as far as I could see, but as you said it could certainly be
tunable. Config parameter ?
The prefs file does indicate "23", but on reopening fldigi, it is not
recognized as IOC576.
Strange. Does it work fine with the other modes ? With the other
parameters ? (Parameters related or not to WEFAX) Thanks.
I'll download and install the 0AE later tonigh and give it a run for the
money! :)
BTW I love letting the program just sit on the WEFAX and pull in the
Faxes! Being an avid boater, I did not have this capability on my boat,
but I could tune the IC-710-M to any frequency (I had it "opened up" for
Ham use also), but I didn't have the ability to capture the WEFAX images.
About receiving many faxes, it would be to fine-tune the detection of
the end of an image. The logic at the moment is based on two things:
- Detected the APT stop frequency.
- If the frequency cannot be extracted, use the power/noise ratio at APT
stop frequency, and stop image reception if this is "strong enough". The
difficulty is in adjusting "string enough" which is variable depending
on everything. I thought about an assisted mode:
- This would start as it is now.
- But when the user stops reception, we would conclude that the current
levels mean "image stop". This would give the right power thresholds
when receiving the next image on the same frequency. Same logic for
image start. This is quite complicated of course, the user-levels wold
have to be saved somewhere, it would have to be tested in many different
cases etc...
One other "Honey-Do" - If we are sitting on a WEFAX channel and detect a
75 baud RTTY/850 Hz, why not switch to RTTY decode for the broadcasts
and capture those as text also? This would probably need another thread
to monitor the RX bandpass and detect the mode being used and activate
the correct decoder/modem.
The difficulty is that two different modes, as you said, must be
monitored at the same time, which is not in the logic of fldigi AFAIK.
Wonder whether it would be possible to "conditionnaly" set a mode with
macros. That is, we would say:
"Set mode to wefax and wait 20 seconds, then return if nothing is
detected, otherwise stay in this mode". Same for rtty, maybe with a
command like <MODE:WEFAX:20>
Thanks for your remarks.
Cheers
Remi
There might be several ways to do that:
- When no signal is detected in wefax mode, automatically switch to
Thanks,
Mitch Baum / AF2M
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