I'm a little surprised that in the discussion of improvements for the
current crop of transceivers no one mentioned that the S-meters could
use a little work too. The radios that have "digital" S-meters
convert the AGC voltage to a digital value and use that information to
turn on segments of the S-meter bar display.
I've wondered why the designers didn't build software lookup tables
that would translate the AGC voltage into a much more accurate
representation of antenna port voltage. There would still be minor
differences between receivers that fixed-value tables wouldn't account
for. But the approach would eliminate the 1 dB low-end S-unit vs. the
3-to-10 dB high-end S-unit spread. It would also allow them to put S9
exactly where it should be. All for the cost of a few lines of code.
Brad, KV5V
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