[TenTec] Problems with limitations, opportunities with Pegasus

[Larry Kayser]

Greetings all:

Duane, AC5AA wrote some comments about the new Pegasus radio that I
need some further qualification.  His comments are from his experience
and that is fair, his statements about limiting cases are simply wrong
and I offer should not be seen as limiting cases.

>and I have somewhat of a sense
>of what GUI's can do and where they are limited

Duane, no problem with your limitation but your summaries go far beyond
the expression of your belief to impose conditions in the general case.

>However, that's a rich man's
>answer to the problem - not many of us can afford to sink the costs of
>renting another property for antennas and then running a fairly expensive
>remote station!

Thank you for defining me as a rich man!  I wish I was, but I am not.
The invested dollars (in US$) for my remote station complete is less
than $2000.  This is less than an upper scale yacomwood radio (with less
control capabilities).  My first remote transmitter system in the current
project had a commercial value of less than $300 including the cost of
the Direct Digital Synthesizer card that fit in the junk PC.  The first
DX-40
Heathkit transmitter cost a grand amount of $18.50 again US$.


>After all, with the computer you are
>reduced by necessity to changing one and only one control at a time.

Wrong.  I have been experimenting with a two dimensional and three
dimensional controls for the RF, AF, and filters all being manipulated
by one mouse click.  A Commercial product using one of these controls
will I am told be introduced in late 1999 on a consumer product.

>Grabbing for the mouse, finding the mouse cursor on the screen,
>clicking back and forth between controls would just add one more layer of
>gorp to have to contend with.

Your "gorp", my solution to tiny buttons and rotary controls!  At least
the current version of the Pegasus control software only uses a Rotary
knob for the tuning, Kenwood still offers only little rotary knobs to
entertain their TS570 es TS870 software users.

Duane, the limitations you set for yourself are yours, please avoid
claiming general limitations that constrain what others are doing in
this new area of technology.


and going forward, Travis Martin askes the obvious question for Pegasus

>The control panel could convert operator input to commands that the Pegasus
>would understand. Could be used with or without a computer.

Exactly Travis.  I have been experimenting with a control head here
that uses no visual component at all, just buttons on a small control
box that fits the right hand.  The feedback is high speed morse that
reads out the frequency or a general status stream of the functions.
Since the Pegasus control software is not available yet I have been
testing with the Kenwood TS-570 command set.  My work suggests there is
opportunity for the use of buttons with different levels of button
mechanical
resistance.  At the moment, I am experimenting with different methods
of entering frequency information - minimizing the learning process and
also minimizing the number of physical actions to enter a new frequency.

Travis, remember that you can use a big PC to do the development of your
custom interface, to develop your ideas, to test your hypothesis for a
custom control head.  When you have it the way you want it, you can mover
the functionality to a PIC type of controller.  The second phase is really
a second project.  By doing the project in several phases you can more
easily dump the approaches that dont work out.

Harold Price, NK6K of AMSAT has said many times, amateurs "build" just as
much as they ever did, they just "build" with bigger and bigger pieces.
Pegasus offers a new world of opportunities to "build" the radio the
way you want it.

Have fun!

Larry
VA3LK



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