[TRLog] band map problems...

[Kenneth E. Harker]

On Tue, Mar 05, 2002 at 12:06:40PM -0500, Ron D. Rossi wrote:
> Tree,
> 
> I ran 6.63 over the weekend at our M/2 for ARRL DX. Some of the operators were 
> relying heavily on the band map to surf the bands for new contacts. This was 
> my first experience with such a large quantity of band map entries as we just 
> recently set up a local RF node on the cluster. I ran into a few problems I 
> need to share. It was frustrating for me to have to make excuses for the 
> program when I know how good it as at everything else! I have a reputation as 
> the local TR advocate.
> 
> 1) When the band map filled up enough that it could not be contained on the 
> screen the NEXTBANDMAP function would tune the radio, but not show that call 
> sign or mult status of the station. I resorted to exiting TR, deleting 
> BANDMAP.BIN, restarting TR, issuing "SH/DX/50 on 10m/SSB" to get the recent 
> ones back. I also changed the decay time to 15 minutes. Not ideal solutions to 
> be sure.
> 
> 2) I could not navigate the band map properly with the cursor keys. This is a 
> new phenomenon for 6.63. <ctrl>-END would put the cursor on a false spot at 
> the end of the bandmap. The contents were gibberish (looked like the list 
> pointer was invalid). When using the cursor keys left and right the cursor 
> would not move linearly or sometimes not move at all.
> 
> 3) BAND MAP DUPE DISPLAY does not function properly as described by myself and 
> others in the past.

I can add several other major problems we experienced regarding the bandmap 
this weekend at N5TW M/2.

1) When using a multi-station network, the bar of information at the bottom
of the screen that tells you where the other stations are on each of the 
bands takes up like 5 lines on the screen.  When moving the cursor left
or right inside the bandmap, it jumps up or down five lines at the same time.

2) When more entries fill the screen than there is space for, wierd things 
happen.  When I see it getting close, I try to aggressively delete older and
worked entries.  This is mostly a problem on 10M.

3) The QSX stuff for 40M SSB is completely broken, and in fact is so useless
that actually using the bandmap to pounce on a 40SSB spot will take you more 
time to recover from, than looking at the DX station's TX freq and spinning 
the dial there yourself and listening for the RX freq to be spoken.

4) When set to show only multipliers, the bandmap would do so - until you 
did a ctrl-end to move into it, and then as you move the cursor around,
it would repaint the screen with all the spots - meaning nothing lines up with
what you had just been looking at.

4) We started running very low on memory (I think we were under 30K by the 
end) and things in the bandmap stopped working.  It wasn't clear at any point
in time what had been turned off because of memory constraints and what 
was just broken.

5) Doing a ctrl-end and having the cursor show up at the bottom of the 
band map was new.  It was really wierd when the bandmap was overfull.

6) We had a separate receive-only station set up for operators not on the main 
run radios to go looking for stations on the other bands.  The plan was to
use the bandmap to add those found stations, but we ended up using mostly
paper to write down a dozen or so found stations to pass onto the guys at the 
radios.

7) Basically every time I did a ctrl-end to enter the bandmap, none of the 
entries would line up with where they had been before.




> I don't know how much more memory it takes to get the don't show dupes to 
> work. I am guessing that you have a double linked list (?)...actually how 
> could you and support left and right cursor movement? Anyway maybe the linked 
> list is the way to go? Then you would not have to do any calculations about 
> placement on the screen? I would give up L/R movement for more versatile 
> display features.
> 
> -- 
> 73 es God Bless de KK1L...ron (kk1l@arrl.net) <><
> Ron Rossi H/P SRAM Engineering -- IBM Microelectronics
> QTH: Jericho, Vermont
> My page: http://www.qsl.net/kk1l
> 
> 
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-- 
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Kenneth E. Harker      "Vox Clamantis in Deserto"      kharker@cs.utexas.edu
University of Texas at Austin                   Amateur Radio Callsign: WM5R
Department of the Computer Sciences      VP, Central Texas DX & Contest Club
Taylor Hall TAY 2.124                         Maintainer of Linux on Laptops
Austin, TX 78712-1188 USA            http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/kharker/
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