If I forgot to return the focus to the logging program and started to type. Without the iPad app in those days, I still had to touch PowerSDR from time to time and there was no window focus helper. With my original Flex5000 and PowerSDR, the first thing I did after every new release was to go and turn off all the keyboard shortcuts so they were disabled. Now add fatigue and short sleep hours on top of this and you see why I want to keep everything simple and focused. so that's around 30 contacts worth of time. My average QSO rate will be something better than 60 contacts and hour. If I had to change window focus for every contact, even using the focus return feature in SmartSDR and set it to 1 second, thats 1500 seconds - almost half an hour of time across the contest.
This coming weekend is the CQ WPX SSB contest - its a full weekend effort for me and I will make something better than 1500 contacts.
With a simple stand next to my keyboard, the iPad provides a virtual front panel to the radio as well as enhancing the capabilities of the radio - for example, the app allows me to configure and store custom filter settings by mode. The app knows when power is applied to the iPad and disables the screen lock while power is applied. The iPad gives me an independent control system for the radio that doesn't require a focus change. I don't have time to wait for the focus to return to the logging program.Īs a consequence, I never command the radio via SmartSDR - SmartSDR simply serves as a display and I control the radio with a combination of the FlexControl and the K6TU Control iPad app. In a contest (and I am a die hard contester), I never want to touch SmartSDR at all - I want the window focus and ALL keystrokes to go to the logging program. I was going to make the same point as Steve but he beat me to it. What other keys would make sense to map to various functions? The cool thing with scripting is that we can make it do whatever we want and change it at any time. I haven't been into contesting yet, even though I want to but lack the time, but I wonder if something like that would be useful to contesters. Then maybe use other keys for fine tuning, or creating a notch filter, enabling/disabling NB, etc, etc.ĭoing this using a keyboard (after memorizing the keys) would be *way* faster than using any gui with a mouse or even using the flexcontrol knob, and definitely faster than using a knob radio. Using the left/right arrow keys would step the active slice receiver up/down the step amount, like 100 khz or whatever. pressing A-H would select slice A-H and maybe set TX=on. People complain about knobs or no knobs, but we have like 101 (or whatever) keys on the keyboard to work with, so why not use them? I was thinking about making a script that accepts keyboard input (lets just call them shortcuts). Now that I have the primary powershell cmdlets working (finally. But eventually a similar topic will probably end up in the main forums. I'm sticking this in the api forum since it is directly related to the powershell module I've been working on.