[Xlog-discussion] v1.6 adventures & comments

[Martin Ewing - AA6E]

Well, I upgraded to Fedora 8 mainly to try xlog 1.6.  (Bad move, but 
that's a story for another day.)

The good news.  Xlog compiles and installs correctly.

First run gave a horrible crash dump.  After some head scratching, I 
turned on my rig (Orion) and tried again.  All is well this time!  This 
was a Hamlib/Orion problem. (I'm the HL Orion maintainer.)  It does not 
seem to happen with other choices for rig type.  Although the software 
turns to molasses if there's no response on the serial port.

I am using Hamlib from CVS.  I found and fixed one problem -- invalid 
return when get_info returns null.  Now xlog does not crash when the rig 
is off, but xlog hangs up with a mostly uninitialized window until you 
turn the rig on.  I'll look at it some more.  Maybe Hamlib itself should 
have a better way to signal if there is no rig available. A non-blocking 
serial read might be a good idea. And/or threads. ;-)

(I'm running Fedora 8 - Linux 2.6.23.1-49.fc8 #1 SMP i686 athlon i386; 1 
GB RAM; Athlon XP 2000+.)

Here are some other comments, besides the start-up issue:

1. Clicking Mode button produces mode setting correctly equal to Orion's 
state for USB, CW (if Orion LCW or UCW), and FM.

However, Orion's LSB -> xlog USB;
AM -> (unrecognized - leaves mode unchanged);
FSK -> (unrecognized - leaves mode unchanged)

I would suggest that LSB should map to LSB at least, and recognizing AM 
and FSK would be good as well.  What do the ADIF files want?

2. Clicking Power button gives a result between 0 and 256.  Hamlib 
returns a floating value between 0.0 and 1.0.  For a 100 watt rig like 
mine, that should be 0 - 100 W of course.  Ideally, there would be a 
preference setting for max. power that would be used to scale the 
result.  In any case, 256 can't be right for most of us!

3. (no great importance)  The S-meter scale does not correspond too well 
with Hamlib's numbers.  Xlog's meter seems to have a long time constant, 
and I haven't tried to calibrate it seriously.  But -6 dB (S8) from 
Hamlib seems to give S9 on xlog's meter.  It seems to indicate 1 S-unit 
high over the range I've checked.

Hope this helps!

73 Martin AA6E