Reply To: Waterfall and Spectrum display questions

[G8BQRParticipant]

Hi Steve,

The bit below caught my eye, as I also use wsjtx.

“It is one thing to have high-speed, high-resolution spectral displays, but on the opposite side of the coin – is there software that will allow more flexibility in the processing and display of the spectrum and waterfall displays?

Just an example of what I’d like to do is watch over, say, 160 meters to pictorially show the drop in band noise as the sun sets and then the rise in band noise as the sun rises the next day – plus the band activity in between.”

The waterfall is a series of single scans of the spectrum placed one after the other. The rate and frequency of these lines affect the visual averaging of noise – a slow rate gives a more visible carrier, which doesn’t disappear from the screen so quickly. My display for 2 min long WSPR signals is just over an hour from top to bottom, and even -28 dB signals are just noticeable using high contrast. The downside is that short signals appear as spots, like random noise, even if a lot stronger.

SDRUno has a x100 Time scale which slows down the waterfall a lot, and time bars can be added across the screen at intervals, I use 15 sec, for FT8, (but the audio waterfall has only 10 sec & 20 sec bars – one has been missed) I forget where I found them, I blame age 🙁

As an initial experiment it may be worth seeing if the waterfall can be slowed down to a rate which gives about 25 hrs on the screen – possibly stack a couple of monitors one above the other 🙂 I’d guess a recording would be the size on disc of a 25 hr film ?

Hope this helps to go in the direction you want 🙂 Regards, Ed G8BQR