Philip A Covington’s Blog

I started to take a look at creating a virtual sound card driver for use with PowerSDR. Here are two ways that I thought about doing it: In the above figure we create two virtual sound card instances. They are virtually hooked together as depicted above. The advantage is that they appear to each application as a sound card so MME and DS can be used in both programs. In the above diagram, the driver creates one virtual sound card device and the third party program talks to it as normal using MME or DS. PowerSDR talks to the driver using normal file read/write IO and custom IOCTL commands instead of through PortAudio's MME or DS. Which one is preferred? Comments: Email Me

I have a preliminary serial to TCP bridge app. Here are some screenshots: (click on the image for a full size version) In the image above PowerSDR's TCP Listener is enabled to listen for connections on port 4444 as in the notes for June 28, 2005 below. I have two pairs of vCOM ports enabled: The first pair is COM4 and COM5, the second pair is COM6 and COM7. The Serial To TCP Bridge app connects the virtual com ports to TCP. The app connects to PowerSDR as a client on port 4444. In the screenshot above HRD is set to connect to COM5. MixW is set to connect to COM7. In the Serial To TCP Bridge app above, COM4 and COM6 are set to bridge to TCP port 4444. Refer to the screenshot below: The IP Address is the address of the computer where PowerSDR is running. It can be an IP address or a machine name (or "localhost"). The TCP Port Number must be the port that the PowerSDR TCP Server is listening to for connections (here 4444). COM Port 1 is the virtual com port th...

I have added preliminary support for TCP in an experimental version of PowerSDR1.3.12. Here are a few screenshots: (click on the image for a full size version) The windows titled "TestClient" is just a fast app I wrote to test the CSocketClient and CSocketServer classes that I wrote. I am using it to send and receive to/from PowerSDR. The four windows represent four different simultaneous connections to PowerSDR. I added a few items to the setup form: You can enable either CAT via Serial or TCP or both. For TCP you can set the maximun connections allowed and which port number the TCP server listens to for connections from clients. I used an umodified PowerSDR 1.3.12 as a base so the new serial port code is not in it. This was just for testing purposes though. As Bill, KD5TFD brought up in an email conversation, we will probably have to serialize access to the PowerSDR CAT and a good place might be in the command parser. The TCP stuff will pr...

I wanted to add some additional fixed filter buttons to PowerSDR as well as two sliders for setting the filter low and filter high for the variable filters. PowerSDR is running out of room for all these "enhancements" so I added a tabbed control to the filter selection section of the screen to try to get some more room. See below: When you select either one of the Var buttons on the Fixed Tab it automatically takes you to the Variable tab. Oh, the above console has not been calibrated with my signal generator yet... Can we gain some more room by putting some of the other controls on tabs? Comments, suggestions, hate mail: Email Me

Build 222 of the vCOM virtual serial port driver is released. New Features: Build 222 will now allow you to create up to 10 virtual com port pairs. Each pair acts like a virtual null modem cable. By default, the inf file that comes with the download will create 1 pair (COM4 and COM5) by default. To change there settings you have to edit the inf file as follows: Look for the section titled "Localizable Strings" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ; *******Localizable Strings******* N8VB= "N8VB vCOM" Desc_x860= "N8VB vCOM MultiportSerialdrivers" N8VBvCOMDesc= "N8VB vCOM Virtual Serial Port Driver" ;NOTE: Edit the following to change com port number and amount of paired ports ;Number Of Pairs ;************ PAIRS=0x01 ;PAIRS=0x02 ;PAIRS=0x03 ;PAIRS=0x04 ;PAIRS=0x05 ;PAIRS=0x06 ;PAIRS=0x07 ;PAIRS=0x08 ;PAIRS=0x09 ;PAIRS=0x0A ;NOTE: MAX is 10 pairs ;Pair 1 ;************ PORT1="COM4" PORT2=...