Mark pan adapter background with S-units

Mark Erbaugh

Would it be possible to add an option to have the panadapter background horizontal lines correspond to S-units?

Steve N4LQ

Agree. My mind thinks in S units.

Dale KB5VE

I use to think in s units that world of units with no set factor to determine what a S 9 was. . S units have been manipulated by radio manufactors to give the appearance of sins active receivers when it was just a calibration of the S meter. I now use -DBM when talking to my contact and have done so for the last 7 years since I bought my first sdr 1000 and realized I had a lab quality device to tell a person the diffeence in two antennas or different power levels in DBM not the estates s units. So I say why would you want to talke a 21st century panadapter giving you persist measurement and go to a 20th century terminoagy of s units. Foes has given you a S meter to use, I personaly have the woodbox meter loaded which is muchhhhhhhhh better as a smeter. And if you want to convert the scale of DBM to s units you can use -71 DBM as a s9 and every s unit below it is -3dbm and occurs every the ones above are easy, it's the DBM showing minus the 71 .

Albert PA0A

To my knowledge S9 = -73 dBm and each S unit is 6 dB

Steve N4LQ

Didn't PowerSDR offer a choice in the menu? I know NAP3 does. 

Mark Erbaugh

SmartSDR has a built in S-meter, so the software already has some calibration from dBm to S-units, but it would beanie feature if the user could select their own calibration. I realize that I could always from the panadapter display using some calibration, but why should I have to do something that the compute could do easily?

Kevin WB4AIO

If the panadapter was calibrated in S-units, you'd quickly discover that the S-meter and the highest signal peaks of an SSB signal on the pan display would not agree. This is because the S-meter is measuring the sum of all the voice components in the passband, while the panadapter is showing the separate amplitudes of each of the many components in the received voice signal.

Mark Erbaugh

I agree that the S-Meter would disagree with the panadapter for the reason you state, but  seeing the peaks of the signal that your working would enable you to give the other operator a meaningful report.

KY6LA_Howard

S Meters LIE There is absolutely No Consitency between S Meter readings among different radios even within that same brand of radio or even on different bands within the same radio So a S-Meter reading is invariably useless information except in very broad terms By contrast we have an absolutely accurate dBm scale on our radios. Give them a report in dBm ....it will be much more accurate and even useful.

pa0bie

cORRECT !!

Dale KB5VE

Ok I run the woodbox S meter great free product. I wish the smeter read in DBm without hovering over it. Now is you want s units do as I and many others have done. Download ddutil it has a scree that reads voltage, s unit and DBM xaverage and peak that should satisfy every desire you would have. I doubt you will ever see a high tech program like smart sdr show the pan in s units but the ddutil will alow you to give the S meter reading in s units without looking at the little snake we have now.

Mark Erbaugh

This is an old post, but I would still like to see the option to have the vertical scale of the pan adapter be in S units or dBm. This is a feature of the Elecraft P3.