Spectrum Lab User's Manual
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Spectrum Lab User's Manual This „document“ is just a collection of all HTML files from Spectrum Lab's built-in help system. They were simply combined in a master document in OpenOffice (later LibreOffice), by means of 'including' the html pages as sub-documents. Unfortunately, the links between these sub-documents (which were once HTML pages heavily linking to each other, and to the 'index.htm' page) get broken in the OO document. This is the reason why all those helpful links don't work in the PDF you are currently reading. If you have a solution (i.e. how to convince OpenOffice / LibreOffice to get the hyperlinks working again, without having to edit zillions of links manually), please let me know. Contents 1 Spectrum Lab Manual - Preface and Help Index .......................................................................... 9 1.1 Contents / Overview .............................................................................................................. 9 1.2 Short Description ................................................................................................................. 10 1.2.1 Translations of the manual into other languages .......................................................... 10 1.2.2 Features ........................................................................................................................ 10 1.2.3 Some Applications ........................................................................................................ 11 1.2.4 About the help system .................................................................................................. 12 1.3 Disclaimer and other legal stuff ........................................................................................... 13 1.3.1 Ogg Vorbis disclaimer and terms of use ....................................................................... 13 1.3.2 Acknowledgements (more in the "ABOUT"-box)... .................................................... 14 2 Spectrum Lab Installation and Program Start ............................................................................. 15 2.1 System Requirements .......................................................................................................... 15 2.2 Installation and directory structure ...................................................................................... 15 2.3 Setting up the soundcard (or other input devices) ............................................................... 16 2.4 Unintended audio bypass between the soundcard's Line-In and -Output ............................ 17 2.5 Avoiding audio drop-outs (caused by thread priority settings / high CPU load) ................. 18 2.6 Stop windows from hiding audio devices which are not 'plugged in' .................................. 18 2.7 Windows 10 camera, microphone, and privacy ................................................................... 19 2.8 Notes on various soundcards ............................................................................................... 19 2.9 Quickstart for QRSS (very slow Morse code viewer) ......................................................... 20 2.10 Running SL 'as administrator', if certain functions don't work properly ........................... 20 2.11 Program Start with Command Line Arguments ................................................................. 21 2.11.1 Overwiev of command line parameters ..................................................................... 22 2.11.2 Running multiple instances of the program ............................................................... 24 2.11.3 Creating shortcuts for different configurations .......................................................... 24 2.11.4 Configuration data files .............................................................................................. 24 3 Controls in the main window ...................................................................................................... 26 3.1 Main Window, main menu ................................................................................................... 26 3.1.1 File ............................................................................................................................... 26 3.1.2 Start/Stop ...................................................................................................................... 27 3.1.3 Options ......................................................................................................................... 27 3.1.4 Quick Settings .............................................................................................................. 27 3.1.5 Components ................................................................................................................. 27 3.1.6 View/Windows ............................................................................................................. 27 3.1.7 Help .............................................................................................................................. 28 3.2 Built-in "Quick Settings" (in the main menu) ...................................................................... 28 3.3 Spectrum Display ................................................................................................................. 29 3.4 Control Elements in the main window ................................................................................ 30 3.4.1 Tabbed display control panel ....................................................................................... 30 Frequency control panel (in SpecLab's main window) ......................................................... 30 3.4.2 Time Axis ..................................................................................................................... 32 3.4.3 Cursor Position Display ............................................................................................... 32 3.4.3.1 Fixing the cursor on a certain frequency .............................................................. 33 3.4.4 Color Palette Control ................................................................................................... 34 3.4.5 Progress Indicator/Stop Button .................................................................................... 34 3.4.6 Programmable buttons ................................................................................................. 35 3.5 Controls on the bottom of the main window ....................................................................... 36 3.5.1 The Spectrum Buffer Overwiew (in the bottom control bar) ....................................... 36 3.5.2 Navigation buttons to scroll through the spectrogram buffer ...................................... 37 4 Spectrum Displays ....................................................................................................................... 38 4.1 1. Spectrum Graph ............................................................................................................... 38 4.2 2. Waterfall Display (aka Spectrogram) ............................................................................... 40 4.2.1 2.1 Multi-strip spectrogram .......................................................................................... 41 4.2.2 2.2 Visual AGC (for the spectrogram colour palette) .................................................. 42 4.2.3 2.3 Amplitude Bar (alongside the spectrogram display) .............................................. 42 4.2.4 2.2 Reassigned Spectrogram ........................................................................................ 43 4.2.5 2.3 3D Spectrum Display ............................................................................................. 43 4.2.6 2.4 Correlogram ........................................................................................................... 44 4.2.7 2.5 Displaying Icom's broadband spectrum instead of SL's FFT output ..................... 45 4.3 3. Frequency Scale ............................................................................................................... 47 4.3.1 Popup menu of the main frequency scale .................................................................... 48 4.3.2 Adjusting the visible part of the frequency scale ......................................................... 48 4.3.3 Adding or subtracting a user-defineable frequency offset (for the display) ................ 48 4.4 Multiple channels for the spectrum display ......................................................................... 49 4.5 Spectrum Averaging (Overview) ......................................................................................... 49 4.5.1 The "Second Spectrogram" .......................................................................................... 51 5 Spectrum Lab Configuration Dialog ........................................................................................... 52 5.1 1. System Settings ................................................................................................................ 53 5.1.1 1.1 Memory and spectrum file buffers ......................................................................... 53 5.1.2 1.2 Timezone ................................................................................................................ 54 5.1.3 1.3 Geographic Location .............................................................................................. 54 5.1.4 1.4 Timer Calibration