Re: [Hamlib-stationserver] Philosophy: Abstraction vs Rig Interface Artifacts

[Art B. <ac...@in...>]

On Mar 4, 2014, at 1:00 PM, Tony Langdon <vk...@gm...> wrote:
> How will we handle radios that are 
> capable of having multiple simultaneous receivers, for instance? (e.g. 
> the TAPR HPSDR software defined radios can have up to 7 receivers 
> independently running at the same time).

A great question.  My current thinking is to define a "device" (aka a "rig") as a black box that has a single connection to a server.  Within the device there may be multiple receivers, possibly even multiple transmitters, and various other components... amplifiers of various types, filters of various types, meters and controls of various types, etc.  (This is why we need the capacity to "discover" from the device its particular composition.)

Again, we get into questions of what's essential and what's just an artifact of individual product design.  E.g., many rigs have memories, multiple VFOs, RIT, XIT and so on, even though in actuality each transmitter and each receiver can only be set to one operating frequency at a time. *

Thus those features strike me as expedients ("facades" in the programming sense) added to make the rig's front panel interface more convenient for the user, but don't reflect essential reality.  They can reproduced on a client as desired without reproducing all the vendor-specific details end-to-end.  

The essential, for each transmitter for example, is to set-and-get a frequency, a modulation mode/modem, a power level and... well, those are the ones that spring immediately to mind.  Receivers are more complicated (as usual) but again, the essentials for each receiver are relatively limited in number.  Given those essential parameters in the protocol and a computer at the other end we could construct as sophisticated or as simple a UI as any particular user needs.  Thus the same rig might look very different to a contester than to a MARS op.

At the other extreme... many higher-end rigs and SDRs can display a spectrograph, which visualizes  energy levels in intervals across a segment of the spectrum.  Do any of the existing CAT interfaces make that vector of values available outside the rig?  This may be an area where we'll need to innovate, not to say lead.

- Art

* (I'm neglecting spread-spectrum and other broadband modes for the moment, but it might be more precise to say "one channel at a time.")