Under development, last changed: 22/07/08 16:32:08 -0600 .  (For east coast Australia EST (+1000) add 16 hours (or subtract 8 hours and add a day) to the -0600 offset time.

News

A Newsletter is distributed via the Yahoo Group "VK1ODNewsletter". The FSM developer is the only person authorised to post messages, and traffic volume will be very low. Subscription is open to anyone (you will need a free Yahoo account).

Vista compatibility

FSM has not been tested with Vista, but should work on Vista.

FSM is written in Visual Basic 6.0. Microsoft have published a support statement for VB6. The executive summary states:

The Visual Basic team is committed to “It Just Works” compatibility for Visual Basic 6.0 applications on Windows® Vista™. The Visual Basic team’s goal is that Visual Basic 6.0 applications that run on Windows XP will also run on Windows Vista.

Links

Download

Latest full FSM setup package - V1.2.0 (~1020kB)

If you need the VB runtime, runtime files for Visual Basic 6.0 are available at no charge from Microsoft at Visual Basic Run-time Files, choose the runtime for Visual Basic 6.0 with the latest Service Pack applied (SP6 at the time of writing this document).

Known problems

None.

Version history

(Dates in this list are AEST, UTC+10)

1.2.0  22/07/2008 12:00

Improved internationalisation, some other improvements, changed licence terms. Preroll increased from 200ms to 1000ms to cope with long start up transients as observed on the SignaLink USB interface.

Prior versions of FSM were not tested for decimal separators other than '.', and are unlikely to have worked properly for those decimal separators.

1.1.2  30/06/2008 09:00

Improvements to some forms.

1.1.1  10/09/2007 09:00

Integration of update checking facility and an interface to dcUpdater. New installer (Nullsoft Install System) to address some issues with the Microsoft installer packaged with VB6.

dcUpdater is a free general purpose update checker that can check for updates for multiple programs and help the user download and install them. dcUpdater is not required to install and maintain FSM, but it makes ongoing maintenance more convenient. For more information click on dcUpdater.

Recommendation: It is strongly recommended that all existing versions of FSM be uninstalled before installing this package. Go to Start Menu / Settings / Control  Panel and click Add / Remove Software. Remove all of the instances of FSM from the list, do not worry about errors reported on un-installation, they are a by-product of the old Microsoft installer.

1.0.18  25/07/2007 04:00

More relocation of code as a result of lack of reliability of the lost focus event. Default filename passed to DPLOT, now requires DPLOT / DplotJr v2.1.2.8.

A revised method of removing the dc component from measurements, which now includes a single pole HPF with a cutoff frequency of 20Hz. This method works better with soundcards that have a large dc transient at startup (mainly some notebooks).

Facility to check online for updates. Transfer facility rewritten to XML format. FSM now uses msxml3.dll which will be installed on most modern computers (eg computers running IE6). The latest msxml3 (MSXML3 SP7) at the time of writing) installer is available on Microsoft's web site.

The FSM Transfer Facility for online filing of measurement results has been updated and will require FSM V1.0.18 or later.

1.0.17 21/07/2007 18:00

Accuracy of Utilities / Calibrate function improved. Some usability enhancements. Updated DPLOT interface lib.

1.0.16 01/07/2007 18:00

Changes to some shortcut keys to ensure validation of field entries (see updated shortcuts documentation), samples / interval saved to profile, obstime more accurate: adjusted to be middle of sampling interval, more improvements in control interactions and field validation.

1.0.15 03/04/2007 08:00

Fixes to control interactions / focus changes etc. Documentation corrections, keyboard shortcut guide appended to documentation.

1.0.14 21/01/2007 20:00

Check on minimum size (3 records) of antenna cal file for import.

V4 Dplot DLL packaged, requires DPLOT or the free DPLOT Jr at V2.1 or later.

1.0.13 28/11/2006 07:00

Adds a large format real time clock display to the main form (handy in taking notes to be read in conjunction with timestamped log records.

Adds a "Record TSV" button to the main form, and link it into the focus shifting scheme.

Write Notes field out to TSV and Transfer data, formatted with URLEncoding.

Documentation updated accordingly.

1.0.12 12/10/2006 18:00

Adds a facility to read a file of antenna Frequency/AntennaFactor pairs, and automatically calculates a spline interpolated value at the frequency of measurement.

Some usability changes is pre-selecting entire fields for some numeric fields to facilitate data entry in the field, shortcut keys for some numeric fields often changed with each measurement, facilitating "mouseless" operation for individual measurements.

Documentation updated accordingly.

In all a significant amount of work, about 300 lines of affected code, about 8% of the codebase.

1.0.11 21/06/2006 18:00

Revises the algorithm for calculating receive power from the Step 2 and Step 3 measurements to increase FSM's flexibility and accuracy at lower measurement levels, allowing measurement of noise levels with Fa below 0dB. This has allowed relaxation of some limits that were needed for the older algorithm, and an associated change to the calibration utility. Documentation updated accordingly.

1.0.10 15/11/2005 20:00

Fixes a defect in range checking input Interval in ms. This defect did not introduce error into any measured or calculated results.

1.0.9 28/10/2005 10:00

Most Recently Used File list (for profile files) on File menu.

1.0.8 06/10/2005 20:40

Replaces the RxNoiseFloor metric with the receiver Noise Figure (RxNF). RxNF is more independent of receiver effective noise bandwidth, meaning that for a given receiver, the RxNF is not likely to change much with changed filter bandwidths, whereas RxNoiseFloor was proportional to bandwidth. RxNF is also a simpler indicator of whether a user has entered an unrealistic value. The new version of FSM will automatically convert any profiles to the new metric when it opens them, and they will be saved with RxNF. This facility may not be in future versions, so it is advisable to open all profiles and save them to force conversion. A handy Receiver Sensitivity Metric Converter is available to convert from specification of measurements to a range of alternative metrics, including Noise Figure.

The database has been converted and will not accept uploads from FSM V1.07. (RxNF=RxNoiseFloor-10*log(Effective Noise Bandwidth)+173.398.)

1.0.7 08/07/2005 18:00

Added Obstime to Title2 in DPLOT, increased frequency field to 3 dec places, added AGC threshold field, widened Location, Tester, and Receiver fields to 40 char, revised documentation to reflect changed functionality.

1.0.6 21/06/2005 18:00

Changed normalised measurements to be normalised to 1Hz bandwidth.

1.0.5 12/06/2005 08:00

Fixed transposition of QP/RMS and Pk/RMS labels in text file save / send / email. CalibrateRx second option changed to remove ambiguity and align with more common labeling practice.

1.0.4 19/05/2005 18:00

Added display of "Average" values to the existing RMS, QP and Peak measured and calculated values for comparison with measurements using instruments with an average detector.

1.0.3 17/05/2005 20:00

Fixed error in calibration utility using noise generator specified in ENR. The defect caused a -1.5dB error in receiver noise floor when FSM was calibrated using the third calibrate option.

1.0.2 07/05/2005 06:00

This version was released because of a defect in DPLOT / DPLOTJr 1.9.9.5. My recommendation is that you do not use FSM with DPLOT / DPLOTJr 1.9.9.5.

FSM V1.10 works properly with DPLOT prior to 1.9.9.5, and FSM V1.02 works with DPLOT 1.9.9.7. The only change to FSM V1.02 is that the install  package uses the updated DPLOTLIB.DLL V1.9.9.6 required for DPLOT /DPLOTJr 1.9.9.7.
FSM V1.02 is published under the GPL.

1.0.1 01/04/2005 13:00

CISPR extrapolation replaced with 3kHz extrapolation, relevant export variable labels changed.
QP and Peak calcs use simulated half wave rectifier.
Reactivate validation of Interval values.

1.0.0 26/03/2005 08:00

Initial production release.

Licencing

FSM is free software.

FSM is © Copyright: Owen Duffy 1995, 2005. All rights reserved.