[Lowfer] Help with WOLF parameters

[John Andrews]

Dick,

Nice to see that you contributed to the 70 million that the movie took 
in over the weekend. Looks like it may make back its effects budget.

t: correct, time in seconds.

f: Yes, offset in Hz from the BFO pitch, 800 Hz in this case. If you see 
this value slowly shift while the program is "locked-on", then you may 
have receiver frequency drift. Or the guy sending may be drifting...not 
the case with either Jay or myself!

pm: This will give you an idea of the strength of the signal. I believe 
it works on the data in the "reference channel," which is the 
predetermined 480 bit message interleaved with the message being sent. 
The number will never decrease, but will grow as copy is accumulated. 
The things to watch for are the rate of increase, and the amount per 
line. Steady growth is a good thing. Increases of 4000 or more per step 
actually indicates overload, and you could back off on the RF gain.

jm: These are bit-timing values that indicate the framing of the decoded 
signal. This runs from 0 to 959. The number itself is meaningless, but 
you can learn a lot from watching the overall output. Several lines of 
the same value may indicate that you have locked onto a signal. If you 
are getting correct text copy, but the "jm" value is slowly changing, 
you probably have an error in specifying your sound card's sampling 
rate. Note: you can't tweak the actual sampling rate of the sound card; 
you can only report the actual value to WOLF so it will compensate for 
it. The copy of my signal from last night shows stable "jm" values, so 
your card may be close to the default 8000 Hz value. Some are...some 
aren't, and price may not be the determining factor.

q: These are two signal to noise readings. The first one is for the 
reference channel, the second one for the data channel. Higher numbers 
(more positive) represent better signal to noise ratios. If you see "q" 
values of -3 or greater, expect to start seeing clear copy.

Based on the copy you sent from last night, you don't have much tweaking 
to do. You could learn more by playing with a weak signal -- my 500 
watts is pretty strong at your qth. Maybe Jay or I could provide a 
weaker signal some night. He copied me down to 5 milliwatts yesterday 
afternoon, but couldn't quite make it with 500 microwatts. We'll let you 
know.

John A.