Callsign Counter
The last 500 stations heard will be displayed. For each station,
a count of the types of packets received is indicated.
I've had a great time just letting this run overnight to see who
is dominating the APRS frequency. But, it may be helpful in keeping track of
your airborne payload and any other packet stations on the same frequency.
Initially, the data is sorted by the time it was heard in
reverse order. IE: Latest at the top, oldest at the bottom.
Click on any header (as indicated by the displayed tooltip
above) and the list will be sorted by that field in descending order with the
exception of the callsign. Callsigns are sorted in alpha-numeric ascending
order. Which ever sort you select, the form will continually display data in
that sorted order for as long as the packet terminal is open. Once you close the
packet window, all this data is erased.
The Menu
Save - If you have previously saved this screen with the SaveAs
command, you can click on Save and the file will be immediately written to disk.
Files will be overwritten with latest data.
SaveAs - Opens a dialog box and prompts you for an output
filename. Then, the file is written in plain text (just as it appears on the
screen). Existing files will be overwritten.
Export CSV - Exports the data in a Comma Delimited ASCII text
file useful for import into a spread sheet. Existing files will be overwritten.
See notes below.
The Buttons
If you click on "All Packets" the button label changes
to "Unique Packets" and an attempt is made to not count any duplicate
packets. This works pretty well. Each time a packet is received from a station,
the text of that packet, minus the callsign and path, is saved. When another
packet is received from that station, it is compared with this previous packet.
If it matches, it is not counted, but the last heard time is updated.
In the screen shot above, AutoUpdate is ON. You can toggle this
on/off at your discretion. It defaults to off. If on, each time a new packet is
received, this form will update.
At any time you can click on the "Refresh" button and
the latest accumulated data will be displayed. It's not needed when AutoUpdate
is active, but useful otherwise.
The form is stretchable in the height and width dimensions so
you can see much more than is visible in the screen shot above if you wish. The
width can be made narrower to just display a portion of the data (shown below).
However, as you can see, the buttons will only move left as far as the
Total Packets indicator on the form's bottom in order to preserve the display of
that value.
The Callsign Counter's position and vertical height is memorized
and used when reopened. The width of the screen always resets to default.
When you export a CSV file the time field in Callsigns Counted
is exported in serial format (number of days since 12/30/1899 at midnight (just
before 1/1/1900)).
When exporting a CSV file from the Import APRS/GPS screen the
serial time is just for the current day so it would appear as a decimal day
(0.2500) instead of say 36924.2500.
So, when you initially load it into a spread sheet (Excel in my
case) it looks like this:
However, if you highlight column "B" (Last Heard) and
select format cells and pick Date/Time the field will be changed to look like
that shown below.
In the case of a CSV export from the APRS/GPS Export routine
don't select to format as a date, instead just format as a time and the correct
time will be displayed.
I believe, but do not know for a fact, that most spread sheet
programs can deal with this type of time format.
The useful aspect of this is that time is a decimal number. So,
you could create a field that shows the elapsed time between two packets by
entering something like (+B6-B5). The result will be time in days. You could
then multiply by 1440 to get minutes, or 86,400 to get time in seconds. I leave
all that to your ingenuity. This greatly helps in analysis.
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