Showing a number of Kiwis using stacked browser tabs
When monitoring a frequency band on Kiwi receivers at different locations sometimes it is helpful to be able to view these simultaneously.
One could have a couple of browser tabs running with each one using a different Kiwi and set these up with the same settings ( e.g. center frequency, zoom level, mode / bandwidth, waterfall parameters) and then depending on the browser capabilties display these browser tabs stacked. As an example using a "Vivaldi" browser this looks as the combined display below.
To enter these settings manually for each individual Kiwi could be time consuming everytime when switching to another band and as a minimum it would be desirable to be able to change (scroll) the center frequency of these stacked tabs together. I looked at different browers and extensions but have not been able to find a suitable solution.
Another approach to this is starting from the TDoA extension and select the desired Kiwi nodes and use the links under the "speaker symbols" to open a number of tabs and display these stacked. This way the tabs will all have the same settings. Changing bands etc would then only require a reload of these links. Ideally these links would be transfered and 'somehow' show up directly on a type of stacked browser page all in one fell swoop.
Possibly someone on the forum has already explored this idea further or has suggestions on how to achieve this.
Best regards,
Ben
Comments
Hi Ben,
It's an interesting idea.
I wonder if something like CatSync could be modified to do something like this.
Maybe contact Oscar, DJ0MY ?
Regards,
Martin
Yes, interesting ideas.
The other thought I had for TDoA was a quick way to determine if a sampling station had reception of the target signal or not. Right now you have to select the station and then click the speaker icon in the station list which brings up an entire user connection in a new tab/window.
It would be nicer if you could shift-click on the station icon have have a small panel popup over the map showing a mini waterfall of the signal passband.
Hi John,
That's a good idea for the TDoA selection and would certainly help.
I wonder if it would be possible to perform some other quick comparison to validate if the selected KiWi's are actually receiving the target signal.
I often find when I perform a listening check that the signal is masked with local interference, even if the overall SNR is good.
Regards,
Martin
I wonder if SuperSDR may be of use
@jks Indeed such a mini waterfall popup display would be a great addition to the TDoA extension.
It looks that synchronized cursor movement across tabs would probably need a custom browser extension or a custom web application that acts as a container for the pages to display. A difficulty could be limitations due to different security policies for various browsers.
So perhaps the suggestion from WA2ZKD to have a look at SuperSDR which uses the pygame library might be leading to the shortest route.
Not sure if it will help, but I use a local HTML file which embeds four kiwi windows in iframes:
Edit the URLs as desired and change the filename extension to .html and open it with a browser.
Thanks G4DYA for that html file which could be a start.
A couple of things are needed as well such as trimming the individual html pages so as to show only the frequency scale and waterfall and the tricky part of having a synchronized cross pointer cursor on those 4 panels.
Best regards,
Ben
A bit more progress with this. There is a a js function 'element.remove()' that I planned to use to reduce the display items not needed for this purpose. Turns out this cannot be used on a page with embedded iframes and I have not found another way to do this.
I then looked at some extensions for chromium and found "click to remove elements" and "tile tabs WE" to be usable and added an old windows program called "crosshair v1.1" on CNET to get the results below.
The yellow cross hair cursor extends over the full screen, but tuning still has to be done in each seperate tile either by cursor or using the frequency entry box. Still far from perfect and a special browser extension would be a better solution.