First, let me say thanks to all who were interested enough in the protocol issue to offer suggestions
>Usable on SSB ... ?????? I have worked New York state from tampabay on USB with stacked ku4ab squailos. I am not sure I understand Bruce's puzzlement. The subject antenna is derived from the horizontally-polarized "skeketon-slot" antenna of the early 50's, and is usable for SSB because it is horizontally polarized, which is the convention for CW and SSB weak signal activity on 2m. Even a simple dipole can work long distances during E-skip or tropo conditions, but our task is to provide sufficient antenna gain for reliable flatland communications over 100 miles without having to rely on propagation as an assist. I also have stacked KU4AB square loops, which I started out with on 2m, but this antenna outperforms those by a significant margin of almost 5 db. In actual tests over 150 miles between my 13B2 to a single KU4AB loop mounted on a mobile truck compared to the skeleton-slot antenna mounted on the same truck, SSB signals that were not understandable on the KU4AB loop were 100% copiable on the skeleton-slot antenna on the same vehicle at the same height (no enhancement present). In addition, if you make careful tests of the KU4AB loop, you will probably find that the pattern is not very omnidirectional, but has deep nulls and one of the nulls on mine measured almost 6 dB. Therefore, a bi-directional antenna like the skeleton-slot is statistically almost as "omnidirectional" as the KU4AB square loop. The "big wheel" would probably be a better choice than stacked KU4AB loops, and is used on many horizontally polarized beacons, but I have not actually tested one. My tests are made using a 2m beacon located at 30 feet, 8 airmiles away. My antenna design is just a simpler, and cheaper ($25), way to make a "skeleton-slot" antenna. If you are interested, check out this excellent article on the skeleton-slot antenna: http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/D.Jefferies/antennexarticles/qloop.htm Yes, Visual studio 2005 is the free compiler I just got from Microsoft but have not tried it yet. I am not shooting for a cross-platform application, but only for an equivalent Windows application to the Linux version that is already close to completion. Only the function needs to be the same, which is basically DigiPan 2.0 or PocketDigi plus ARQ and simultaneous multichannel decoding and display. The PocketDigi C++ code is a good start and works very well (slightly better than DigiPan!), so Visual Studio seems to be the fastest way for me to incorporate that proven code as I have not used RealBasic. I wrote my DigiTalk program in Visual Basic 5.0 using PSKCORE.DLL. I wrote QuikPSK using Delphi, also using PSKCORE.DLL, and there is a Kylix version of Delphi for Linux. I have never programmed in C++ before. :-( My own programming experience is very limited, so if anyone has C++ experience that would like to help, you are more than welcome to join the effort! The reward is coming up with a narrowband ARQ program for Windows for ARRL to use nationally for Emcomm in place of Winlink so they do not try again to give the Winlink Email robots more space where the rest of us are just trying to enjoy our hobby. Using PSK63, or even PSK125, there is more than enough space in 10 kHz of spectrum to handle all the Emcomm communications ARRL will ever need. We just need to show it can be done. This is why I am working on this. 73, Skip KH6TY
