Copyright: (c) Peak Systems 1997


Alarm
Alarm for WinPack

ALARM.EXE allows you to set up alarm text strings, which will cause an audible warning when a line containing that text is monitored by WinPack. ALARM uses the PC speaker, it doesn't use the sound card.

In Use

Start WinPack, then start ALARM by using the "Start Alarms" option on the File menu.

ALARM will normally run minimised, but not the first time you run it. That is because it is useless until you have set up some alarm text. You do this by using the "Options", "Text" menu option - it should be obvious what to do. The text matching isn't case sensitive, so whatever you input is converted to upper case. You can input as many different strings of text as you want, and they can be as long as you want. When you have input your text, click Finished. You can of course alter the text any time you want.

There are four alarm sounds available - choose which one you want with the"Options", "Sound" menu options.

ALARM works via a DDE link to WinPack - it is passed all the text that WinPack receives. Whenever it sees one of your selected text strings, the sound is activated and the line containing that text is displayed in the Window.

There are two menu options which I added to V2 of ALARM specifically for my own use - they may well not be of interest to most other users:-

Whilst running a 10m port on my BPQ node during the Sporadic E season, I wanted to have an alarm whenver anything was monitored on that port, therefore I put "Port=3" as an alarm text. However, that resulted in an alarm occurring every time my own system sent a nodes broadcast, so I added "Options", "Exclude" which allows you to specify text which will cause a line to be ignored, even if the line contains a specified alarm text. By putting "G4IDE-1>NODES" as an exclude text, I could ignore my own nodes broadcasts.

I also wanted to log everything heard on the 10m port for later analysis, so I added the "Log Alarms" option - if it is checked then all lines which contain an alarm text and don't contain an exclude text will be logged. The log files are put in the TEXT subdirectory of the main WINPACK directory and have names like AL970620.TXT - that would be the alarm log file for 20th June 1997.

Restrictions

If an alarm is still sounding when another line containing an alarm string is monitored this second line is ignored.

The ALARM sounds, particularly the siren, may cause WinPack to lose characters. It doesn't happen with my system, but it is something to watch out for.