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HamCall (April 1991)
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HAMCALL CD-ROM (Buckmaster)(April 1991).BIN
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1990-10-14
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TMUF
TMUF was originally written in response to a request from VS6DX
for a IBM PC program that would replace the commercial APPLE
program he had been using for predicting HF propagation. There
seemed to be a noticeable lack of Ham Radio Programs for the IBM
PC, and no graphical MUF plotting program could be located. Hence
this program was written. Version 1.00 of TMUF has been finished
and in use since February 1986. Due to requests of many hams who
have seen it in operation, I am Placing it in Public Domain, and
encouraging its FREE distribution. TMUF may be shared with other
people under one condition; that there is NO CHARGE for the
copy(s).
There is obviously much room for improvement of the Program, and I
have since developed better ways of doing many of the functions in
TMUF. However, as the program fills my needs at the moment, I have
little incentive to rewrite it.
TMUF is a User Supported program. I am asking for a donation of
$20.00 for its use. If there is enough interest and support shown,
I will be updating and improving it. Otherwise, it does what I
need and will remain as is. Donations should be sent to:
James W. Harrison W4HSR
1904 Duke Drive
Richardson, Texas 75081
DESCRIPTION
This is TMUF, version 1.00, placed in the Public Domain by the
Author, W4HSR. It is a Turbo Pascal version of MINIMUF 3.5 as
Described in the December 1982 QST article. In addition to
calculating and displaying the Maximum Usable Frequency (MUF) and
the Optimum Working Frequency (FOT), it permits you to easily
choose and change the Date and Flux value for the Calculation, to
select the Transmit and receive Stations from a database which you
can control and customize, and to plot the calculated values
graphically if you have a color graphics adapter. You may add
stations to the supplied database using the program, or you may
use any ASCII Text Editor to add to, modify, or rearrange the data
base.
TMUF was written in Turbo Pascal for an IBM PC or close compatible
with 256 K or more of RAM. If equipped with a Color Graphics
adapter, you will be able to display the calculated values on an
X-Y graph very similar to those published monthly in QST. If you
have only the monochrome adapter don't despair, you will instead
receive a Table of values when requesting a graph. The Program is
able to determine if you have graphics compatible hardware. Credit
is hereby given to to the following persons who have provided
previous programs, source code, and the testing upon which TMUF
has been built.
Robert B. Rose, K6GKU for the original MINIMUF
program in BASIC published in QST magazine,
December 1982.
Dennis Allen, WA5LXS who converted the
original MINIMUF to IBM BASIC and included
the conversion algorithm for Flux to Sunspot
Number.
J. Scott Douglass, K2SD for his BEAMHEAD.BAS
which formed the basis of the Data File
included with TMUF.
Ed Nance, VS6DX and the Ham community in Hong
Kong which tested the preliminary version of
TMUF and offered constructive comments.
Ed Bachmann for his EBMENU.PAS which was used
to implement the Menus for TMUF.
Donald R. Ramsey and Larry Romero for their
TURBO-UT.PAS which was used as the basis of
the formatted inputs.
If desired, the program may be initiated with up to two optional
parameters on the command line to automatically set desired
selections. This will bypass the introductory screen and result in
an automatic calculation/plot. The first parameter is normally
solar flux value and the second is the desired receive Station
Call Letters or Prefix. Either or both of these parameters may be
specified by typing them on the command line immediately after the
program name separated by a space. If no parameters are specified,
the program will default to a solar Flux of 80 and with the
Receive Station set to the second record in the Data base. If you
wish to specify the receive station without specifying a flux
value you may do so. The Transmit Station will always be set to
the first entry in the Data Base.
If either of the two parameters are specified, the program will
automatically go into the Plot mode upon entry, and will shortly
after display the graph of the specified data. If at any time you
specify or select a station which is not in the data base, you
will be so informed, and may make another selection.
For anyone who may not know how to obtain the value of the Solar
Flux, it is broadcast by the National Bureau of Standards radio
station WWV at 18 minutes after each hour. WWV broadcasts in the
high frequency bands may be received on 2.5, 5.0, 10.0, 15.0 and
20.0 mHz.
The program features a Lotus style menu for all selections. You
may make your selections by typing the first letter of the desired
selection, or by moving with the cursor keys or space bar to the
desired selections and pressing Return. The Menu selections are:
Plot Plots the MUF/FOT of the current settings if you
have a color graphics adapter. If not a table will
be displayed as described below.
Table Displays a table of the MUF/FOT of the current
settings. All information available on the Plot is
also displayed in the table. For some applications
the table may be preferable, and the table does not
require the color graphics adapter.
Add_a_Station Permits adding new Stations to the Data base.
Stations added in this manner are appended to the
end of the data base file. You will be asked for
the Call or Prefix of the station, the city, state
or country, and the latitude and longitude. Refer
to the description of the data file for more
information.
Date Permits changing the Date of the Calculation. The
default date is the DOS date as read by the program
upon entry. You may change the date to any valid
date. TMUF will not accept invalid dates. The year
portion is used only in checking validity of Leap
years and has no bearing on the actual MUF
calculations! The primary use of the date is to
calculate the solar zenith angle at the mid-point
of the path. This has a very important effect on
the MUF as you will find if you experiment with
various dates. You will find a marked difference in
the behavior of the path during the winter and
summer periods.
Flux Permits changing the value of the solar flux. Solar
Flux may range between 65 and 245. This is
converted to Smoothed International Sunspot Number
in the TMUF program. Flux is used instead of
sunspot number as the input unit due to the readily
available flux data from WWV.
Select Allows you to Select a new station from the data
base as either the Transmit or the Receive Station.
You will first be asked for the Station Call or
Prefix. You may type over the data in the field, or
you may clear the field by pressing the <ESC> key.
Your entry need not be complete. If you can't
remember the complete call or prefix, enter as much
of the leading part as you are sure of. The select
function is not case sensitive, so you don't have
to worry about whether you are in upper or lower
case mode. Partial matches are allowed, but
remember that the program will select the FIRST
entry which matches your input. After entering a
value in the Call field, press return and you will
be asked to enter either a R to designate the
Selected call as the Receive station, or a T to
designate it as the Transmit station.
End Ends the Program and returns you to DOS
The Data Base itself is a simple sequential file with fields
delimited by commas in the manner of a BASIC program DATA
statement. In Fact this file was generated from BASIC DATA
statements included in the Public Domain Beam Heading Calculation
Program BEAMHEAD.BAS. The fields are as follows:
Field 1: Call Sign or Prefix - Free form Upper Case 20 characters
Maximum.
Field 2: City - Free form Upper Case 20 characters
Maximum.
Field 3: State or Country - Free Form Upper Case 20 characters
Maximum.
Field 4: Latitude - Numbers and sign only, entered as
a decimal number, North Latitude
is positive, South Latitude is
negative, nine characters Maximum,
Absolute Value must not exceed 90,
Plus Sign not Required.
Field 5: Longitude - Numbers and sign only, entered as
a decimal number, West Longitude
is positive, East Longitude is
negative, nine characters Maximum,
Absolute Value must not exceed
180, Plus Sign not Required.
Being a sequential text file, the Data Base may be Edited with
almost any ASCII Text Editor. The order of entry of the majority
of the file as furnished here is alphabetical. This is quite
arbitrary and may be changed by you if you desire. Only two of the
entries are important as to their order, and these are the first
and second. The program will always use the first entry in the
Data File for the default transmit station. Hence, you should
place your own station as the first entry in the Data File. Also
the program will use the second entry in the Data File as the
default receive station unless it receives contrary instructions
via the command line. Therefore the second entry in the Data File
should be selected as the station of your primary interest. Other
entries may be in any order, but as the search for a call is
sequential, you might want to move the stations you frequently
plot to the first part of the file, immediately after the second
entry (Receive station). This will speed up the selection process.
Duplicate Entries are allowed, and you will find many in the
supplied data base, but due to the Sequential search method, only
the First occurrence can be selected. Also, since partial matches
are allowed in the selection portion of the program, the first
entry matching the partial entry will be selected, i.e., if both
UA1 and UA9 are in the data file and you select Ua, the first UA
entry will be chosen. Note that selection in the program is not
case sensitive.
The mathematics of the MUF calculation used in this program are as
nearly as possible exactly the same as the BASIC program described
in the QST article. There's a whole lot of Trigonometric number
crunching going on, for each hop, for each hour of the selection,
so be patient. Actually it's not too bad, requiring at most about
30 seconds to calculate a new 2 hop path (All paths are treated as
either one or two hops). If you wish to compare the results of
TMUF with the original MINIMUF, the two stations used in the QST
article example are included as TEST1 & TEST2 in the data Base. Be
sure and set the Flux to 156 and the date to 17 Oct for the
comparison. As supplied, TEST1 and TEST2 are the first and second
entries, and will default to the transmit and receive stations.
The calculated data including the selected Parameters, Path
Distance, Beam Heading from the Transmit Station, and computed
number of Hops are displayed in either Graphical or Tabular format
by choosing PLOT or TABLE from the Menu. If no changes have been
made to Station, Date, or Flux since the last calculation, the
Display is almost Instantaneous, as the data does not have to be
recalculated.
If you wish to print the Graphical Output of TMUF, you should
issue the DOS command GRAPHICS before running the Program, and
then use the Print Screen Function (depress the SHIFT and PrtSc
keys simultaneously) to produce the printout. Note that the call
to GRAPHICS is is included in the MUF.BAT file.
The TMUF program includes the following Files:
TMUF.COM This is the Actual Program.
TMUF.DAT This is the Data Base of Calls and locations.
TMUF.DOC This File which you are presumably reading!
4X6.FON This is a font file required by the Turbo Pascal
Graphics routines. If you are not equipped with
Graphics Hardware, you do not need this file.
8X8.FON This is also a font file required by the Program.
Likewise if you do not have Graphics hardware, you
will not need this File.
ERROR.MSG This is the Pascal Error Message File.
MUF.BAT
This is a batch file used to start TMUF. It
includes the call to GRAPHICS.COM and handles the
command line variables for TMUF.COM.
AUTOEXEC.BAT Optional, included in case you wish to boot and run
the program from diskette. You will need to add
this file to a system formatted diskette along with
the TMUF.COM and TMUF.DAT files. You should also
add the DOS files GRAPHICS.COM and MODE.COM and If
you have a clock/ calendar board, you should copy
your file for setting the DOS date/time onto the
diskette and replace the DATE and TIME statements
with the proper command for Setting the DOS clock
from your Clock board. This Batch file ends by
calling the MUF.BAT file described above.
The TMUF Program supports Pathing. In order to make sure that TMUF
can find the necessary files, you should install the files in a
subdirectory supported by your SET PATH command. Provided you do
this, TMUF should be able to find its files regardless of what
directory you are in when you call it. The files TMUF.COM,
TMUF.DAT, 4X6.FON, 8X8.FON, and ERROR.MSG must all be located in a
directory or subdirectory which is listed in the PATH environment
in order for the program to be able to locate the necessary files.
If you fail to do this, you will receive an error message to the
effect that the program can not locate the required file. If
unable to locate the data base file, TMUF will default the
transmit and receive stations to TEST1 and TEST2.
73 s
Jim Harrison, W4HSR
