Monday, September 13, 2010

The Excalibur And Scheduled Recordings

As is known for those who've read about the Winradio Excalibur, the software lacks the ability to do scheduled DDC recordings. Which is puzzling, since their audio recording scheduler appears to be excellent.

Now, as many are aware of (myself not included), there is an abundance of programs offering scheduling of Windows software. John Smith, G8BUP, in a recent posting to a Winradio reflector pointed towards Splinterware's System Scheduler. I downloaded the free version of the program, and after a bit of investigation found it to be a very good companion to the Excalibur.

What it does, is to open the software, use the keyboard shortcuts for Start DDC Recording and Stop DDC Recording as part of the sendkey line and, if the user so wishes, closes Excalibur. These shortcuts are "Ctrl ¨" and "¨" respectively, and I didn't get them to work on the sendkey line. Luckily, you can define any of the 98 keyboard shortcuts to your own liking, so I chose "O" to start, and "V" to stop. The first "Wait"-command gives the Excalibur software time to "settle". I don't know if it is necessary or not, but better safe than sorry. 5000 is milliseconds, so this pause is 5 seconds.

The second "Wait"-command sets the length of the recording. In the illustration below it is set for 60 seconds. The third "Wait"-command gives the program 2 seconds to save the file until the Alt-F4 command is given for closing the Excalibur.















If you are doing more than one recording, closing the program is necessary, because otherwise the next scheduled recording will open another instance of Excalibur. I don't think 24 instances of the software will run very smoothly...

The scheduler itself has a large variety of options. The illustration below describes how I would use the scheduler for unattended full-hour and half-hour recordings.















As I mentioned, you can't choose the length of the recording in the scheduler, you need to do that in the sendkey line. The times refer to the PC clock, so they are local.

And of course, you need to prepare the Excalibur with the correct DDC bandwidth and the correct centre frequency. The DDC bandwidth can be changed with sendkeys, but I don't think the centre frequency can.

Update Sep 21: I have now made scheduled recordings over several nights, without any problems. This is indeed something you can use with the Excalibur. Thanks John for bringing this to my attention.

2 comments:

DANIC said...

Bjarne:

This is an excellent contribution to the G31DDC community!

Thank you very much.

DANIC said...

Bjarne:

This is an excellent contribution to the G31DDC community!

Thank you very much.