Sunday, September 26, 2010

The Perseus And Scheduled Recordings

After I found that Splinterware's System Scheduler worked flawlessly with the Excalibur SDR, I became increasingly dissatisfied with the way scheduled (and unattended) RF recordings worked with the Perseus SDR. So I began to experiment with the System Scheduler to see if it could run the Perseus as well.

The TOTH is a small gem of a scheduler, however too often it will fail to start a recording, or it will record only some of the scheduled recordings. Apparently, development was stopped before it had developed into a reliable software. Then there is the Perseus Record Scheduler (PRS) which I have tested briefly, but it is not ideal for recurring multiple recordings for many days (not to say weeks).

The Perseus and the Excalibur differ in two important aspects: Firstly, the Excalibur features keyboard shortcuts for just about any function. If you want to program the Perseus, you need to use mouse clicks to a specific part of the display (buttons, dialog boxes). So you can't move the GUI around on the display - if you do the mouse clicks won't work. Secondly, the Perseus prompts you for a file name prior to recording, while the Excalibur starts recording on the fly.

So, for the System Scheduler to work with the Perseus, you will have to program mouse clicks, and you will need to enter a file name in the dialog box. Fortunately, System Scheduler is powerful enough to let you define dates and/or times as file names, much the same way TOTH does.

A test this morning confirmed that the Perseus can indeed be scheduled by System Scheduler. So at the moment I have my PC recording top of the hours from both the Excalibur and the Perseus, using two events on the software.

The free version of System Scheduler is adequate for the task. The pro version gives you added versatility for USD 30. I haven't yet tested the pro version. By the way, the Help function is comprehensive, and most valuable for those (including me) who know nothing about programming.

There may be an abundance of software out there that do the same, and perhaps even better. I am however quite satisfied with what I got, so I feel no need to look further.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Bjarne: Have you ever used the schedule.txt file with PRS? I think this feature is undocumented - you have to be curious and look in the file itself to see what it does. I have used it to make recurring recordings and to have a template of recordings so that I don;t have to manually enter them.

Chuck

Bjarne Mjelde said...

Noooo.... like I said I only briefly tested PRS so anything undocumented would be certain to avoid my radar.

4nradio said...

Hi Chuck & Bjarne,

Alesso made a cryptic reference to schedule.txt in Perseus SDR Yahoogroup message #7587. Mostly though, the commented-out lines in the file are sufficient to get going. I too have used it as a template for repeated recordings. It works very well, and I find PRScheduler the most reliable Perseus utility of its type.

Guy