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Support |
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Support |
FSM has not been tested with Vista. It has been tested on Windows 7, 8 and 10 and works fine.
FSM is written in Visual Basic 6.0. Microsoft have published a support statement for VB6. The executive summary states:
The Visual Basic team is committed to “It Just Works” compatibility for Visual Basic 6.0 applications on Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008 and Windows 7.
The Visual Basic team’s goal is that Visual Basic 6.0 applications that run on Windows XP will also run on Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008 and Windows 7. The Visual Basic team is also committed to the Visual Basic 6.0 development environment running on Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008 and Windows 7. As detailed in this document, the core Visual Basic 6.0 runtime will be supported for the full lifetime of Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008 and Windows 7, which is five years of mainstream support followed by five years of extended support
Latest full FSM setup package (~2000kB)
The installer and application .exe are signed, the thumbprint is 664d1c64ee0c34af30643151bb8086cb469818b7.
Latest FSM setup package signature.If you need the VB runtime, runtime files for Visual Basic 6.0 are available at no charge from Microsoft at Visual Basic Run-time Files, choose the runtime for Visual Basic 6.0 with the latest Service Pack applied (SP6 at the time of writing this document).
Some users have experienced problems with the NFM "Check for Updates" function under Windows XP. Microsoft has shipped changes to the security environment in XP that block the operation, you need to change the "Access data sources across domains" in the "Internet Zone" security settings to "Prompt" or "Enable".
(Dates in this list are AEST, UTC+10)
Minor changes, signed.
Added export of wave plot to Gnuplot file.
Adjusted URLs to new support site.
GPS dialogue changed to allow specification of COM1 to COM99, updated MSCOMM32.OCX packaged to support.
Some additional shortcut keys to make scripting from WScript easier.
Fix a couple of errors in the new installer (incorrect help menu, interference with NFM installation).
Various minor improvements, new Inno installer.
Because of the installer change, it is recommended that versions earlier than 1.5 be UNINSTALLED prior to installing V1.5 or later.
Reinstated DCUpdater support.
Disabled some utility options that are no longer available under later versions of Windows.
Added fields for latitude and longitude, added support for position from GPS NMEA data connection.
Note new formats for FsmData.tab, all exported data formats, and online database to cater for the new fields. Because of this, all previous versions go unsupported.
Removed hooks to dcUpdater.
Improved internationalisation, some other improvements, changed licence terms. Preroll increased from 200ms to 1000ms to cope with long start up transients as observed on the SignaLink USB interface.
Prior versions of FSM were not tested for decimal separators other than '.', and are unlikely to have worked properly for those decimal separators.
Improvements to some forms.
Integration of update checking facility and an interface to dcUpdater. New installer (Nullsoft Install System) to address some issues with the Microsoft installer packaged with VB6.
dcUpdater is a free general purpose update checker that can check for updates for multiple programs and help the user download and install them. dcUpdater is not required to install and maintain FSM, but it makes ongoing maintenance more convenient. For more information click on dcUpdater.
Recommendation: It is strongly recommended that all existing versions of FSM be uninstalled before installing this package. Go to Start Menu / Settings / Control Panel and click Add / Remove Software. Remove all of the instances of FSM from the list, do not worry about errors reported on un-installation, they are a by-product of the old Microsoft installer.
More relocation of code as a result of lack of reliability of the lost focus event. Default filename passed to DPLOT, now requires DPLOT / DplotJr v2.1.2.8.
A revised method of removing the dc component from measurements, which now includes a single pole HPF with a cutoff frequency of 20Hz. This method works better with soundcards that have a large dc transient at startup (mainly some notebooks).
Facility to check online for updates. Transfer facility rewritten to XML format. FSM now uses msxml3.dll which will be installed on most modern computers (eg computers running IE6). The latest msxml3 (MSXML3 SP7) at the time of writing) installer is available on Microsoft's web site.
The FSM Transfer Facility for online filing of measurement results has been updated and will require FSM V1.0.18 or later.
Accuracy of Utilities / Calibrate function improved. Some usability enhancements. Updated DPLOT interface lib.
Changes to some shortcut keys to ensure validation of field entries (see updated shortcuts documentation), samples / interval saved to profile, obstime more accurate: adjusted to be middle of sampling interval, more improvements in control interactions and field validation.
Fixes to control interactions / focus changes etc. Documentation corrections, keyboard shortcut guide appended to documentation.
Check on minimum size (3 records) of antenna cal file for import.
V4 Dplot DLL packaged, requires DPLOT or the free DPLOT Jr at V2.1 or later.
Adds a large format real time clock display to the main form (handy in taking notes to be read in conjunction with timestamped log records.
Adds a "Record TSV" button to the main form, and link it into the focus shifting scheme.
Write Notes field out to TSV and Transfer data, formatted with URLEncoding.
Documentation updated accordingly.
Adds a facility to read a file of antenna Frequency/AntennaFactor pairs, and automatically calculates a spline interpolated value at the frequency of measurement.
Some usability changes is pre-selecting entire fields for some numeric fields to facilitate data entry in the field, shortcut keys for some numeric fields often changed with each measurement, facilitating "mouseless" operation for individual measurements.
Documentation updated accordingly.
In all a significant amount of work, about 300 lines of affected code, about 8% of the codebase.
Revises the algorithm for calculating receive power from the Step 2 and Step 3 measurements to increase FSM's flexibility and accuracy at lower measurement levels, allowing measurement of noise levels with Fa below 0dB. This has allowed relaxation of some limits that were needed for the older algorithm, and an associated change to the calibration utility. Documentation updated accordingly.
Fixes a defect in range checking input Interval in ms. This defect did not introduce error into any measured or calculated results.
Most Recently Used File list (for profile files) on File menu.
Replaces the RxNoiseFloor metric with the receiver Noise Figure (RxNF). RxNF is more independent of receiver effective noise bandwidth, meaning that for a given receiver, the RxNF is not likely to change much with changed filter bandwidths, whereas RxNoiseFloor was proportional to bandwidth. RxNF is also a simpler indicator of whether a user has entered an unrealistic value. The new version of FSM will automatically convert any profiles to the new metric when it opens them, and they will be saved with RxNF. This facility may not be in future versions, so it is advisable to open all profiles and save them to force conversion. A handy Receiver Sensitivity Metric Converter is available to convert from specification of measurements to a range of alternative metrics, including Noise Figure.
The database has been converted and will not accept uploads from FSM V1.07. (RxNF=RxNoiseFloor-10*log(Effective Noise Bandwidth)+173.398.)
Added Obstime to Title2 in DPLOT, increased frequency field to 3 dec places, added AGC threshold field, widened Location, Tester, and Receiver fields to 40 char, revised documentation to reflect changed functionality.
Changed normalised measurements to be normalised to 1Hz bandwidth.
Fixed transposition of QP/RMS and Pk/RMS labels in text file save / send / email. CalibrateRx second option changed to remove ambiguity and align with more common labeling practice.
Added display of "Average" values to the existing RMS, QP and Peak measured and calculated values for comparison with measurements using instruments with an average detector.
Fixed error in calibration utility using noise generator specified in ENR. The defect caused a -1.5dB error in receiver noise floor when FSM was calibrated using the third calibrate option.
This version was released because of a defect in DPLOT / DPLOTJr 1.9.9.5. My recommendation is that you do not use FSM with DPLOT / DPLOTJr 1.9.9.5.
FSM V1.10 works properly with DPLOT prior to 1.9.9.5, and FSM
V1.02 works with DPLOT 1.9.9.7. The only change to FSM
V1.02 is that the install package uses the updated DPLOTLIB.DLL
V1.9.9.6 required for DPLOT /DPLOTJr
1.9.9.7.
FSM V1.02 is published under the GPL.
CISPR extrapolation replaced with 3kHz extrapolation, relevant
export variable labels changed.
QP and Peak calcs use simulated half wave rectifier.
Reactivate validation of Interval values.
Initial production release.
FSM is free software.
FSM is © Copyright: Owen Duffy 1995, 2005. All rights reserved.
© Copyright: Owen Duffy 1995, 2021. All rights reserved. Disclaimer.