Select a question and click 'ask', or just scroll down to peruse the questions and answers.
HamAlyzer loads, but then disappears. What do I do? How do I use a spectrum analyzer to improve my audio? How does the new registration system work? Can I use HamAlyzer for rf? Why does the dB axis only go down to -100 dB? What does "16 bit" mean? Why are the dB numbers (on the Y axis) negative? What does "-inf" mean? What system requirements are there to run HamAlyzer? So, what is a 'spectrum analyzer'? How do I use the 'FFT size' and 'sample rate' settings? What about the different 'window types'? Are there keyboard shortcuts to any of HamAlyzer's functions? How will HamAlyzer be shipped to me? Why do I get the installation error: "Some system files are out of date"? Why are the controls all messed up/not in the right place? Why do I get a 'runtime error: MSVBVM60.DLL, was not found' Why do I get a 'runtime error 5' when I try to start the program? Who is 'Code-Breaker Software'? What do I get for my 30 bucks? Where can I learn more about the FFT, VB Programming, and DSP?

Answer: This is a bug in the program. There is a fix. I thought I had taken care of this in version 2.8, but apparently some hams are still getting the problem.

When this occurs, the program is actually running, it's just that it is running off the visible part of your screen. Here's how to fix it:

1. Run HamAlyzer (watch the progress bar fill up, then the window disappear.
2. Right-click on your taskbar. The taskbar is that strip along the bottom of your screen, where you can select all the programs your running. Make sure 'lock the taskbar' is UNchecked.
3. Hold the mouse over the upper edge of the taskbar, so that the mouse cursor becomes an up/down arrow.
4. Resize the taskbar. Left click and hold the button down, and drag up to make it bigger. Release. You can do the same thing to make it normal sized again. This action will reset the window position of all open programs (HamAlyzer included), so that they are fully visible on your screen.

I will make sure this bug is removed for the next release.

To Top

Answer: I think the best answer I can give is to point you to the website of W3OZ. Larry is a ham who is very knowledgeable about SSB Hi Fi audio, and his website has a wealth of information about it. Also, he is on the air most every night on 14.168 or 14.178, if you have a question.

To Top

Answer: When you register, you'll receive a registration key (just a string of scrambled up text). All you do is run HamAlyzer, click the 'About' button, then click the 'Register' button, and then paste the key into the textbox and click the button. Then you just close the program and restart, and vwala, you've got the registered version.

Of course, if your past the 10-day evaluation period, the program won't run, so you can't paste the key in. Because of this, I include a 'key file' attached to the email, and you can just double-click on that file to update your registration information. You can use whichever method you like. Once the key is entered, HamAlyzer will run as the registered version instead of the evaluation version.

Then, any newer versions of HamAlyzer will run as the registered version, since your registration information information will still be there even if you uninstall the program. So you can download the newest copy from the website whenever it's convenient.

To Top

Answer: No. This is not a shortcoming of the program, but rather your sound card. Sound cards are designed to handle, well, sound, or only signals in the audible frequency range.

To Top

Answer: This is because when using 16-bit precision, -96 dB is the theoretical noise floor (see the "-inf" question and the "16-bit" question for details). There is no point to go down any further than that, since values below it are meaningless.

To Top

To Top

Answer: This is because dB, (or deciBel, named after Alexander Bell) is a relative measure of sound level, meaning it is compared to some standard. Really, you can make that standard anything you want. Sound cards tend to have the capability of accepting at most plus or minus 1 volt without 'clipping'. So I use that as the peak, or zero dB, and all other values are relative to that. So a value of -10 dB means that it is 10 dB down from the largest measurable value, 0 dB, or 1 volt.

To Top

Answer: The position window displays the frequency and level values of the mouse position when you left-click on the plot. Only the values for the plot(s) displayed will show up (Peak, average or freerun). The noisefloor, or lowest level a 16-bit sound card can achieve is -96 dB. If you're interested in the math,

dB(x) = 20*(log10(x/2^16)

So 1 is the smallest value measurable, since we're dealing with integers here. If you plug 1 into that equation, you get -96.329. This noisefloor is theoretical, meaning you can actually get numbers less than that out of the FFT, it's just that those numbers don't mean anything. Anything less than -96 dB is essentially "minus infinity", or less than measurable. "-inf" means "minus infinity", or below the noisefloor.

To Top

Answer:

Windows 95/98/98se/NT/ME/2000/XP

Note that HamAlyzer is 32-bit software, and as such will not work with windows 3.1 or 3.11, even with win32 extensions.

at least 32 megs of RAM

One interesting thing is that the amount of ram required by HamAlyzer changes as you adjust the FFT size. At the smallest FFT size (1024), it takes up about 8 megs of ram. If your using the largest FFT size (32768), it uses a little less than 14 megs.

3 megs of free hard drive space

Intel Pentium, or AMD K6 or better;

Processor speed has a great deal to do with HamAlyzer's performance. I've run it on a 60 mHz pentium machine, but for acceptable performance, I recommend at least a 300 mHz processor.

At least 256 colors

A fast video card also significantly improves HamAlyzer's performance. If you think your video card may be slowing things down, remember that you can get a very fast card nowadays for around 30-40 bucks, and installation is a snap.

Answer: A spectrum analyzer displays sound in terms of it's frequency content. It shows you what frequencies are present in whatever sound you are analyzing. HAM radios work within a 3000 Hertz (abbreviated 3 kHz) 'bandwidth'. This means that only frequencies between 0 Hz and 3kHz are present. For comparison, humans can typically hear frequencies up to about 12 kHz (infants up to 16kHz). Because HAMs have such a limited bandwidth to work in, it is important to utilize the entire band to achieve the highest quality signal possible. To that end, the use of a spectrum analyzer (like HamAlyzer) in conjunction with an equalizer (which adjusts the levels of particular frequency regions) can dramatically improve the quality of your signal.

To Top

Answer: The sample rate controls how many samples per second the sound card takes in. The higher the sample rate, the closer each sample is in time to the other samples. Essentially, the upper limit of the frequency range that you can see on the spectrum plot is one-half the sample rate. So a sample rate of 22050 means you can see frequencies up to 11025.

FFT size refers to how many bins are used in the FFT analysis. Again, you actually get half the number of bins displayed as the number that make up the analysis. So an FFT size of 1024 means we get 512 bins in our analysis.

The larger the sample rate, the larger the frequency region we're analyzing. The larger the FFT size, the more bins, or frequency points we have to look at in that frequency region. So if we keep the FFT size constant and increase the sample rate, we have the same number of points, just spread out over a larger frequency region. This means that the FFT points are spaced farther apart, giving us less 'spectral resolution'. Solution? Increase FFT size or lower sample rate. This gives us a higher density of FFT points in our spectrum, and consequently better spectral resolution. Drawback? The FFT takes time to compute, and time spent computing is time away from recording. This means you have a less accurate picture of the incoming sound. Another way to say that is that you have less temporal resolution. So you can see it's a trade off between temporal (time) and spectral resolution.

As far as the display is concerned, since HAMs usually are interested in a frequency range only up to 3 kHz, it is usually best to adjust these two settings so that the 0 Hz to 3 kHz range takes up as much of the plot window as possible. In HAMwindow mode (this mode is selected in the options window), an FFT size of 2048 combined with a sample rate of 32768 works well. The only problem with this setting is that not all sound cards work with that sample rate. In this case you will need to stick to sample rates of either 22050 or 44100.

To Top

Answer: Windowing is a process of applying a series of coefficients to the incoming data. The data from the sound card comes in as chunks (the size of which is determined by the FFT size number), each chunk is fft'd, and the result is displayed. If the signal coming in is loud, then the beginning and end of a chunk will start and end abruptly. This causes the fft to be unduly 'noisy'. Windowing reduces the level of the beginning and end of a chunk of data, by simply multiplying each value by a decimal. The center of the chunk is usually multiplied by one, so that if you plotted what a window looks like, it would usually look something like a cross-section of a bell (very low at the ends, high in the middle).

You can try this out by connecting a microphone to the mic input of your soundcard, and running HamAlyzer. Set the window type to 'Boxcar'. This is essentially no windowing at all, or a series of coeffients which are all 1's. Whistle into the mic. You'll get a peak at the frequency your whistling at, and everywhere else is noise. But the noisefloor is pretty high. Now switch to "Hanning". This is a very standard window type. The peak is still high, but now the noise floor is much lower. This is good. Different window types have different characteristics. But in general, Hanning is fine.

To Top

Answer: Almost all of the main-window functions have keyboard shortcuts. Here's a list, but remember; to get the keyboard shortcut, just hold the mouse cursor over a function to get the keyboard equivalent.

Key	Action
spacebar	start/stop
f	toggles freerun mode
a	toggles average mode
p	toggles peak mode
w	open wavefile for analysis
left-arrow	move x range slider left
right-arrow	move x range slider right
down-arrow	move y scale slider left
up-arrow	move y scale slider right
c	capture plot
o	options dialog box
.	about box
/	exit

Answer: If you choose 'email', I'll send you an email attachment. Your email provider must be able to handle attachments of at least 2 megs in size.

If you choose US or international mail, I'll send you a cd. Within the US, I ship priority mail. Outside the US, I ship standard mail.

For international orders, I'll find out how much shipping will be to your address, and add $1.50 US for packaging. I will then email you to let you know how much it is. US funds only, thanks.

To Top

Note: This problem has been addressed and corrected (no thanks to Microsoft). If your experiencing problems getting HamAlyzer to install, try downloading again. Things should work fine for you. I will leave the cause and workaround I had posted previously for reference purposes.

Answer: This problem is a confirmed Microsoft bug. You can view Microsoft's article on this problem at The Microsoft Knowledge Base. However, none of the workarounds provided on the MS site seem to help.

Because of this, I have provided some instructions for a 'brute force' installation, which does not use the installer program. The procedure is staightforward, and not much can go wrong, but you will be in your windows/system directory moving files around.

To Top

Answer: This problem has been addressed in the most recent version of HamAlyzer. If your using trial version 2.04 or lower (full version number is viewable in the startup 'splash' screen or the About Window) and are experiencing this problem, try downloading version 2.05 and reinstalling.

Why it happens: Windows allows you to set what it calls the 'Display Font Size', usually to either small or large. Large means that fonts are generally larger, and easier to see. This setting has differing effects on various other things. Visual Basic is a programming language that is supposed to take care of worrying about things like this, and in fact makes it difficult for programmers to have any control over them at all (Microsoft calls things like this a 'feature').

Anyway, I use the 'Small' display fonts setting on my machine. Therefore, anyone who also uses this setting should have no problem with controls. But if you are experiencing problems, your probably using the 'Large Fonts' setting. Unfortunately, I can't just switch to 'Large Fonts' and recompile the program. So to overcome this problem, I have the program check to see whether your using small fonts. If you are, the program starts normally. If not, all of the controls are moved around so that they look right for large fonts. This was the only solution I could think of. If your copy of HamAlyzer still doesn't look right, try switching to small fonts:

Click: Start Menu>Settings>Control Panels

Double-click on 'Display'

(Or right-click on the desktop and select 'properties')

Select the 'Settings' tab

Click the 'Advanced' button

Select 'Small Fonts' from the 'Display Font Size' pull-down menu

Click 'OK'

Click 'Close'

Allow Windows to restart

To Top

Answer: You need the Visual Basic Runtime files.

Note: The runtimes are free, about a 1.3 meg download, and are required for any program written in Visual Basic (so they're probably a worthwhile download anyway)

To Top

Answer: This issue has been addressed in the most recent version of HamAlyzer.

This problem occurs if there are two or more input sources attatched to a computer.

Example system configurations which have shown themselves to be problemmatic:

-A soundcard & a digital IO card (SPDIF, etc)
-A soundcard, & an enabled soundchip on the motherboard (Crystal Audio, etc)

Solution: If you use a sound card, check your BIOS and disable any on-board sound.

To Top

Answer: It's often useful to have a business name, for tax purposes, to have something to put in the 'Company:' slot on forms, etc..

So, my company name is now Code-Breaker Software. Where did the name come from? Well, it's true that I don't write encryption software, although I did write a program called 'CryptoReg' once that had an encryption algorithm in it. It was quite strong encryption; I wrote it, and I couldn't even crack it! :)

The name comes from the two meanings of the word break. 'code breaking' means cracking code, or more generally, figuring something out, unscrambling messes; going from chaos to order. But the main meaning of the word 'break' is 'to make not work', or in the programming world, going from order (software that works) to chaos (a pile of code that doesn't work).

Since I tend to move from one to the other (working software to a pile of junk) and back again quite easily (and quickly; it's amazing how fast you can kill a piece of software. one mistyped key and your debugging for the next 4 hours), both definitions of 'code-breaker' seemed to fit me. Hopefully, only the useful software ever sees the light of day, but only time will tell.

To Top

Answer: The following:

The 10-day time limitation will be removed

The "UNREGISTERED" text will be removed from the plot area

Your call sign will be in the title bar of the application

Your name and call sign will be displayed in the 'about' window as the registered user

In captured plots, "HamAlyzer from " and your call sign will be displayed in the upper left hand corner of the plot

This is your program (it has your name on it!). You are free to put it on as many computers as you wish. Make as many copies for your personal use as you like. The only thing I ask is that you not give a copy of your registered version to anyone else.

Answer: Don Cross's FFT page is a good place to start:
http://www.intersrv.com/~dcross/fft.html

Here's a link to a very nice site that has full working programs available for all kinds of signal processing applications, from a spectrum analyzer to filtering, an oscilloscope, a sound level meter, and full vb source code is available for many of the apps:
http://www.geocities.com/vrbalthezr/shannonsoft/page3.html

To Top

Answer: I'm afraid that my programming aplomb is surpassed only by my good looks. Yeah right =) 

To Top