QSO ActiveX Controls Readme Notes

Release 0.1 Alpha
November 27, 2001
Dave Cook
WAØTTN
waØttn@qsl.net

Introduction

Welcome to the first release of the QSO ActiveX controls These controls are designed to provide an easy means for creating your own digital mode communcations application in Microsoft Visual Basic and Visual C++.

QSO Controls Concept

The QSO ActiveX controls are a wrapper around the Microsoft Windows RichText edit control. Two controls are provided, one for handing text to be transmitted, and one for handling the display of received data.

The receive control, or RXControl as we will refer to it, is a display-only text control. The user cannot edit the text displayed, however text can be selected and copied. In addition, the RXControl has a QSO logging facility. Information can be selected from the RXControl and stored in the QSO item collection, and subsequently written to external logging applications or used in macro processing.

The transmit control, or TXControl, is an editable text control representing a queue of text to be transmitted. It also contains a macro processor for automating transceive operations.

Installation

This distribution should include the following files:
Readme.htm The file you are now reading.
QSOX.dll The QSO Controls ActiveX component.
QSOControls.chm Documentation for the QSO controls, in Windows compiled help format.
MiniPSKSrc.zip A little VB project I used in developing the QSO controls. Useful for demonstrating the interaction between the RX and TX controls.
regsvr32.exe A Microsoft tool for installing the WinPSKX component on your computer.

Perform the following steps to install the QSO controls on your computer:
  1. Place the QSOX.dll file in a convenient location on your computer. You may wish to place it in your Windows system directory. The location of this file is not important, but it should be put where it is not likely to be accidentally deleted.

  2. Run the regsvr32 program to install the control on your computer, as shown in the following example:

    regsvr32 qsox.dll

  3. The results of the installation will be display on a message box. If the installation did not succeed, please send me an e-mail message describing the failure you encountered.

Using the QSOX Controls

Please read the documentation contained in the QSOControls.chm file. Double-click on this file using Windows Explorer to activate it. Do not try to open this file with a text editor.

To create a simple QSO application in Visual Basic, follow these steps:

  1. Create a new "Standard EXE" project in VB.

  2. Right-click the mouse on the Toolbox and select "Components..." from the popup menu.

  3. Scroll down the list of available controls and select both "QSOX ActiveX Control module" and "WinPSKX ActiveX Control module", and click OK.

  4. You will see three new controls added to the Toolbox, the standard WinPSKX control, and a set of RX and TX controls. For the first demo application, create an instance of the WinPSKX and the RX controls on your form.

  5. Now start the QSOControls.chm documentation file and go to the section titled "Programming Examples". Type in the code shown in the "PSK31 Monitor" topic into your VB project.

  6. Run the project and you should see a fully operational PSK31 receiver.

Also have a look a the MiniPSK application included with this distribution to see how the RX and TX controls would be used in a PSK31 tranceiver application.

Precautions

Please be aware of the following:
  1. There is no automated installation. This is an SDK. As such, I only provide redistributables. You will need to write your own application installation scripting and perform the control registration as part of the installation process.

  2. This version is still under development, and this is a preview version for selected developers. Among the known issues are:

    1. The interfaces to the logging applications is not yet complete. You can store items in the log, but the WriteLogApp and WriteLogFile methods don't do anything.

    2. The text color and font interfaces are not yet implemented. For now, I'm using the stock color and font settings from the WinPSK application.

    3. You can paste text from the clipboard into the TXControl, but it doesn't go into the TX queue. For some mysterious reason, I haven't been able to intercept the OnPaste command in order to get my mitts on the pasted text. As a result, the text shows up in the TXControl, but can't be retrieved with the NextChar method.

    4. Be advised that there are likely other peculiarities with inserting text into the TX control. For example, you can place the cursor on already-sent text and enter new text. This text winds up getting appended to the end of the transmit queue, but shows up in the TXControl where you set the cursor, as well as being appended to the current TXControl text.

    5. File insertion macro processing is not implemented yet.

    6. I haven't been able to do much testing, so be advised that you may find additional misbehaviors or unimplemented features.

    7. The documentation is not quite complete. I intend to add more information on how to write applications using the QSO controls and the WinPSKX control.

  3. While I don't expect any problems, I must state for the record that I can't be held responsible for any inconvenience or damage to your computer system that might result from installing the QSO controls.

Thank you, and have fun!

Dave Cook, WAØTTN
waØttn@qsl.net

Revision History:

28-Nov-2001