[Suggestion] GPS Distance, Repeater Coords, & Channel Sorting

[VE4HTO]

... thats why i wrote "for the CPS only ... before writing to the radio" meaning to do this within the CPS to help building a Codeplug

[VK3KYY]

... thats why i wrote "for the CPS only ... before writing to the radio" meaning to do this within the CPS to help building a Codeplug

You can already preprocess any CSV file by writing a python script to split it into arbitrary geographic zones yourself, then use the CSV import function

This thread is about the radio showing the closest repeaters on the fly using the locating of the radio

[KQ4IOE]

I checked and there are only 4 bytes free in the channel data structure, so a precise position could not be stored, but possibly an approximate positions to about 1 mile accuracy may just fit

IF those 4 bytes aren't being used, I think GPS position would be a good option to use them for. About one mile accuracy is perfect for distance calculations.

We literally only have a few kilobytes of program memory remaining in the radio and the APRS functionality would probably take priority over other things.

I'm not sure what programming language is used, but I think this would be a big feature for a small price. If you loop through the repeaters and do some simple distance math, you should be able to find the closest repeater(s) with a small amount of code. It could possibly be RAM intensive, but if the radio can handle calculating satellites, it can handle that.

Overall, I think this is a worthwhile feature to add to this radio. It would be appreciated by many mobile DMR users, especially if they travel often. Big feature, small size.

Sidenote:

These radios have the CPU power akin to a 80's home computer , not a modern cellphone, or a RPi or even a RPi Pico.

Considering they do satellite calculation, I'm pretty impressed.

[VK3KYY]

FYI

The satellite prediction uses an algorithm from the 1980s which is not so processor intensive as the modern algorithms, but seems to be quite accurate

We spend a little lot of time optimising the code by hand for maximum efficiency

We dynamically change the CPU clock speed depending on what processing the firmware needs to do, to speed up the satellite prediction etc, but convert sely when the radio is idle we lower the clock speed to technically below the minimum in the CPU spec

If we didn't do all of this under the hood the firmware would not be so good

[KB0PCH]

So it looks like the technical hurdles of storing repeater position information was solved... did it end up being those last 4 bytes that got used?

Currently the setting is Show Dist OFF|ON. For us yanks, any chance the options could be OFF|km|mi ?

[VK3KYY]

So it looks like the technical hurdles of storing repeater position information was solved... did it end up being those last 4 bytes that got used?

Currently the setting is Show Dist OFF|ON. For us yanks, any chance the options could be OFF|km|mi ?

I think we now used all but perhaps 1 byte of available space in the channel data.

Re: Miles

Yes. This could be done, the only slight problem is that we have to add another voice prompt for "miles" and get it translated etc etc

Nothing is simple

[KB0PCH]

Nothing is simple

A really smart guy* I know had "Nothing is ever no problem" in his email signature and he's proven right on nearly a daily basis.

I figured it couldn't hurt to ask. Awesome job with the firmware!

* I'm not the smart guy. Wish I was.