A night's scan leaves hundreds of files, most worth nothing and a few of
them the reason it was left running. Sorting that out meant leaving the
browser and going at the directory with mv and rm.
Five keys, meant to be pressed once each going down the list:
S I N file it into saved/, investigate/ or noise/
u put the last one filed back
d delete it and its sidecars, for good -- asks first
m lock the frequency out, so no later scan stops on it
Each of these acts on the whole capture -- the .wav, the JSON sidecar, the
IQ, the transcript and the decoded data -- because a recording in one
directory and its transcript in another is a pair nothing will ever put
back together. A move that cannot be finished puts back whatever already
moved. The cursor stays on the row it was on, which is now the next
recording, since a cursor that jumped would make one-key-per-recording
impossible.
m writes to the lock-out list in the settings file, the same one the
scanner's own l key maintains, so a birdie found while reading last night's
recordings is gone from tonight's. It says "the next scan": one already
running read its settings when it started.
The subdirectories sit under the recordings directory, so a scan writing
there never looks in them, and saunterbrowse ~/bandsaunter/saved reads one
back.
Also here, because this is the first part of the browser that writes:
- The help screen is back inside eighty by twenty-four. It had grown past
the bottom of an ordinary window, which puts "q quit" off the screen.
- The footer drops keys in a deliberate order when the window is narrow,
rather than ellipsising whichever happened to be at the end.
- Moving or deleting what is playing stops the player first.
- The pty harness accepted an env and ignored it, so a test aimed at a
throwaway settings directory wrote to the real one. It honours it now,
and conftest redirects the settings directory for every test besides.
1014 tests.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016PsWPTweCT6pwxKngvVxcg
Two additions, both about turning a number into something meaningful.
A band column. Next to every frequency -- on the live display, in the
line-per-hit output, in saunterbrowse's list and details -- is the name of
the band it falls in. 421 MHz is the 70 cm amateur band, and being told
so is quicker than remembering where the edges are.
The names come from the existing preset table, so there is one band plan
to keep right rather than two, but naming is not the job that table was
shaped for: several presets cover any frequency, some of them whole-tuner
sweeps that say nothing. So the candidates are ranked. Sweeps and the
"-complete" duplicates are dropped outright. The narrowest of what is
left wins, because it says the most -- 146.52 MHz comes back as the 2 m
simplex calling channel rather than as the whole 2 m band. Two exceptions
where the narrowest would be the wrong answer: ISM yields to the
allocation it shares (433.92 is 70 cm first, 915 is 33 cm first), and
shortwave broadcast yields to amateur where the two overlap, because
3.9-4.0 and 7.2-7.3 MHz are Region 1 and 3 broadcast but Region 2 amateur,
and this plan is documented as Region 2. 6 MHz really is 49 m shortwave
and is left alone.
The name is written into each capture's sidecar, so it travels with the
recording and an edit to the plan later cannot rewrite history, and
saunterbrowse searches on it: /70 cm finds the band without anyone having
to remember 420-450 MHz.
A map. A licence says where its holder is, so a list of callsigns is also
a map. Callsigns heard during a scan are now looked up as the transcripts
come in, announced on the display, and written to callsigns.kml in the
output directory; saunterbrowse --kml builds the same file from recordings
already on disk, and the two continue one map rather than starting two.
One placemark per station, not one per transmission: the same repeater
heard twenty times in an evening is one operator, and twenty pins on one
rooftop would say less than one. Each pin carries the callsign, the
licensee, the town, the grid square, and every frequency and time it was
heard on. The file is read back on open and added to, so later scans
build it up rather than replacing it.
Where a licence has no coordinates the grid square's centre is used and
the placemark says so -- a square is kilometres across where an address is
a street. A callsign with no licence at all is still recorded, in a
folder that starts switched off, because that a station was heard is worth
keeping even when nothing says where. A file already there that is not
readable as KML is never overwritten.
Also fixed along the way:
- The hit list's "no signals recorded yet" placeholder was one cell short
of its row, so it landed in the SNR column and wrapped, making the panel
taller than the layout had budgeted for and scrolling the display off a
short terminal. The identification column can no longer wrap either,
which is what _hit_capacity has always assumed.
- Licence lookups now record coordinates. The cache is versioned so that
entries written before this are asked about again, rather than pinning
every station to its grid square for good.
- CallsignBook.wait dropped joined threads; an all-night scan calls it
after every transcript and the list only ever grew.
- Tests redirect XDG_CACHE_HOME, so a run no longer reads or writes the
real lookup cache.
676 -> 761 tests.
The Dust Council