I recently added the SVGA add-on to my Elecraft P3 Pan Adapter. (I purchased one from K6RO (Larry) who is a great source for anything K3/K3S from parts to entire stations. Check him out on QRZ). The P3 has a ton of on-board capability such as markers for each VFO, on board power/SWR monitoring (option), Span controls, and modulation envelope monitoring. My personal favorite is the ability to use the markers to set the independent VFOs and then press the knob to pounce. This is really nice when working split!
Using a video capture device like this one from Amazon, along with a VGA-HDMI converter, the image that normally would go straight to a VGA display was brought to the Windows desktop. Once this was going the goal was to then add the interactivity I had been craving from my Hermes/Thetis/SDRplay experiences. I wanted the ability to move the frequency by clicking on something interesting in the waterfall or on the spectrum, as well as to adjust the span with buttons in the frame and the center frequency by scrolling the mouse-wheel.
Not having much patience for a “from the ground up” development work for this, I enlisted the help of ChatGPT. This AI tool is pretty great for prototyping because some English language descriptions can be used to access or generate example code in virtually any computer language (C, C++, Python, etc.) This can be anything from basic functions and sub-routines for Arduino, to a full windows framework for a desktop application. Python scripting language is an oldie-but-a-goodie in the sense that it has so many libraries available to do almost anything, and it is very quick to put a functioning piece of software together. So the AI tool and I had some coffee and a “chat”.
The end result works well, and has proven to be very useful whether sitting at the radio or operating remotely over something like NoMachine. (I like having all the operating content on one screen):
I have published all this fun-stuff on GitHub, so feel free to try it out! The K3/K3S was, and is, so popular that I would imagine there are quite a few Elecraft fans out there still using these rigs every day.
Hope you found this of interest!
73
WR9R