ncdxf     iaru


 

BeaconWizard by KU5S

Beacon Wizard, written by Jim Tabor, KU5S, can be found at http://www.taborsoft.com/CAPMan/HamTools.html. It is a 16-bit program written for Windows 3.1. This program has been superseded by a much enhanced version called Active Beacon Wizard++ which runs under Windows 95, but people who still use Windows 3.1 and people who prefer the simple tabular output of this earlier version of Beacon Wizard will still find it useful. You can e-mail Jim at ku5s@wtrt.net.

I tested version 1.23 under Windows 95. It worked fine. One picks one of the five bands to have displayed using radio buttons. The window shows the currently transmitting beacon on that band and the previous and next beacons for that band. For each beacon it shows the short-path and long-path beam headings from your QTH and the short-path distance in kilometers, and the sunrise and sunset times at the beacon.

Beacon Wizard also shows your own sunrise and sunset times, your local time, UTC time and the current beacon's slot number and local time. Beacon Wizard makes excellent use of the "hints" that can be displayed when you allow the cursor to linger over an area of its window.

Beacons which are not on the air yet are grayed out. The user can easily update the beacon database using a built-in editor. Put the cursor over the window and right click to customize the various options and edit the information about the individual beacons.

(Review by N6EK)

BeaconWizard Screen Shot