Antenna profiles bug

Eric Tweet

Active Member
Either I'm missing something significant, or I've discovered an ugly bug relating to antenna profiles.

Here's the story:
- I have some profiles set up for my metric rod, along with appropriate vertical offsets. For example, a profile for the 2-meter setting on my Seco. I created it by entering the height using the Meters units (entered as 2.0 meters), and measured the actual rod height, yielding a difference of 0.056m. That gets entered into my vertical offset, still using the Meters units.
- My project is in USft, so when I save the profile, I see the readings as: 6.5617' with vertical offset of 0.1837'. Great! I've used and checked all my profiles in multiple projects and they work fine.

Now for the confusing bit...
- I have the need to use a different rod for a while, so I make a new profile for it like normal. Again measured and entered in metric, and auto-converted to feet. Let's call it 1.4 meters height with no offset.
- Somewhere during that process of making a new profile, the bug occurs.

The Bug:
Upon saving the profile for the new rod, my profile for the 2-meter Seco rod has been mysteriously changed and now reads: 2.0 FEET, with 0.1837-foot vertical offset. While the newly created profile shows up correctly as 4.5932 feet.
Somehow, J-field has "forgotten" the units in a previously-created profile during the course of making an entirely unrelated one, but only for the height. The offset remains correct.

This has happened twice over the last couple of weeks, in different projects. When the bug happens, it affects multiple saved profiles at once, in the same way. I've tried to manually re-create the problem, but I'm not sure what combination of actions during creation of Profile #2 causes problems to occur in the previously-created Profile #1. To be clear, this problem does NOT happen every time I make a new profile - it appears to be rare, making it tricky to replicate.

Thoughts? Are there some procedures that I might be doing which are obviously "dangerous" and could yield this issue?
 

nusouthsc

Active Member
Either I'm missing something significant, or I've discovered an ugly bug relating to antenna profiles.

Here's the story:
- I have some profiles set up for my metric rod, along with appropriate vertical offsets. For example, a profile for the 2-meter setting on my Seco. I created it by entering the height using the Meters units (entered as 2.0 meters), and measured the actual rod height, yielding a difference of 0.056m. That gets entered into my vertical offset, still using the Meters units.
- My project is in USft, so when I save the profile, I see the readings as: 6.5617' with vertical offset of 0.1837'. Great! I've used and checked all my profiles in multiple projects and they work fine.

Now for the confusing bit...
- I have the need to use a different rod for a while, so I make a new profile for it like normal. Again measured and entered in metric, and auto-converted to feet. Let's call it 1.4 meters height with no offset.
- Somewhere during that process of making a new profile, the bug occurs.

The Bug:
Upon saving the profile for the new rod, my profile for the 2-meter Seco rod has been mysteriously changed and now reads: 2.0 FEET, with 0.1837-foot vertical offset. While the newly created profile shows up correctly as 4.5932 feet.
Somehow, J-field has "forgotten" the units in a previously-created profile during the course of making an entirely unrelated one, but only for the height. The offset remains correct.

This has happened twice over the last couple of weeks, in different projects. When the bug happens, it affects multiple saved profiles at once, in the same way. I've tried to manually re-create the problem, but I'm not sure what combination of actions during creation of Profile #2 causes problems to occur in the previously-created Profile #1. To be clear, this problem does NOT happen every time I make a new profile - it appears to be rare, making it tricky to replicate.

Thoughts? Are there some procedures that I might be doing which are obviously "dangerous" and could yield this issue?
You may be onto something. Since our last update one of the guys told me he had an issue with it switching to metric. He also couldn’t recreate it but assured me it was doing something weird.
 

Eric Tweet

Active Member
Thanks, Adam. Currently uploading project "DryCrk" from LS+ 0722, ~30MB.

Note that all the antenna profiles there are in working order, as I've been attempting to re-create the issue, deleting and making profiles with as many variations of the procedures as I can think of.
 

Eric Tweet

Active Member
Yep. Just had 2 profiles disappear on me today too... Specifically created for and in a particular job, so I KNOW I didn't create them in a different job and somehow lose them by changing jobs. o_O
 

Eric Tweet

Active Member
Quick update to previous post, for those interested.

Confirmed the "disappearing" antenna profiles issue pointed out by John. My 2 profiles that disappeared have indeed reappeared.

Other profiles still holding strong with their meters-to-feet automatic conversion still working correctly for the time being.
 

Eric Tweet

Active Member
Michael, thank you for pointing that out. I think you have possibly illustrated the entire underlying issue to both the "disappearing profile" as well as the "meters and feet profile error" discussed in this thread.

To start, I'll just elaborate on the General Profiles and Reboot scenario, to confirm my understanding by walking through it and show what other people may be experiencing as well.

I have made some General profiles using the "Copy As" button. It looks like that will copy the antenna profiles to the new General profile. For example, my 'UHF' profile was made by copying my 'RTN' profile where I already had 3 Antenna profiles. Because I'm using UHF most days lately, I have added 2 additional antenna profiles in the 'UHF' General profile.
So when I want to switch back to my RTN, I Recall the 'RTN' General profile, and proceed with my work. Important point here: I can see and use the 5 antenna profiles that are stored in the 'UHF' General profile, even after switching back to the 'RTN' General profile that should only have 3!
NOW, for the "disappearing act" ... With my 'RTN' profile still active, I REBOOT. This causes J-field to "re-load" the list of antenna profiles only from the 'RTN' General profile which was active at the time I did the reboot.... so now I am missing the 2 additional antenna profiles I created within the 'UHF' General profile!

I can confirm that scenario further by rebooting with my 'UHF' profile active, so I can see all 5 antenna profiles now, and then creating (not copying) a new 'Testing' General profile with NO new antenna profiles in it. When the 'Testing' General profile is activated, I can see the 5 antenna profiles. But, after rebooting with 'Testing' profile active, the 5 antenna profiles disappear as expected, per Michael's explanation!

SO... on to the original topic of this thread - the "incorrect meters/feet problem"... I'm pretty sure that within the first days of receiving my LS+ I probably went quickly through some of the features as I was simply exploring everything, and not doing any real work with the new receiver at that time. I'm quite confident that I had made some antenna profiles where I neglected to verify the units that were being used in my antenna heights. I wanted to quickly (too quickly) create profiles for the 4 settings on my metric Seco rod. So there were probably a few initial profiles I made where I put in 2.0 Feet, when I meant to use 2.0 Meters. At that time, I was also exploring the different options within General profiles, and almost certainly used "Copy As" with the "bad" antenna height profiles. So if I switched to one General profile and fixed my antenna heights after discovering my units mistake, rebooted while using that "corrected" General profile, then switched back to the "bad" General profile, I WOULD NOT KNOW that the "bad" antenna profiles still existed UNTIL ANOTHER REBOOT where it would only appear as though the antenna profiles mysteriously became altered! So really, I'm at least partly at fault for the wrong units in my bad antenna profiles, and the reboot aspect further confounded the whole situation by making them re-appear unexpectedly (the actual antenna profiles were not being changed in any way, they were just being re-loaded in ways that I didn't understand).

In summary, Michael has saved the day, and although the storage and recall processes relating to antenna profiles clearly needs some attention, the root cause of the original topic of this thread, as well as subsequently introduced topics, are at least sufficiently understood now.

Thank you again, Michael, for explaining the underlying issue!
 

John Thompson

Well-Known Member
Great detective work, Michael and Eric. I asked a few weeks ago if they were stored in the general profile, because I thought that explained some of the disappearing and reappearing, but it didn't occur to me that new profiles can move from one general profile to another until a reboot refreshes the list. Thanks!
 

Eric Tweet

Active Member
One additional thing to note regarding a top secret procedure for copying antenna profiles between different General profiles, by example (This is really just to show some additional side effects of how antenna profiles are stored):

1. With a General profile activated containing, say 5 good antenna profiles, reboot the device to ensure you're looking at the correct desired list of antennas to copy.
2. Create a new antenna profile called "Dummy" or similar, with any antenna height. (It will revert to 0.0 height later in the process, and is only used to facilitate this process). Now we have 6 profiles in our source General profile.
3. Switch to, or create, a General profile with no antenna profiles in it, OR one that does contain antenna profiles that you don't care about being erased. Note that when you switch to this second General profile, you're still viewing the list of antenna profiles that were contained in your source General profile.
4. Now with your second General profile activated, RENAME the "Dummy" antenna profile (it can be the exact same name as before, just need to go through the rename process). This will remove the antenna height that the "Dummy" antenna profile was set up with, and it now reads 0.0.
5. Now all 6 profiles (including "Dummy") are saved in the second General profile, and any antenna profiles that were previously saved there are gone.

So, this COULD be useful for now, if you have a good list of antenna profiles in your "Main" General profile, and you want to copy them to a different General profile. Of course using "Copy As" to copy your "Main" General profile in order to create a new one will also do the same thing, without the need for "Dummy".
 

John Thompson

Well-Known Member
Thanks, Eric. I used this procedure to get all my antenna height profiles back, and they are still there in both general profiles after rebooting. It looked to me like Dummy did not change to 0.0 when I renamed it though. But Dummy has been deleted now.
 

Eric Tweet

Active Member
Glad to hear it, John! I'm not sure why your Dummy doesn't change. Mine does, and the only reason I included it is because I tried the rename trick with an antenna profile I wanted to keep, and it blasted the height that I had in there to 0.0.

Funny thing, I wrote that post just to point out some ghostly effects folks might experience. But I too have recently used it to "unify" the antenna profiles across a few of my General profiles after getting "re-frustrated" upon rebooting in a half-empty profile. An oddly convenient workaround for the time being. :)
 
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