As an experiment to gain some experience with using the soundcard (long
after everyone else has already done it!) and to see how good Visual Basic 6
is at real time audio DSP, Ive written a couple of progs for evaluation and
to revise my programming skills after a break of some time.   One is an
automatic beacon monitoring prog, and while this is aimed primarily at
logging and tracking microwave beacons that are not 'too' stable in
frequency, it may be of some interest to readers of this forum on lower
bands.

The other prog is a simple audio spectrum analysis  and waterfall display.
While this is not intended to compete with the likes of Gram/Argo/Spectran,
it does give access to a much wider range of FFT sizes (128 to 65536 point)
and some other innards of the software, like the ability to change FFT
windows and different waterfall palettes, and a simple oscilloscope.   Also,
the full VB source code is there to play with.

Both packages can be obtained from www.scrbg.org/g4jnt.  The beacon
monitoring software is available as a full archive UWBCNMON.ZIP that
contains all the VB run libraries and setup software.  A smaller .EXE file
alone is there for anyone who already has VB installed.   The software
functionality is described in UWBCNMON.PDF.

The spectrum analysis/waterfall package is in PLAYSNDCRD.ZIP which only
contains the .EXE and VB source files.  If you want to run this standalone,
youll also need to  download and install the VB libraries from UWBCNMON.

Andy  G4JNT