Review of W8WWV’s S-Meter Lite

S-Meter Lite display window

I have a very bad RFI problem at my home QTH.  This necessitated my looking at S-Meter values across time in order to quantify when the start and end times for my RFI issues were taking place.  After looking around for software, I discovered S-Meter Lite by W8WWV.  This software is installed under Windows XP on my home setup and does exactly what I needed, plus a lot more…  After taking a look at this software I thought I would provide a review of W8WWV’s S-Meter Lite.  S-Meter Lite will graph S-Meter readings in real time, save spreadsheet ready files over very long time frames of your S meter values, assist in generating a pattern for your beam antenna, show RF levels in S units or in dB, and show signal level differences in dB between one signal and another on the same graph.  In short S-Meter Lite does a lot of things, some of which I have not tested yet, but look forward to testing.

S-Meter Lite talks to your radio using a data connection to your radio provided by the manufacturer.  In some cases the radios do not provide data connections, so S-Meter Lite is unable to talk to those radios.  If you are set up with radio control using your computer, you are probably already set up to use S-Meter Lite.

As of 10/07/12 S-Meter Lite will talk to the following radios:

Icom:

• IC-756 Pro Series (all radios)
• IC-706 Mark II G, (not other 706’s)
• IC-746
• R-9000
• IC-7100
• IC-910H

Yaesu:

• FT-920
• FT-1000MP
• FT-1000D
• FT-2000
• FT-5000
• FT-950

Elecraft:

• K3

TenTec:

• Orion

Example S-Meter values

As you can see I have a pretty bad RFI problem, what you are seeing is the result of almost two years of RFI hunting.  In the past my RFI was 20 over S9, 7 X 24 a day.  As you remove RFI sources, other sources become visible, which were lower than the original source.  S-Meter Lite has been an invaluable source of data for RFI hunting, and I would recommend it it anyone who is needing to quantify RFI times, or generating beam patterns.

S-Meter Lite also saves data in Excel ready spreadsheet form, and more importantly the time/S-Meter resolution of the graph is very small:

High time resolution graph

As can be seen from the graph above data is stored in 30 second intervals.  This makes it very handy for pinpointing start/stop times for an RFI source.

Pros:

• Free
• Easy to install
• Stable
• Generates long term graphs over time
• Allows for taking the difference between two signals
• Provides uninstaller

Cons:

• Does not come in a Linux version
• Not intuitive to use or setup

Conclusion:

If you are hunting RFI, looking to create a beam pattern, on in general curious about your background signal levels, S-Meter Lite is the software for you.  It is very informative to take S-Meter Lite and look at WWV as it comes alive in the mornings/evenings.  If you want to see when a band is open, drop S-Meter Lite on a station close to your operating frequency, and graph it for a few days.  You will quickly know when the band is open.

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