FA-NWT revival

Needs: photos, screenshots: coming soon

A longer while ago a friend sold me his FA-NWT 1, a network tester for high frequency measurements. It's a really nice device, heavy, well built, and capable. It was designed by Bernd Kernbaum (DK3WX, sk) in collaboration with the German amateur radio magazine "Funkamateur", there was a book about it, and it came with a CD containing Windows and Linux software (WinNWT/LinNWT V4.0). The software was written by Andreas Lindenau DL4JAL. 

Unfortunately, when I tried to revive that thing a decade later (life had been in the way), I found that the software was no longer shared on DL4JAL's website. He may have had good reasons for removing it, and I completely understand; but for me and many others it meant that our nice FA-NWT 1 devices now were fancy paper weights. This didn't sit well with me, and I looked for a solution. And I found one.

You're out of luck with Windows, unless you find a working executable. These are still floating around, and you may find it - but you might find that it doesn't work for you anymore. I still had an executable, tried it and found that the parameter dialog was displayed all mangled up, and the window elements all seemed to mingle in the left upper corner.

I'm actually more interested in the Linux version for it, but it's trickier to use. You need to compile it yourself, after you managed to find the source - and you need source modified to use QT5 as QT4 is no longer shipped with modern Linux distributions. The Git project at https://github.com/wojtekka/linnwt4 provides the QT upgrade (great job Wojtek!), and I was indeed able to get it running. However, at the end, the situation wasn't much better at the end: same display issue... Hmm!

The fact that I saw the same display problem on both the Windows and the Linux version of the software made me think that it might be actually an issue with modern computer monitors: their resolution is too good. I put that to a test. Since you must compile it yourself, you can also adapt the code! I did some research about how QT scales things, and came up with a recommendation which I posted in an online forum (I couldn't find it anymore for this article). The line 

  QApplication::setAttribute(Qt::AA_EnableHighDpiScaling);

needed to be added at the beginning of the main() function. With that in place, my paper weight was back alive!

The good news is that Wojtek must have seen my post about this solution, and he has added this change to his repository just a few days after my post. You just need to download the source and manage to compile it.

In another article, I'll describe how to set up a tiny handheld computer (Higole 2 Pro) with Fedora Linux KDE, which I will be using with this network tester.