Glyn,
Tis me, from the other side again!
Boy, they don't take any prisoners do they - anyway, enough of that and on with the business. Lets see if I can answer your questions.
There is an issue with the release version of RadarBox, in that if you run it without an Internet connection and have "Share Data" selected in Preferences, RB tries to upload your data and can't. Whilst it's thinking about this, it slows down the menus. The easy fix here is to deselect Share Data and the delay goes away. The default setting is Share Data, so you needed to deselect this each time RB was run. The latest beta, soon to be released, has fixed this problem completely, so it doesn't matter if you forget to deselect it.
At the moment, on my 2 GHz AMD 64 PC with 1 Gb of RAM running XP home, I've got RB running, I've got 4 tabs open in FireFox, I've got MS Word 2007 open at a document I'm working on, my Watson W-8681 weather station is feeding USB data to the PC which is being displayed by Weather Display, I'm running Weather display Live to display that weather information in a Flash window on the PC, I'm running 2 LCD monitors from my GeoForce 8500 graphics card and I'm FTPing a jpg picture up to one on me websites every 60 seconds - and my wife says I can't multi-task :-0
With all this going on, RadarBox is running like a dream, processing my Live data and displaying Network data. My laptop is a similar spec to the desktop and RB runs fine on that too.
I don't have a dual processor, so I can't answer that, but I don't think that the software has been written to take advantage of such a setup.
You can't split (undock) the RB windows, although this is something that a few of us would love, so full use could be made of dual monitors. I tend to have RB running on the bigger monitor, and do everything else on the smaller one. I still don't have enough monitors though, expecially when I'm running the PCR-1500 radio scanner.
OK, that brings us nicely on to the subject of scanners. I paid the extra to have the "Radio Interface" on the SBS-1. It's only a software key that allows the radio to work with the SBS-1. The SBS-1 radio interface has it's good points. You can right click on an airfield and see a frequency list. Clicking on a frequency tunes the radio - great so far. You can manually alter these frequency lists using a simple text editor.
Where it becomes more difficult is with the Area or en-route frequencies. Although these are nominally allocated to specific areas, these frequencies are often "bandboxed" or one frequency used for two or more areas. At night when there isn't much traffic, there might only be a couple of frequencies in use for the whole of the UK en-route system. As the SBS-1 interface needs an area for you to right click on to bring up the list, it all gets a bit difficult unless you have every frequency in the list - a bit pointless really. You can have all these frequencies in a drop down list from the menu, but the same problem exists - just what do you put in the list?
Added to this, you can only listen to one frequency at a time. Yes, I paid for the radio key and I did run it with my AOR 8000 scanner, but I was missing a lot because I was only listening to one frequency. In the end, I used a 3rd party scanning program to drive the radio, and left the SBS-1 to watch the aeroplanes.
Now that I have the excellent Icom PCR-1500 PC driven scanner, I use this in just the same way with Radarbox. I listen to all the frequencies and watch all the aircraft! Some people will find this confusing, but if I hear something interesting, then I just halt the scan.
So, is a scanner interface needed? It really depends what you want to do. The easy answer is "I want to click on an aircraft and hear what it's saying" - now that would be good, but it's impossible to achieve. Now, if the aircraft were transmitting the frequency they were on along with the other Mode S data, this would be a dream come true. Unfortunately, that's not the case.
Right, that's enough rambling from me, hope this helps a bit. Time for a cold beer :-)
