Tuesday, April 23, 2024

How to make emoijis in VarAC

 I was in a QSO with Robert K9ROB from Fairbanks Alaska today...









As you can see it was quite interesting. I saw Robert spotted me a couple of times before but I never actually saw his signal at my QTH till today. His callsign is also not usual for an Alaskan station. But these days callsigns in the US are not area restricted anymore.

Anyway, Robert asked me how I did get the emoji pictures into my "info" and "welcome" text.
An example, this is what you see when connecting me:
 
Hello ✌, welcome @ my 🏡 station

Which actually means "Hello, peace to you, welcome at my home station. There are also other emojis like the one for antenna and radio. If I send my info you see something like this:

📻 IC-7300
📡 Square multiband halo @16mH

To get this working into VarAC you need to modify the VarAC.ini file which can be found in the VarAC directory on your computer drive. You open this file with notepad and then save it as an UTF-16 LE file. See the example here:


Your file is now ready to fit in emojis.
You can both edit the ini file as the normal "canned messages" in VarAC.

How to get those emojis?

That's easy. Press the "windows button on your keyboard + . (point)". You will get something like this:


This one is in my native language dutch, you get one in your own language. The nice thing is that you type for example radio in your text and you will get the "radio" emoji 📻. You click with the mouse or give enter on it and it will appear instead of the text. This way you can make what you want....

Examples: 

Radio 📻
Antenna 📡
Peace ✌
Kiss 💋
Sun ☀
Goodbye 🖐
OK 👌 (or perfect)

It to your imagination how and what to use for VarAC.... have fun!

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