I spent yesterday afternoon watching my FT-890 interact with CT (V8.42) and
now have a better idea of what is happening to cause the time out problems
and delays that people are experiencing using CT with Yaseu radios. Thanks
to Dick (AA6MC) for the suggestion!
Set up: CT (V8.42) running on an IBM thinkpad (x486, DOS6.0 & OS/2 2.1)
Yaseu FT-890 (less than a year old)
Yaseu's CAT interface (TTL <-> RS-232)
Toshiba laptop running ProComm in monitor mode
I tapped into the RS-232 receive and transmit lines between the radio and the
laptop running CT and watched the exchange on the Toshiba laptop. Here's what
happens.
STARTUP
-------
When CT first comes up it queries the radio with two commands:
FAh - return 24 status flags in 5 bytes
10h 03h - return 18 bytes encoding VFO A & B
The radio responds INSTANTLY with 23 bytes containing the correct
information (well almost, it seemed to think the antenna tuner was
on when it wasn't, but that is all that wasn't correct).
CT pauses 2-3 seconds and then prints the "YASEU Radio timeout"
message.
FREQUENCY CHANGE
----------------
When using CT to change the frequency of the radio by typing it
in the call sign area, this is the exchange:
As above for start up, CT first queries the radio with the commands.
FAh - return 24 status flags in 5 bytes
10h 03h - return 18 bytes encoding VFO A & B
And again the radio instantly sends the requested 23 bytes.
CT pauses and then times out. When it does, it sends the following
commands to switch the radio anyway.
05h 01h - switch to VFO B
0Ch 00h/01h - mode LSB/USB
05h 00h - switch to VFO A
0Ch 00h/01h - mode LSB/USB
0ah -- -- -- -- - set frequency
01h 00 - split on
The radio responds instantly and changes frequency.
SWITCH BANDS
------------
When switching bands with CT (ALT-F2, ALT-F1), CT does not first
query the radio. Instead it simply sends the change frequency
command sequence. The radio responds instantly
to band change requests.
Summary
-------
It would appear that CT is not recognizing the status replies
from Yaseu radios. I traced the RS-232 traffic right up to the
connector of the machine running CT and the other monitoring laptop
had no problem receiving the characters sent by the radio.
One guess is that there is a race condition in CT between
send and receive and that Yaseu radios reply too quickly. There
is a command to tell Yaseu radios to slow down, perhaps that
should be tried.
Of course, this doesn't explain why Bruce was able to get it to
work with his 990 just by using the Yaseu interface.
Any ideas why CT would not be recognizing the replies?
Dan KD6WKX
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