Charles,
Regarding your concerns on Omni 6/NA. I've spent a lot of time on this and
I'm pleased to say--I resolved things so that my lashup in now close to 100%.
Don't sweat the "out of band stuff"--I still occasionally get that, however,
I definitely get it when, in fact, I am tuning out of band--a nice feature.
I have 2 Omni 6's. I am just getting into two rig control, but my first try
at this was very positive--the control R perfectly switched between rigs.
Let's start at the beginning.
I have a DVP board in my 486-66DX, 2 com ports, & 1 LPT port, and a bus
mouse, which freed up the 2nd com port. Use NA 10.03.
For starters, I had best results slowing everything down to 1200 baud--then
as things come together you can try faster speeds. Remember with verstion
10, you have to go into the config file to set things up. At the C:\NA
prompt (assuming you have things in a directory called NA) type config and go
through the steps. Set the Omni 6 to code 38 and set NA to Icom 781. I
understand it will work on code 2 and NA on Icom 735, but I use the other.
By properly setting the config file and the control panel things just work
great. I used it for both SS (full time both modes) and a part time in the
160 ARRL test. I can honestly say, I had not one single lock up, restart,
mysterious occurence, etc. (except the occasional out of band message). The
band map seemed to work fine. I jumped the speed up to 4800 and things were
still fine.
My set up has the com port 1 for packet TNC, com port 2 for rig control, and
LPT 1 for cw keying. I didn't use packet for any of these contests, so for
experimenting I was using com port 1 to control the 2nd rig, but haven't done
this except for playing so far. I'm working on a rig control box (to switch
key, mike, audio) which will also use LPT 1.
The really neat thing about the Omni 6 is that the RS232 port has all the
band info to switch things like the Dunestar band pass filters. Everyone
else has to go through the "Top ten" box and allocate another com or LPT
port. By switching bands through the computer or the front of the Omni, 12
volts appears on one pin for each band and easily switches the Dunestar. To
save someone the trouble of scanning the various schematics: 160 is pin 10,
80/24, 40/23, 20/21, 15/17, and 10 meters is pin 15.
So, the Omni is the only rig I know of that can be used with the fairly
common computer set up I have to do all of these things. Of course the digi
boards (4 com ports, 2 LPT ports) is the other answer.
I had both of my rigs back to Ten Tec for an "improved grounding scheme" for
the processor. Don't know when this bacame standard. This seemed to help
with strange things happening while the rig was under computer control.
My one problem remaining is the presence of occasional (often) RF in the
audio (with amp) on one rig and not the other! They can't come up with
help--they both look the same.
Hope this helps.
73 John N0IJ (formerly K0IJL)
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