A quarter-per-poll decay covers the milliseconds between CW elements but not the
gaps that matter on the air: between the words of a CQ, in CW as in SSB, the
meters genuinely read 0 for most of a second and the bars fell with them.
A peak now stands for 1.5 s before it starts to fall, and still rises instantly —
a needle goes up fast and comes down slow. The SWR RATIO is not updated at all
from a zero reading: showing 1.0 during a word gap is worse than showing a stale
figure, because it looks like good news.
A test caught a real defect on the way: the proportional decay stalls on
integers. With the needle at 13 and the truth at 10, a quarter of the gap rounds
to zero and the meter sat three units high for ever. It now always steps down by
at least one, so it converges.
An FM carrier could not answer it: constant by definition, so nothing to
correlate. CW at 100 W did, because the keying itself varies the output:
key down: RM4=25 RM5=207 RM6=13
key up: RM4=25 RM5=0 RM6=0
RM5 follows the RF envelope exactly — it IS the power meter. RM4 sits near 25
whether the key is down or up, so it is not measuring output at all, and reading
it as power is what showed 8 W on a 100 W transmission. The operator's hunch was
right and my first reading of the ramp was wrong: what I took for a needle
rising was RM4 drifting, not tracking.
Watts are now derived from that meter (207 = 100 W, measured) instead of the
power SETTING scaled by a percentage — the setting says what was asked for, the
meter says what left the radio.
The bars also hold their peak with a gentle decay. In CW the meters genuinely
read zero between elements, so following the raw value made them flash to nothing
several times a second; a needle has inertia, and this only ever holds a value
the radio really reported.
One transmission cannot name it. RM4 rose while RM5 stayed flat — which points at
RM4 — but RM5 differed BETWEEN transmissions, 208 then 105, which points at RM5.
Both readings are consistent with either answer, so picking one now would just be
the FT-991A table mistake again in a new place.
The survey line now carries the rig's power setting, and the sample cap is raised
from 12 to 40 so two transmissions fit. Keying at, say, 10 W and then 100 W makes
the answer a one-line comparison: the wattmeter is whichever index moves with the
setting.
The displayed mapping is left alone until that comparison exists.
A second measurement at a known mismatch settled both the index and the scale.
At SWR 1.1: RM6=0. At SWR 1.5: RM6=52, while RM4 kept tracking the power.
52/255 = 0.204, which is the reflection coefficient of a 1.5 SWR to three
decimals. So the raw value is rho scaled to 255, and the ratio is
(1+rho)/(1-rho) — physics, not a curve fitted through two points, which is why
2.0 and 3.0 fall out of it correctly without ever having been measured.
The panel now shows that ratio, the number the operator reads on the rig, rather
than a percentage of meter travel — and a dash while receiving, since a stale SWR
from the last transmission reads as a live one.
Both measurements are recorded in the code and in a test, so the mapping is
evidence rather than a table borrowed from another model — which is exactly how
it came to read 81 in the first place.
Measured on the radio, steady carrier for three seconds:
RM1=0 RM2=unsupported RM3=0 RM4=9→18→21→22 RM5=208 flat RM6=0
RM4 is the index that RAMPS with the output, so RM4 is the power meter. RM5 sat
at 208 from the first sample to the last, unmoved by the power — that is not SWR
on an operator reading 1.1, and 208/255 is exactly the 81 that appeared on the
bar. Borrowing the FT-991A's table, which puts SWR on RM5, is what put it there.
SWR now reads RM6. It stayed at 0 throughout, which is CONSISTENT with a 1.1
match but does not prove the index — only a deliberate mismatch would, and I am
not asking for that. A bar at zero on a good antenna is honest; 81 was actively
misleading.
The measurement is written into the code next to the mapping, so the next person
sees the evidence rather than a table copied from another model.
The one-shot survey fired as the transmission began and caught the meters still
at rest — RM4=13 and everything else zero, which identifies nothing. And the
operator's reading points the other way: the bar showing 81 tracks his 100 W,
while the one labelled power sat at 8.
What names a meter is which index FOLLOWS the power over a few seconds of steady
carrier, so the survey now samples on every poll while transmitting, capped at a
dozen lines. Two seconds of tune will settle it.
Still not guessing at the mapping: the numbers will say which index is power and
which is SWR on this radio, and it gets corrected then.
Speed: with DTR/RTS line keying the PC does the timing, so the Yaesu console's
slider — which sets the rig's internal keyer — changed nothing audible and looked
broken. Both entry points now go through one handler that drives the engine
actually sending, and additionally sets the rig's own keyer whenever a Yaesu is
on CAT, so the radio's front panel shows the same figure.
SWR: an operator reads 80 on the bar with a real SWR of 1.1. That is the shape of
reading the WRONG METER — ALC, say — not of a scaling error, and which RM index
carries which meter is not consistent across the family. Rather than guess again
and move the wrong number somewhere else, the first transmission now logs RM1
through RM6 raw, once. The log will say which index is which on this radio, and
the mapping can then be corrected as a fact.
The log settled it: the rig answers "?;" — its "unknown command" — to KY; and to
MG;. So the keyer status query cannot work on this model, and every send spent
four seconds waiting for an answer that was never coming.
"?;" is now recognised as what it is. A command refused once is never asked
again: models implement different subsets, and re-asking costs a 600 ms timeout
on every slow beat for a control that will never answer — which is also why the
panel felt sluggish.
Without a buffer status there is still a real constraint: one KY command carries
24 characters and the rig DROPS the rest silently. So the send is now paced by
how long the text takes to key, from PARIS timing at the rig's own speed. A long
macro goes out complete instead of losing its tail.
That leaves the question the log cannot answer: whether KY <text>; itself is
accepted. If the rig also replies "?;" to it, the CAT menu's PC KEYING setting is
the next suspect — but nothing in the code will be guessing at it.
The radio has a keyer and a command to feed it (KY), so an FTDX10 needs no
WinKeyer and no second cable, exactly as the Icom CI-V and Flex CWX engines
already do. The rig keys with its own timing, which is why the spacing is right
where a PC keying a line through USB latency drifts.
Text is filtered to what the keyer can actually send: an unsupported byte does
not produce an error on a Yaesu, it can abort the whole buffer, so the rest of a
macro would vanish silently. It is then fed in 24-character pieces, waiting for
room between them — the rig DROPS what does not fit, again with no error, so a
contest CQ would lose its tail.
STOP is the honest gap. Yaesu documents no buffer-clear, so it drops the
transmitter (TX0) instead: nothing queued reaches the air, which is what Escape
means to an operator. It deliberately does NOT send "KY0;" — a plausible-looking
clear that the rig would read as the CHARACTER zero and transmit.
A test caught a real one on the way: tabs and newlines were dropped as
"unsupported", gluing the words either side together, so a macro written on two
lines went out as CQCQ. Whitespace now becomes a word gap before filtering.
Settings warn when the Yaesu keyer is selected without the Yaesu CAT backend —
otherwise it simply never keys, with nothing on screen saying why.
Send path follows the CAT reference and how Hamlib drives these rigs; NOT yet
verified on the air.
Microphone gain and VOX are meaningless in CW: the rig ignores both, so showing
them is showing dead controls. They are hidden, and a CW card takes their place
with keyer speed (KS), break-in (BI) and ZIN (ZI), the zero-in that retunes so
the station being received lands on the operator's own pitch.
ZIN is a one-shot with no state, so it is a plain button rather than a chip that
would look latched, and no settings read-back follows — the frequency change
arrives through the normal poll like any other.
The keyer values are read on the slow beat whatever the mode, so the card is
already populated the instant the operator switches to CW instead of filling in a
poll cycle later.
Which controls show is decided by the RIG's mode, not the logged one: the logged
mode can be a digital sub-mode the radio knows nothing about.
Reported on the FTDX10: listening on 14.244 with VFO B still holding 18.115 from
an earlier session, pressing SPLIT threw the transmitter onto another band. The
button only flipped the rig's split flag, and the other VFO is stale by nature —
the only transmit frequency that makes sense is one derived from where the
operator is listening NOW. SPLIT therefore places the TX VFO too: up 1 kHz on CW
and the data modes, up 5 kHz on phone, the offsets operators actually call. The
+1k / +5k buttons remain for anything else, and a test pins the mapping.
The panel also drew its own flat meters while the Flex and Icom consoles use the
shared LED-segment MeterBar. Two instrument styles in one application is just
inconsistency — it now uses the shared component, and the local one is gone.
And the three consoles are named alike: "Flex Console", "Icom Console", "Yaesu
Console", in the tabs and in the Main-view pane list, in both languages.
Three corrections from the operator's second pass.
The sideband gesture was wrong: I used double-click, which hides the action.
Clicking a button that is ALREADY active now flips its sideband — CW-U → CW-L →
CW-U. One button, one finger, nothing to discover.
A lit SPLIT chip does not tell an operator anything useful: it says split is on,
not where they transmit. The header now shows the TX frequency and the offset in
kHz whenever split is active.
And the offset that matters is set in one action: up 1 kHz on CW, up 5 kHz on
phone. Doing it by hand means swapping VFOs, retuning and swapping back — exactly
the fumbling a panel exists to remove. Both are offered rather than picked from
the mode, because which one is idiomatic is the operator's call, and the button
turns split on at the same time.
The offset is measured from the RECEIVE frequency and written to the VFO we are
not listening on, so it stays correct when the operator works on VFO B, where the
roles are mirrored.
First look on the FTDX10 turned up six things:
The S meter printed a raw percentage — "57" tells an operator nothing, and it is
the S number that goes into a report. It now reads S1-S9/S9+dB, the same value
the click-to-fill RST already used.
CW, RTTY and the data modes exist on BOTH sidebands and the operator is the one
who knows which they want. The buttons now carry the rig's actual sideband and a
double-click flips it; PSK is added, riding the rig's DATA mode as it does on the
radio itself. This also means the mode row drives the rig directly (MD0 with the
exact mode) instead of going through the ADIF path, which could only pick a
sideband by convention.
The attenuator is a 6/12/18 dB pad on these rigs, not the single step I assumed —
two thirds of the control was unreachable.
Sliders had no visible filled side: --muted is barely lighter than the card it
sits on, so the whole track read as one bar. They also came in three kinds (two
bare range inputs among them). One component now, explicit track colour, and it
takes a min/max so power in watts and DNR 1-15 look like the rest.
The panel stretched across the whole window; it is a column of controls, so it is
now capped and every row stays readable.
And it gets its own Yaesu tab, like FlexRadio and Icom, rather than only being
available as a Main-view pane.
A console pane for the native Yaesu backend, in the same shape as the Icom and
Flex ones: S/PO/SWR meters, band and mode rows, AF/RF/squelch, AGC, the IPO/AMP1/
AMP2 front-end selector, ATT, NB, DNR + level, narrow filter, power in watts, mic
gain, VOX, split and ATU tune.
Three decisions worth keeping:
Panel reads are STAGGERED and live in their own file, away from ReadState. Meters
poll every cycle; settings only change when someone turns a knob, so they refresh
every 8th cycle and right after any set. Polling all of it every cycle would put
twenty queries a second on the serial link the frequency display shares.
Band buttons use the rig's own band memory (BS) rather than a frequency we pick,
so 20 m lands where the operator last was on 20 m — what the radio's own band
keys do.
A set is followed by a read-back, so the panel shows what the RIG ended up with,
not what we asked for; the two differ whenever a value is out of range or the
mode forbids the control. And a control the model lacks keeps its previous value
instead of dropping to zero, which reads as a setting that reset itself.
The S9 point of the S-meter scale is a hypothesis (the manual does not state it)
and is commented as such — one number to correct if reports come out an S unit
off, rather than a fudge spread through the RST helper.
Also removes the FlexRadio settings blurb, which explained the backend to
someone who had already chosen it.
rouggy