Two things the wiring got wrong, both visible on screen.
A KPA fell through to the PowerGenius branch of the amplifier card and was
drawn as one — titled 'POWERGENIUSXL · ELECRAFT KPA1500', with a
PowerGenius's meters and none of its own. It has a card now: OPERATE, ON
and OFF, band, power, SWR, temperature, supply, and the fault across the
end. The OPERATE button carries a tooltip saying it also clears the fault,
because that is the button an operator already has under the cursor when
they need it.
And the band-follow option was offered on it. That option exists because
an Acom POLLS a transceiver and has no command to be given a band, so
following it needs a second serial port and a rig emulator answering those
polls. The KPA has ^BN — OpsLog simply tells it, on the link it is already
using, and only when the band CHANGES. The option is gone from the KPA and
the telling is automatic.
Also: Acom rather than ACOM everywhere it is read, which is how the
company writes it. Identifiers, package names and log lines are left
alone — renaming those is churn with no reader.
One package for both amplifiers: they share the Elecraft command set — a
caret, letters, a semicolon, case-insensitive in and upper case out — the
same family as the K3/K4 panel. What differs is the transport and which
commands exist, not the grammar.
Everything here comes from the KPA1500 Programming Reference, and the
document's own examples ARE the test:
^WS1204 014; 1204 W and SWR 1.4:1 — power and SWR in one exchange
^VI513 061; 51.3 V and 61 A — volts in tenths, amps whole
^FL91; HEX, and 0x91 is 'antenna not connected?'
That last one is why the parsing is pinned rather than eyeballed: read as
decimal, 90 and 91 become 144 and 145 and match nothing, so an amplifier
shut down by high reflected power would report a fault OpsLog could not
name. SWR in tenths is confirmed by the reference too — 'expressed in
tenths, 123 is 12.3:1' — where it had only been inferred from Hamlib.
The client is question-and-answer under one lock, never two questions in
flight: the reference states there is no flow control and that commands
are paced by waiting for the reply. Fast cycle four times a second for
power, SWR and the fault; the rest once a second.
Faults are named in the operator's terms — 'the ATU found no match', not
'fault 92' — and an unknown code from a newer firmware still says
something rather than nothing.
Not wired to the app yet, and two commands are deliberately absent: ^TX
makes the amplifier transmit from software, and ^ON0 cuts the main
supplies with Wake-on-LAN as the way back. Neither belongs on a poll loop
or behind a button that can be pressed by accident.
rouggy