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 keyer buffer stayed full for 4s" and nothing keyed, on a rig whose CAT is
working. The buffer was not full: the check demanded the reply be exactly "KY0;"
with the digit at byte 2, so anything the FTDX10 phrases differently — a space
before the digit, another command's reply arriving first — read as "still full"
on every poll until the deadline.
The test is now asymmetric on purpose: only a clear "1" holds the send back.
Anything unrecognised goes ahead. Refusing to transmit because a status line was
phrased unexpectedly is the worse failure — the operator gets silence with no
explanation, where at worst sending early truncates a long message, which the
chunk loop then recovers from.
The reply is also logged once per run, since we have no verified sample of it —
that line is what turns the next surprise into a fact instead of a theory.
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.
rouggy