The WAS gap made visible: a worked-states set joins the cluster status cache
(distinct states over the three US entities), the status entries carry a
NewState flag wherever the state resolves (log county first, ULS licence
second), and the decode panel gains the badge in its status column plus the
filter chip alongside NEW/BAND/MODE/GRID. Colour from the shared marker
palette, so the cluster can adopt it later without a second hue.
Three faults, one report. The slow poll asks ^TP — the KPA1500's ATU, which
a KPA500 (no ATU) never answers — and ask() dropped the whole connection on
any read timeout: a two-second stall and a reconnect every slow cycle, which
is why buttons lagged and the status read wrong. Worse, every serial reopen
toggled DTR/RTS — and those lines are the KPA500's POWER SWITCH (that is how
the Elecraft utility turns it on), so the amplifier obediently switched off
twenty seconds after its operator pressed nothing but Standby.
Silence is no longer a dead link (write errors still are), ^TP is never asked
again after one silence, the control lines are asserted once and held, and
the baud field becomes a list of the rates these amplifiers actually speak.
A connect that lasts 50 ms leaves nothing to say which answer the client
disliked — WSJT-X refusing to attach to the shared CAT was undiagnosable
without the full wire trace. The handshake is now always logged; steady-state
polling stays behind the trace switch.
Configure (message 15), mode field only, every other field sent as
no-change: an FT4 spot clicked while WSJT-X sits in FT8 lands the operator
ready to decode instead of staring at gibberish. Sent to every instance
heard this session — one already in the right mode treats it as a no-op —
and only for modes the decoder actually speaks (FT8/FT4/JT65/JT9/MSK144/
Q65/FST4); CW and SSB are none of its business. Toggle in the Connections
panel, on by default.
Message 13 paints callsigns in WSJT-X/JTDX's own Band Activity window with
verdicts from the same cluster status cache that colours the spot grid:
watchlist pink, new DXCC green, new band for its entity orange. Deduplicated
per instance+call+verdict, one datagram each; a verdict that lapses (the
operator worked them) clears that call, and turning the option off clears
everything via the protocol's CLEARALL!. Off by default, switch in the
Connections panel.
Message 7 asks a program heard for the first time this session to replay the
decodes already on its screen, so the FT decodes panel starts full instead of
empty until the next period. Replayed lines arrive marked not-new and are
shown but never auto-answered — the auto-caller now checks, on top of its
30-second freshness gate.
The operator measured the whole table: 10 W showed 83, 12 W showed 100, 13 W
showed 8 — the bargraph is relative to a meter RANGE that flips at 12 W
(0-12 QRP, 0-120 above). A bar percentage was never watts; with the PC
setting choosing the range, it converts, and the console prints the watts
beside the bar.
One placeholder per id in a single IN (…) hits SQLite's bound-variable cap:
bulk field set died at 168 000 QSOs with 'too many SQL variables' (10 000
passed). One chunker now serves bulk set (text/int/extra/frequency), the
delete, the post-upload markers and the export-selection iterator — the last
collecting and sorting once at the end so its chronological contract holds
across chunks. 500 ids a statement keeps every backend far from any limit.
Tried on the real IC-7760: the magic packet wakes nothing; Icom's own
mechanism is the network-standby session plus the CI-V power-on, which
OpsLog already does. The MAC store and the WOL sender go, and the changelog
entry with them. The CI-V pump now says once per session that the client
pings are armed — invisible pings read as absent pings.
wfview sends a ping (0x07, 0x15 bytes, its own seq and a monotonic
timestamp) every 500 ms on every stream, and so does RS-BA1. OpsLog only
ever REPLIED to the rig's pings — and the loaner IC-7760 stopped serving
CI-V data about a minute into nearly every session while the transport
stayed alive: the rig had concluded nobody was listening. Scope, TX audio
and idle numbering were each eliminated in turn before wfview's source
settled it. Pings now go out on control, CI-V and audio alike.
A 7760 switched fully off takes its LAN server down, and no session means no
console and no ON button — the one thing remote operation cannot tolerate.
The rig's MAC is learned from every login and persisted; when a dial finds
nobody home, the magic packet goes out to it before the next attempt. The
rig wakes into standby, the session opens, and the ON button does the rest.
The generic Freq write lands on the TX VFO when split is engaged: an FT-2000
moved B and left A — the receiver — behind, so a spot click QSYed the
transmitter and nothing audible changed; without split the same write moved A.
With split on (and the operator on MAIN), FreqA and FreqB are both written,
so the radio arrives on the spot whole, split left as the operator had it.
The inference tables knew FT8 on some bands and nothing on others: a 10.136
spot with a bare comment read as generic DATA — which is what every
skimmerless spot of a DXpedition's 30 m FT8 slot did. The standard FT8/FT4
windows are added on 30 m, 60 m, 80 m (FT4), 17 m (FT4) and 12 m, in BOTH
tables (backend band plan and frontend spot.ts), ahead of the wide segments
they sit inside — order is the mechanism there.
Every idle went out with seq 0, seven a second, interleaved with
properly-numbered data — where RS-BA1 and wfview draw idle sequence numbers
from the same counter as everything else. A rig that follows the sequence
tolerates the zeros for a minute or so and then stops serving CI-V data on
the stream: the shape of every dropout the loaner IC-7760 has shown, with the
scope and the TX path both since eliminated as causes. Idles now take the
next tracked seq and sit in the retransmit buffer like any other packet.
The 0x26 01 copy was fire-and-forget, and a real 7760's sub VFO kept
yesterday's mode with nothing to show why — refused, or sent with a stale
mode byte. The mode is read first when unknown, and both outcomes are
logged.
The console's thin home-made bars were the one holdout — every other panel
(Flex, Elecraft, the amps, the tuner) draws the same MeterBar. And the mode
badge said SSB, which on any band leaves the operator guessing which
sideband the rig is on: the panel now shows USB or LSB (the log keeps ADIF's
SSB).
The blind kill at connect still left a real 7760 streaming — the selector
byte differs by model, and the result was discarded so a quiet failure looked
like a cure. Both forms go out now (a NAK costs one frame) and the outcomes
are logged. The power table also gains its third measured anchor: a real
200 W reads full deflection, so raw 213 is 200 W — not the printed face's
250.
The CI-V meters are point samples: between two SSB syllables a poll lands on
0 W and a perfect SWR, so a 150 W transmission read 0-10 W most of the time
and the SWR sat at 1.0. Power now decays like a needle and SWR holds its peak
then snaps to the live value — the same meterPeak the Yaesu and Kenwood
consoles already use. The readout column also widens so '180 W' stays on one
line.
TUNE (1C 01 02) started a cycle; nothing sent the 0 that puts the tuner back
through. An ATU chip beside SPLIT now toggles it, and the tuner state is read
on the slow front-panel beat so the radio's own TUNER button stays in sync.
The first attempt sent it only after CI-V answered — but the waveform flood
is what stops CI-V answering, so a rig wedged streaming never received its
cure. It now goes out at the end of Connect, before anything waits on a
reply: an unanswered set costs one frame, and the rig acts on what it decodes
whether or not we hear the acknowledgement.
The 0x27 output flag lives in the RADIO and survives our sessions: a scope
enabled by an older build (or another program) kept flooding every new
session with 700-byte frames — and on the IC-7760 that flood is what kills
the CI-V link. One 'waveform output off' as soon as the rig answers, once per
session; the front-panel display is deliberately untouched.
The voice keyer and the live microphone each numbered their packets from 1.
A message played after a talk session re-used sequence numbers the rig had
already seen and was discarded wholesale: the PTT keyed for the full length
of the message and none of it was modulated. PlayTX now feeds the same framer
and counters as the microphone.
The MOX and SPLIT controls lived at the bottom of the Transmit card, below
the fold on most layouts — a console whose PTT needs scrolling is not a
console. A strip under the mode row now carries the PTT and Split as
OFF/+1k/+5k/+10k, DXpedition style, on a new SetIcomSplitOffset that takes
the chosen TX offset (0 keeps the old CW/SSB convention). The mode-alignment
from the previous fix rides along on every engage.
A radio in standby is silent on CI-V by design; only the transport chats.
The quiet-recovery added for the mid-session deafness treated that silence
as the fault it usually is and tore the session down every 15 s — taking the
console and its ON button with it, so a radio that was off when OpsLog
started could never be turned on. The recovery now arms only once the
session has heard at least one CI-V payload.
The TX-audio entry points type-assert the transport; a nil port failed the
assertion and produced the sound-card message, sending an operator whose
radio was simply off — or on a new DHCP address — hunting through audio
devices.
The unselected VFO was read only when split was on, so a dual-receiver rig's
second dial sat blank on the console. It is now read on the same slow beat
regardless. And engaging split copies the main's mode (and data flag) onto
the TX VFO with 0x26 01 — a split whose TX VFO still speaks yesterday's mode
transmits FM into a CW pileup; rigs that predate 0x26 NAK it harmlessly.
The talk button learns the network road the voice keyer already took: when
To-radio is the radio itself, the microphone is captured and re-framed into
the rig's 320-sample packets, the capture callback serving as the clock — the
mic delivers in real time, so no ring and no pacer. Counters and the frame
remainder live on the audio stream, so a talk session spans calls. PTT keys
before and releases after, through the same code as the USB path.
With this, a network Icom is a complete remote station over three UDP ports:
RX audio to the headset, live voice and recorded messages back, CW through
the rig's keyer, CAT for everything else.
The audio session opens its TX side alongside RX (txenable in the conninfo,
16 kHz both ways), the stream gains a paced sender — 320 samples every 20 ms,
the frame mirroring what the rig itself sends on this socket, IDs swapped —
and the network Icom takes the same NetworkPlayer slot a TCI radio does: pick
'Radio (network audio)' as the To-radio device and the voice keyer needs no
cable and no virtual sound card. PTT brackets the message through the same
code as every other audio path.
The capture shows the spiral: a session goes deaf on CI-V (28 unanswered
commands, transport alive), the fast-fail rebuilds it, the new session answers
for one second — one state read got through — and is then strangled when the
rig purges the half-open old one. Twenty seconds a lap, no audio throughout,
and only the third or fourth session survives. When the previous session died
less than 90 s after connecting, the redial now pauses 20 s so the purge
happens BEFORE the new session, not on top of it. A long-lived session still
reconnects immediately.
The operator's counter-hypothesis deserves an answer: RS-BA1 shows no such
dropouts, so are we sure the rig stops answering — or do we stop asking? The
quiet log now carries the number of CI-V commands sent since the last answer.
Zero would convict our own poll loop; a healthy count convicts the rig.
The capture settled it: the 7760 keeps the transport chatting (pings answered,
no socket error, no loss) while CI-V data simply stops, the in-place reopen is
ignored, and only a fresh session brings it back. So: one reopen attempt at
10 s — kept, it is free and the log will say if a firmware ever honours it —
and at 15 s the link is failed deliberately so the manager rebuilds it,
halving the outage. Also: the recovered-acknowledgement now sits on the DATA
packet, not on any packet — pings were toggling the detector, 160 reopens in
thirty seconds all logged as recoveries that never happened.
The IC-7760 recurrently stops answering CI-V a few minutes into a network
session while the transport keeps chatting — pings answered, session alive,
commands unanswered — and the only recovery was the 30 s watchdog's full
teardown. At 10 s of CI-V silence the pump now says 'open' again on the
existing stream, which is all it should take if the rig quietly closed the
data flow; the watchdog remains as the backstop. The send counters gain a
mutex since the pump now transmits too.
The first detector counted any packet and never fired: pings and idles keep
flowing while the rig stops answering CI-V commands — which is what the 7760's
recurring silence turns out to be. Now it fires on 10 s without a CI-V payload
and reports the ages of the transport, the last scope frame and the last
socket error, so the next occurrence says exactly what the rig was still
sending.
Every audio packet was delivered as if it were the next 20 ms, duplicates and
late retransmits included. The monitor's capped ring quietly threw the surplus
away, so the speakers sounded fine — but the recorder keeps every sample it is
given, and the file came out longer than the QSO, slowed and stuttering, each
lost-then-resent packet heard twice. trackRxSeq now says whether a packet
advances the stream, and only those are handed on.
A real IC-7760 keeps going silent on the CI-V stream two-three minutes into a
session while the control link stays alive. At 10 s of silence the pump now
logs the last real socket error and the retransmit backlog, and notes when the
stream resumes — the 30 s watchdog that follows cannot tell a dead socket from
a rig that stopped talking, and the next occurrence should.
The 30 s watchdog message asserted another program had taken the session; a
real IC-7760 went silent once with nothing else on the network, and the
message sent its operator hunting software that was not installed. State both
causes.
The console gains a DATA mode button (USB-D, what FT8 and friends ride on);
the PSK button now maps to the rigs' native PSK mode (0x12) instead of erroring
as an unknown mode — rigs without one NAK it, exactly as RS-BA1's button does
there. The power meter shows real watts on the IC-7760, whose meter face runs
to 250 W where a 100 W rig's percentage was the watts. The clickable S-meter
gets a pointer cursor so it looks like what it is.
Network audio: rxcodec 0x04 — the experiments on the real 7760 settle the
codec table (0x10 = 16-bit stereo, 0x02 = 8-bit mono, both heard as garble),
and 0x04 is the 16-bit mono the playback path actually plays.
The IC-7760 acknowledges the 1A 06 data-mode command and stays in USB-D
anyway, which left the operator unable to get back to plain USB from the
console at all. After every mode set the flag is read back; on a mismatch it
is said again with 0x26 — mode, data flag and filter in one frame, the form
the newer rigs actually honour. Only on a mismatch, so rigs that predate 0x26
never see the command.
The first real radio on the 50003 stream (an IC-7760) settles the two guesses
the experimental audio path shipped with. The payload starts at 0x18 — the
packet carries a big-endian payload length at 0x14 (0x500 on every packet) —
not at 0x16, which swallowed two header bytes into the PCM and laid a 50 Hz
click track under everything. And rxcodec 0x10 asks for TWO-channel LPCM,
which the mono playback path rendered as double-speed garble; 0x02 asks for
the one channel the monitor plays.
A rig that answers something unrecognised (a newer model, another firmware)
and a rig that answers nothing are different faults; a silent timeout hides
which. Capped at a dozen packets so a working handshake cannot flood the log.
Prompted by the first IC-7760 network attempt — which turned out to be aimed
at the console's IP, where nothing listens; the remote server lives on the RF
deck.
The S-unit mapping was provisional, waiting for a real radio. One arrived:
side by side with a K3's own display, raw 5 reads S7 and raw 9 reads S9+20,
so S9 sits near raw 6.5 — not 9 — and each raw step above it is worth ~8 dB.
The old scale showed everything two S-units low.
The SWR meter borrowed the power meter's needle inertia — hold the peak, then
close a quarter of the gap per poll. The K3 throws a brief SWR spike as an FT8
frame ends, and that decay turned one bad sample into twelve seconds of red on
the next transmission. SWR now holds the peak for the same 1.5 s and then
snaps back to the live reading: it is a warning light, not a needle.
clublog.org/watch.php, per entry: the DXpedition flag, OQRS, LiveStream, the
log's QSO total and the last-24h rate — the fields the schema has carried since
phase 1. Refreshed on DXHunter's own cadence (hourly for expeditions,
six-hourly for the rest), two at a time with a breath between requests: the
application API key is shared by every install, so a hundred-entry list must
read as a trickle at ClubLog's end. Nothing to configure — OpsLog's own key,
already used for cty and Most Wanted, serves.
A starred pattern is asked about by its base (ClubLog has no log for VK9*).
The card gains the 24h rate beside the QSO total and the Live link to the
expedition's stream.
The prefix matching ported from DXHunter swallowed too much: a three-letter
special-event entry N8W lit up NEEDED for N8WCR, a different station entirely.
The implicit becomes explicit — a bare entry matches exactly that call, a
trailing star makes it a family: VK9* catches every VK9…, RI0SP* the
expedition's portable forms. A star anywhere else (or alone) is refused at Add
rather than silently matching nothing. Same rule in the backend Match and the
tab's own matcher, pinned by test.
DXHunter's header row, ported: Watchlist / Active / Needed counts up front and
the All-Modes select beside the other filters (DIGI matches the digital class,
SSB folds USB/LSB). Counters, card lists and the Active/Needed-only filters all
read the same mode-filtered view, so the numbers add up to what is on screen.
And the notify alert now asks the SAME worked-slot question the tab asks —
before making a sound. It used to fire on the raw spot while the tab's verdict
arrived on a debounce, so the bell rang for a slot that showed Worked a moment
later. Judged in the backend at emit time: exact slot for named modes, digital
class for generic DATA, today-only for contest entries.
The concept, transplanted: a list of callsigns or prefixes being hunted,
matched against the live spot stream, one card per entry with the spots
underneath and the two questions that matter answered on every line — is this
slot still needed, and what is it worth (the cluster's own NEW badges, read
from the same status index).
The file is DXHunter's own watchlist.json, field for field, ClubLog block
included though phase 2 will fill it — a file that round-trips unchanged is the
whole of 'same format', and a test pins it with a real DXHunter entry. Global
(dataDir), not per profile.
CONTEST is per entry, not the global mode DXHunter has: a contest entry is
judged against the current UTC day — the boundary lives in the query's date
bound, so midnight needs no timer and resets nothing. Normal entries read the
same in-memory worked index the alerts use. Prefix matching is why RI0SP
catches RI0SP/MM, pinned by test.
Notify goes through the existing alert:fired event — the frontend already
toasts and sounds it — throttled to one alert per entry per two minutes,
because a DXpedition lights every skimmer on the planet.
Tab wired like NET Control: opt-in from Tools, persisted, closable. Single
click fills the callsign, double click works the spot — the cluster's own
gesture, kept.
The My-station group covered nineteen fields and not the three numeric ones.
They take their own integer path rather than the generic text setter: the
columns are nullable integers, and while SQLite would coerce '14' quietly, a
shared MySQL logbook would not — and empty must become NULL, never ''. Bounds
checked (DXCC <1000, CQ 1-40, ITU 1-90) so a slip cannot stamp zone 400 across
a thousand rows.
'None of the consoles look alike' is the complaint ShiftRow exists to answer,
and the Elecraft panel was still driving its offset with a row of nudge buttons.
It now uses the shared control — ±, wheel, typed value — plus the same
Ctrl+←/→ 10 Hz clarifier the Icom and TCI panels have. The K3 keeps ONE offset
for RIT and XIT, so both rows show it, exactly like the Icom's.
The backend gains the absolute setter the shared control speaks
(SetKenwoodRITOffset, funnelled through the same RO write as the nudge), and
the power slider moves in 1 W steps — nobody asks a K3 for 'between 10 and 15
watts' in fives.
Also per review: the chase switches are labelled 'Chase POTA' / 'Chase SOTA',
matching 'Chase new grids' beside them.
The report: switching the K3 to a data mode 'does not work for FT8 — the K3
does not go into DATA'. The mode digit is only half the answer on that radio:
MD6 keeps whatever DT submode the previous session left, and with FSK D still
armed the rig keys FT8 with no rear-audio modulation.
The panel buttons say the whole thing: DATA is MD6+DT0 (DATA A, the soundcard
path), DATA RTTY is MD6+DT2 (FSK D). The DT submode is also read on the
settings beat — Elecraft only, a plain Kenwood would '?;' it — so the active
DATA button follows what the rig is actually in, front-panel changes included.
A dedicated SetKenwoodPanelMode rather than the logger's SetMode: a panel
button is the operator saying exactly what the rig should do, not an ADIF mode
to be mapped through preferences.
Two rounds of fixes and the SunSDR's meters are still silent. The one remaining
difference from the protocol document is the case: its examples read
TX_SENSORS_ENABLE:true,200; and ours went out lower-case. Every other command
works lower-case, but nothing proves this newer path does — a case-insensitive
server ignores the duplicate, a sensitive one finally hears it.
rouggy