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