Two problems from one operator's log, both of them the log's fault.
SteppIR. The last line about it is "status query failed, reconnecting: Port
has been closed" and then nothing — for the rest of the session. The poll loop
does retry every two seconds, but a failed open was a bare `continue`: no line,
ever. And startUltrabeam had three silent ways out — settings unreadable, the
antenna turned off, no port or host configured — so a cleared field and a lost
adapter produced exactly the same evidence, which is none. Both now say what
happened, with the port or host named. Reopen failures are reported three
times and then throttled (a port that is gone stays gone), and the recovery
says how many attempts it took.
FLDIGI. Four hundred "ADIF payload ignored" lines and nothing else legible.
The cause is in the same log: two inbound listeners on the SAME multicast
group and port, 239.255.0.1:2237 — one WSJT (MSHV), one ADIF (FLDIGI). Every
WSJT-X packet is delivered to both, and an FT8 cycle is dozens of decodes
every fifteen seconds; the bursts in the log are exactly 15 s apart. The ADIF
listener now checks for the WSJT-X magic and says so once, with what to do
about it, instead of rejecting each packet in writing. Anything else is
described a few times with its payload and then goes quiet.
The SteppIR client logged commands it sent but never the status frames it read
back, so a misread motor-status byte — which drives the app's "block TX while
the antenna is moving" interlock on a FlexRadio — was invisible. Log the raw
11-byte frame plus the decoded freq/dir/moving and the motor (buf[6]) and
direction (buf[7]) bytes, but only when the frame changes, to keep the 2 s poll
from flooding the log. Purely diagnostic; no behaviour change.
rouggy