It showed what the radio calls itself over CAT — 'Kenwood (911)' for a K3,
a bare 'CAT' for a Flex that reports nothing useful. That is the answer to
a question nobody asks once the rig has a name in the list, and it made
the two radios look alike in the one place they have to be told apart.
The name the operator typed comes first now, on the chip and in the menu,
and falls back to the radio's own identity when they typed none. The model
identity is still in the tooltip, where it answers 'what is actually
connected' without taking the place of 'which of my rigs is this'.
The answer to 'I have two rigs' was 'make two profiles', which is a heavy
instrument for a light question: a profile carries the whole station —
logbook, callsign, awards, cluster, macros — so switching one to change
which radio is connected takes all of that with it, including a change of
logbook when the profiles point at different databases.
Radios are a list now, the way amplifiers already are. The CAT chip in the
status bar opens it, one click connects the chosen rig, and nothing else
about the station moves.
The storage keeps the ACTIVE radio in the same settings keys everything
already reads (cat.backend, cat.icom_port, …), and switching writes the
chosen entry into them and reloads the link. So the consoles, the CAT
sharing, the band-follow and every panel see exactly what they saw before
and needed no change at all — the list is a second store beside the
configuration, not a replacement for it.
Details that matter more than they look:
- An operator who has run one rig for a year opens the list and finds it
there, because a missing list reads as the CURRENT settings rather
than as nothing. It is written on the first save, not on the first
read.
- Editing the CAT panel updates the active entry, or an edit made before
switching away would be lost on the way back.
- A new radio starts as a COPY of the current one: a second rig is
usually the same shape with one port changed, and an empty form is a
form to fill in twice.
- Switching saves the panel first, so edits to the radio being left
behind are kept.
- The chip only becomes a menu with more than one radio; with one it
opens the CAT settings exactly as it always did.
rouggy