The detection shipped reading whatever the operator's cluster nodes happened to
carry. On VHF that is a few hundred skimmers, nearly all of them on HF: a 6 m
opening carrying 869 stations reached OpsLog as a handful of spots or none, and
Nexus flagged it on the same PC while OpsLog stayed silent.
internal/pskr subscribes to pskr/filter/v2/<band>/# on PSK Reporter's MQTT
broker. Every ordinary station running WSJT-X reports what it decodes, so the
difference is two orders of magnitude rather than a threshold. The feed's shape
suits us exactly: BOTH grids are in each message, so distance and bearing are
arithmetic — no lookup, and no DXCC-centre approximation, which is what made the
cluster path's bearings coarse. The geometry is injected from app.go so it stays
the same arithmetic the cluster path uses; two answers to one question is how a
bearing quietly becomes wrong.
Volume was the design constraint, not the protocol. Six metres open is thousands
of messages a minute and this runs on some very old PCs, so nothing is kept or
persisted in the watcher: each message is parsed, measured and handed on or
dropped, and the detector's existing window does the deciding.
And the part that was the real bug: enabling the watch now ARRANGES ITS OWN
SOURCES. It adds the two RBN nodes when missing and brings the feed up. A
feature that silently depends on sources nobody can know are needed does not
look unconfigured, it looks broken. Matched on host and port, not name, so an
operator who renamed theirs does not get a duplicate — which the detector would
read as twice as many stations, and announce an opening that is not there.
Turning it off leaves the nodes alone: they may have been wanted for their own
sake, and removing a node someone is using is worse than leaving one they are not.
IOTA is an official ADIF field, and almost everything for it was already here:
the qso table has carried my_iota since the first migration, the insert and scan
handle it, and both ADIF import and export write it. The one missing link was
the station profile, so the reference had to be typed on every contact of an
island activation, or added afterwards in a bulk edit.
Migration 0025 adds the column; it joins my_sota_ref and my_pota_ref in the
profile, in the Station Information panel, and in the same stamp-if-empty block
that fills the other My* fields on a logged QSO.
Uppercased and trimmed on save. ADIF spells it EU-005, and an operator typing
"eu-005" would otherwise put a reference no award matcher recognises on every
QSO of an activation - the kind of mistake you only find months later.
Colour moves from the text to the CELL. A filled Band cell means new band, a
filled Pfx cell means new prefix, a filled County cell means new county. This is
not the pills coming back: a pill is a box inside the cell with its own height
and padding, so it pushed the text off the row baseline. A background has no
geometry - the text does not move a pixel - and it reads from across the room,
which a tinted glyph does not. Worked-call stays text-only: it is not a novelty,
and filling it would wash most of the rows.
The colours still come from the semantic tokens and lib/spotMarkers, so a fact
keeps one colour across the grid, the band map and the filter chips - and the
per-marker colour setting will drive all of it from one table.
US County column. The backend already resolved the county from the offline ULS
store to decide NewCounty and then threw it away; it now returns it, which costs
nothing.
The Locator column is renamed Spotter locator. It always held the SPOTTER's grid
- cluster.go says so - so a column labelled Locator next to a DX callsign was
reading as the DX's grid and was mostly empty besides. The DX grid is not in the
feed at any price worth paying under an RBN firehose.
Both display options move out of Preferences into the cluster filter panel,
beside Hide worked. They are changed while working a run, not set up once, and
a preferences dialog reopened every ten minutes is a filter in the wrong place.
Two options that change what the eye is pulled towards, both applying to the
cluster list AND the band map.
Mute worked before: a spot that brings nothing new loses its colour and its
badges. It stays in the list - the operator asked for less noise, not less
information. "Brings nothing new" reuses the dimming rule the cluster list
already had rather than inventing a second notion of done, so it keeps obeying
the same-slot option and the digital-mode grouping for free. A new-band or
new-slot status is NOT muted: having worked that callsign once on another band
says nothing about the band in front of you.
Highlight unworked in this slot: colours any callsign not yet worked on this
band and this mode, whatever the entity says. For an operator filling slots a
common entity on a fresh band+mode is the whole point, and the entity-level
status flatly calls it worked. It reuses the existing new-slot status, so no new
colour, no new legend, no new badge - both panels already knew how to draw it.
WorkedSlot is computed independently of the same-slot preference: it is what
this option reads, and it must not change meaning because a different option was
toggled. The slot index is now built when either option needs it, and the status
cache is keyed on both so a toggle invalidates it.
The rules live in one module used by both panels. Marker colours already taught
us what happens when the two derive the same thing separately.
The band row was hardwired to 160-6 m, so an IC-9700 - the one radio in the range with no HF at all - showed ten dead buttons and none of 2 m, 70 cm or 23 cm. bandsFor(model) follows the model, exactly as attOptions already did for the attenuator steps. bandOfHz's labels had to move with it: it returned '70' where the button says '70cm', so the current-band highlight could never have matched, and it knew nothing of 23 cm.
The seven existing themes are warm beige, cool grey, sage grey, slate, warm
dark, graphite and black — every one neutral, six of the seven accented orange.
Picking a theme changed the shade of grey and little else.
These colour the SURFACES, not just the accent, and each takes a different
primary so the picker tells them apart at a glance: violet on deep indigo, cyan
on deep teal, magenta on aubergine, indigo on a crisp cool white.
The semantic colours stay recognisable as themselves. A logger is read for
hours and "red means a problem" cannot become a decorative choice, so the hue
budget went on the surfaces and the primary. Where a theme's primary would have
collided with a meaning, the MEANING kept its identity and the ornament moved:
Ocean's info is blue rather than cyan, Plum's danger is red rather than rose,
and the matrix entity ramp shifts to cyan under Indigo and teal under Nordic so
a "confirmed" cell never reads as a button.
Everything else follows for free: the grids resolve var(--…) at runtime, so
they re-skin with no re-render. The three shared registrations that do NOT
follow automatically are done — the chart palette (light vs dark ramp) and the
date-picker icon inversion, which is keyed on an explicit list of dark themes.
Typing RK3DWA found nothing while RK3DWA/3 found 21 QSOs, so a station's
history was only visible if you happened to type the exact form it had been
logged under — and an operator who worked it as /0, /P or /MM saw none of it.
The other RDA tools and Log4OM fold these together; this does too.
The predicate strips the suffix from what was typed and matches "call = base OR
call LIKE base/%", so it works from either end: the base call finds the portable
QSOs and a portable call finds the plain ones. Deliberately not a bare prefix
LIKE 'RK3DWA%', which would also match RK3DWAB — a different station. The '/' is
what makes it the same operator.
Settings -> General to turn it off. Default ON, hence the inverted storage: an
existing install has no key, and reading that as OFF would leave everyone with
the behaviour we were asked to change.
Contest dupe checking is untouched — it runs through ContestDupe, a separate
binding, and stays an exact match as a contest requires.
Settings -> DX Cluster: a toggle and an interval. When it is on, logging a QSO
announces the station on the master cluster — the QSO's own station callsign as
the DX, on the frequency the contact was made on — so callers find the run
without waiting for someone else to spot it. The node fills the DE field from
the login, so the spotter is us too: a self-spot.
It fires on the FIRST QSO of a frequency and then at most once per interval.
Both halves matter: announcing every QSO would flood the node and get the
station filtered out, while a pure timer would stay silent for minutes after a
band change. A drift of up to 500 Hz still counts as the same run, so nudging
the VFO mid-pileup does not re-announce.
Five minutes is the floor, clamped in SaveSelfSpotSettings as well as in the
input: the limit protects the node from us, so it must not depend on the
frontend. The interval input keeps raw text and clamps on blur — clamping per
keystroke rewrote "10" to "5" as soon as the "1" landed.
Wired into both log paths (manual entry and UDP auto-log) on the async side, so
a cluster that is slow or down never holds up logging. A send failure restores
the previous throttle state, so the next QSO retries instead of sitting out an
interval that produced no spot.
The Settings -> Database panel had lost every action on the settings
database except "Open folder", which launches Windows Explorer — where a
.db cannot be selected at all, so double-clicking it only asks which
program should open it. The handlers were still there, just no longer
rendered; New / Open existing / Save a copy / Rename / Reset are back,
along with the restart banner (the DB pointer is only read at startup).
The backup block put the rotation field and three checkboxes on one flex
row inside max-w-xl. That fitted until "keep every backup" arrived with
its two-line hint, after which every label wrapped into an unreadable
sliver. The options are stacked now, and keep-all sits under the option
it depends on.
The Elecraft handling was buried in the Kenwood "data mode" option, so users
couldn't find it. Add "Elecraft K3/K4" as its own entry in the CAT backend
selector. It reuses the Kenwood-dialect transport and the Kenwood USB/network
settings (the K3 emulates the Kenwood command set — a separate transport would be
a near-total duplicate), with an `elecraft` flag on the client that forces
digital modes to DATA A (MD6+DT0) — no data-mode dropdown needed. RigState still
reports Backend "kenwood" so the CW-over-CAT keyer capability keeps working.
Sub-option of "back up on every exit": when on, backup.Run/RunADIF stamp the
filename with the time (opslog-YYYY-MM-DD-HHMMSS.db) so each run is a distinct
file instead of overwriting the day's snapshot. Rotation still trims to the
newest N (raise Rotation for a longer history). Threaded as a `unique` flag
through runConfiguredBackup/backupLogADIF from BackupSettings.KeepAll
(keyBackupKeepAll); UI sub-checkbox shown only when EveryExit is on.
Received flag: new APP_OPSLOG_QSL_RCVD extra, toggled on the QSO edit window
next to QSL Message (immediate targeted write via SetOpsLogQSLReceived so it sets
AND clears reliably), plus a live PSE QSL / TNX indicator and a Recent-QSOs
column mirroring the sent one.
PSE/TNX card stamp: automatic — received → TNX, otherwise PSE QSL — exposed as
the {qso.pse_tnx} token (added to qslVars, so preview and send agree) and placed
in the default QSO-box footer; it can be moved to its own element in the designer.
Default QSL message: new qsl.default_message (QSLEmailTemplates.DefaultMessage),
edited under Settings → E-mail → QSL card e-mail. qslVars falls back to it when
the QSO's own QSLMSG is empty, so a per-QSO message always wins. Single choke
point covers both live preview and send.
New BackupSettings.EveryExit (keyBackupEveryExit) with a Settings → Backup
checkbox. When on, the three shutdown-backup gates (plannedShutdownSteps,
runBackupForShutdown, maybeShutdownBackup) bypass the HasBackupToday /
HasADIFBackupToday "already done today" check and always run, so a second
session's QSOs are captured instead of skipped until the next day. The dated
backup file for today is refreshed (overwritten) each exit; prior days are still
kept by rotation.
The recording e-mail's subject and body round-tripped through EmailSettings and
the backend (keyEmailSubject/keyEmailBody) but had no UI editor — only the QSL
card e-mail did, so the recording mail was stuck on the default text. Add the
same subject/body editor to the E-mail panel, above the QSL block, sharing the
{CALL}/{DATE}/{BAND}/{MODE}/{MYCALL} template variables.
The Row helper was defined inside AwardsSelectionPanel, so each render minted a
new component type and React remounted the whole list on every click — flicker,
and clicks lost between mousedown and click (hence needing many tries). Inline
the row markup so the keyed buttons keep a stable identity.
New per-profile "tracked awards" selection: Settings → Awards (under User
configuration) is a two-column transfer list — every defined award on the left,
the ones you follow on the right, click to move either way. The Awards tab's
list is narrowed to the followed set; an empty set means "show them all" so the
tab is never blank.
Backend: app_awards_tracked.go adds keyAwardsTracked (per-profile JSON array of
award codes) with GetTrackedAwards/SaveTrackedAwards; saving emits
awards:tracked-changed so the Awards tab re-filters live. Award definitions stay
global — only the follow selection is per profile.
A contiguous FreqMin/FreqMax range can't drop a single band while keeping its
neighbours — so it couldn't express "40 m and 20 m yes, 30 m no" for an antenna
whose 30 m extension isn't fitted. Replace it with a Covered bands selector
(40 m–6 m) that applies to both the Ultrabeam and the SteppIR.
The follow loop and immediate re-tune now gate on band membership
(motorBandAllowed) instead of a MHz range: only bands in the operator's set are
followed, and 80 m/160 m are never followed (outside a beam's reach) regardless.
The legacy FreqMin/FreqMax is migrated to a band set on load and still
round-trips, so existing configs are unchanged. UI swaps the two number inputs
for a row of toggle chips.
The follow logic skips out-of-range frequencies only when it knows BOTH edges
of the antenna's range. The Ultrabeam path took those edges from the
controller's status frame, but an RCU-01 behind an RS232-to-Ethernet bridge
answers with the short frame that omits FreqMax → the guard saw FreqMax==0 and
disabled itself → OpsLog forwarded every rig frequency, so 80 m (un-tunable)
reached the controller, which clamped the elements down to its lowest band
(~30 m).
ubAdapter now carries the operator-configured FreqMin/FreqMax from Settings →
Antenna (like steppirAdapter already did) and uses them as a hard floor/ceiling,
falling back to the controller-reported bound only when one is left unset. This
guarantees both bounds are present so the guard actually engages. The Tunable
range editor in the Antenna panel, previously SteppIR-only, is now shown for the
Ultrabeam too, with a generic bilingual hint.
New internal/rotator/dcu1 client speaking the DCU-1 command set (AP1nnn / AM1
to go-to, AI1 to read bearing), over a serial COM port (4800 baud default) or a
raw TCP serial-over-IP bridge. Azimuth-only; Stop re-commands the current
bearing since the base set has no stop opcode.
Wired through app.go (normRotorType, default port 4001, GoTo/Heading/Stop/test
switches, park returns the same "PstRotator only" note as ARCO) and exposed in
the rotor settings as "Hy-Gain DCU-1 (RotorCard DXA, Rotor-EZ, Green Heron)"
with the ARCO's serial/TCP transport chooser and a bilingual hint. Protocol is
implemented from the standard DCU-1 spec and still needs field confirmation
against a real RotorCard DXA.
New DX Cluster setting (Settings → DX Cluster). Off (today's behaviour) a call
worked anywhere reads as already worked; on, the WORKED-call flag needs the same
band AND mode. It folds through the digital-mode grouping (Settings → General):
grouped, a 20m FT8 contact also marks a 20m FT4 spot worked; ungrouped they are
separate slots. Backend: qso.WorkedCallSlotKeys builds CALL|band and
CALL|band|mode(grouped) keys; ClusterSpotStatuses uses them when the option is on
(a spot with no inferable mode falls back to same-band).
Removed the long explanatory hints under the Kenwood COM/baud/host, data-mode,
CAT-trace and PTT-hotkey fields; shortened the CAT-sharing hint to just the
client setup line; and replaced the DTR/RTS hint with a one-liner. Less clutter
in the CAT settings.
No single Kenwood mode digit fits every rig for a data mode: a K3/K4 wants
DATA (MD6), a TS-590SG/TS-990S data mode is a USB modifier set on the rig,
and MD6 on a plain Kenwood is FSK/RTTY. So the operator now chooses in
Settings → CAT: USB (default), DATA (MD6), or leave the rig's mode unchanged.
Only soundcard/data modes (FT8, PSK, JT…) follow this; RTTY/FSK stays its own
native mode, and voice/CW are untouched (isKenwoodDataMode + test).
- PGXL: remote AUTH password; direct-link meter fallback (VITA-first) with
250 ms poll + peak-hold; fan mode uses bare "fanmode=" (was ignored).
- TCI: spot colour sent as decimal ARGB (ExpertSDR dropped the hex string);
spot click handled via CLICKED_ON_SPOT / RX_CLICKED_ON_SPOT to fill the entry.
- FlexRadio: clicking an OpsLog spot on the panadapter now applies the mode too.
- Filter presets: the trash icon deletes again (Radix pointer-down intercept).
- PTT hotkey: keys over CAT when a backend is active (was hijacked by a stale
Audio-tab RTS/DTR serial setting); AltGr keys allowed; presses logged.
- CW macro <LOGQSO>: logs after the preceding CW is sent, not on the first letter.
Settings -> Rotator is now a list like the amplifiers: add/remove rotors,
mix PstRotator / Rotator Genius / ARCO, and a Rotator Genius can drive both
its ports (one entry = two rotors). The compass gains a rotor selector, and
a per-rotor motorized-antenna flag so the boom/pattern paths show only for
the rotor carrying the Ultrabeam/SteppIR.
Also in this batch: a keyboard PTT hotkey (hold-to-talk or toggle, reusing
the audio PTT method with a CAT fallback), and TCI spot push to the
panadapter with click-to-fill of the callsign.
The 0.22.7/0.22.8 breakage came from a Xiegu-reported fault being fixed
inside the Yaesu and Kenwood backends. The lesson is structural: nothing
a backend does may be steered by another backend's report or another
backend's setting.
The lower-lines checkbox introduced for 0.22.9 was still one shared key
applied to both Yaesu and Kenwood — the same reflex in miniature. It is
now cat.yaesu.low_dtr_rts and cat.kenwood.low_dtr_rts, each checkbox in
its backend's own settings block, each wired only to its backend. The
shared key never shipped, so nothing needs migrating.
Both defaults break someone. 0.22.7 lowered the lines on Yaesu and
Kenwood and silenced a TS-990 whose interface needs RTS raised to
transmit; 0.22.8 stopped lowering them and an FT8 station reported its
output power wandering, cured by closing OpsLog — Windows raises both on
open and the interface reads one as PTT.
So it is now a checkbox on those two backends, off by default: that is
how they behaved before any of this. Xiegu keeps lowering them
unconditionally (its own report, its own explicit keying setting), and
the CI-V backend keeps the behaviour it has always had.
Reported on a Xiegu G90. With the blue programming cable — three wires, no
modem lines — CAT works perfectly. Behind a DE-19, which carries audio, CAT and
PTT, the radio went into transmit the moment OpsLog connected and stayed there.
Windows raises DTR and RTS when a serial port is opened, and the DE-19 reads
them as PTT; Xiegu's own documentation asks for both low. The CI-V backend has
dropped them since it was written, for the same reason on Icom rigs with USB
SEND mapped to a line. Xiegu, Yaesu and Kenwood did not. They do now.
The second half of the report: WSJT-X through OpsLog's rigctld decoded fine and
never transmitted. Nothing was broken in that chain — set_ptt reaches the
backend, which sends the CI-V PTT command, which a G90 ignores. That is why
Xiegu keys on a hardware line instead. The backend can now do that: Settings →
CAT → Xiegu → how the rig is keyed (CI-V / RTS / DTR).
Untested here — no G90 in reach. The operator who reported it offered to try.
A panadapter shot settles it: answering an S5 station, the replayed recording
goes out several times wider and taller than the station being answered — in WAV
as well as MP3, so this is not the encoder.
One setting served two sources that have nothing in common. A voice-keyer
message is a microphone at speaking distance and legitimately wants 195%; a QSO
recording is a receiver's line output, which is far hotter. The same 195% put it
into the transmitter flat out, ALC pinned, noise and voice alike.
The QSO playback now has its own level, defaulting to 100%. The voice keyer
keeps the setting it had, so nobody's F-key messages change.
Reported again after the monitor was wired up: 300% still sounded like 10%. The
monitor fix was right but could not show, because the sliders only changed the
settings panel's own state — the value reached the audio engine when the
operator clicked Save.
A level is set by ear, by dragging. It now applies on every move, to the monitor
and to the recorder mix alike; saving still persists it. Both halves were needed
and neither works alone.
The rule between the band-driven columns and the mode-driven ones was an extra
empty cell added to the body rows only. Seven cells per row against six in the
header slid every heading across: Phone stood over the TX antenna, CW over
Phone.
The rule is now drawn on the first power cell itself, in the header and the body
alike, so the two cannot drift apart again.
Antennas and power were two tables listing the same bands, one under the other,
so configuring a band meant matching rows by eye between them.
They are now one row per band. That the two settings are stored separately and
applied on different triggers — antennas on band change, power on band or mode
change — is a backend detail, and no reason to split what is a single decision
per band for the person configuring it. A rule in the header keeps the two
groups readable.
Settings → FlexRadio, beside the per-band antennas and applied the same way:
when the band or the mode changes. 1.5 kW that is fine on SSB has no business
going into an FT8 signal on the same band.
Three classes rather than one row per mode, because what decides the power is
duty cycle and what the amplifier will take of it, not the mode's name — FT8 and
RTTY punish an amplifier the same way, SSB and AM do not. The classification is
pinned by a test: a digital mode sorted as phone would deliver exactly the
1.5 kW this exists to prevent.
An empty box means "leave the power alone", never zero watts, and an unknown
mode changes nothing — setting a transmit power from a name we do not recognise
is not a good guess.
Unlike the antennas, a locked band does not skip it: the lock means "do not let
the rig drag my log entry around", not "let the amplifier keep whatever the last
mode left".
Settings → General, beside the language. An operator reading 2026-07-30 as the
7th of the 30th month is reading their own log wrongly, and that is a display
problem.
Storage stays ISO/ADIF, deliberately and permanently: it is what ADIF
specifies, it sorts correctly as text, and a stored format that followed a UI
preference would make the log unreadable the day the preference changed. Exports
and uploads are untouched.
Two details that decide whether it actually works:
- The columns are rebuilt when the format changes. The formatters are captured
inside AG-Grid's column definitions, so nothing else would notice and the
table would keep the old format until something forced a rebuild.
- main.tsx re-reads the choice after the portable prefs are pulled from the
database. The module reads localStorage at import time, which is BEFORE that
sync — so a copied data/ folder would have shown ISO until the next launch.
UTC is not part of the choice and never will be: a logbook is kept in UTC, and
showing local time would make the display disagree with the QSO's own record
twice a year.
It applies to QRZ.com and Club Log both, but it was rendered after the tab
strip — so it read as a QRZ setting when the QRZ tab was open, appeared to
repeat itself on the Club Log tab, and was invisible to anyone opening a third
one.
Above the tabs it belongs to the panel, which is what it actually is.
Opt-in, off by default: neither service can undo it, and a local delete is not
always a statement about the world — a duplicate cleared out of a contest log
was never meant to change the DX's log.
The two APIs are not alike, and the difference decides what is possible:
- Club Log deletes by MATCH (callsign, exact timestamp, band number), so it
works for every QSO in the log, past or future. The band table is its own
list and is pinned by a test: a band mapped to the wrong number does not
fail, it points the delete at a different QSO.
- QRZ.com deletes ONLY by logid. So markExtUploaded now stores the LOGID it
already received on every upload — it was being logged and thrown away. A
QSO uploaded before this cannot be withdrawn from here at all, and the log
says so by name rather than leaving the operator to assume it worked.
Both run BEFORE the local delete, because both need the QSO's own fields to
find their copy and there is nothing left to ask with once the row is gone.
Neither can block it: the operator asked for the QSO to go, and a refusing
website is not a reason to keep it.
The same ASCII stream over a socket instead of a wire: ser2net, an
Ethernet-serial adapter, a Raspberry Pi at the radio. One TCP transport
presented as a serial port, so the backend keeps a single code path.
Explicitly NOT the radio's own RJ45. A TS-890 or TS-990 speaks Kenwood's
KNS/ARCP there — session, authentication, a different protocol — and that needs
one of those radios in hand to write honestly. The setting's help text says so,
because an operator who plugs in their TS-890's Ethernet port and types its
address deserves to learn that from the interface rather than from silence.
Two details that decide whether this is usable or maddening:
- A read deadline expiring is reported as "no data yet", not as an error. It
is exactly what a serial read timeout means to the caller; as an error it
would make ask() abandon a rig that is merely thinking.
- The log line names what was connected to. "connected on @ 0 baud" after a
network connect sends someone hunting a serial fault that does not exist.
The host wins over the COM port when both are filled: it is the more deliberate
setting, and silently preferring the wire leaves someone staring at an address
they typed and a radio that never answers.
Grey line — the day/night terminator and its twilight band, off by default,
redrawn every minute so a map left open all day is not silently wrong by
evening. Its own Leaflet pane below the overlays, non-interactive, so it never
hides the path or beam nor swallows a click.
The solar maths is pure and was checked against known positions before being
wired to anything: both solstices, the March equinox, the subsolar longitude at
12 UTC, and day/night at Paris, Tokyo, New York, Sydney and Reykjavik across
seasons and hemispheres. That last set is what caught the real bug: the equation
has TWO solutions per meridian and the naive branch put New York in daylight at
02:00 in December — the terminator at +63° where it belongs at −63°. A shaded
map that looks entirely plausible and is exactly mirrored. It now anchors on the
classical terminator and takes the branch nearest it, which is also what makes
the twilight band follow the terminator instead of jumping hemisphere.
Separately, from a Xiegu user: the protocol-trace checkbox does not stay ticked.
It is React state initialised to false on every mount, so a trace still running
came back unticked — the operator ticks it to "switch it on", which switches it
OFF, and the log they send contains no trace at all. Worse than a cosmetic bug:
it silently defeats the one tool asked for to diagnose their radio. Both boxes
(CAT and WinKeyer) now read their real state from the backend.
Reported from a Flex in Kenwood CAT mode: frequency read perfectly, split never
appeared. Not every rig speaking this dialect fills IF's split bit.
Rather than guess which column that firmware populates, ask the question that
DEFINES split — is the transmit VFO a different VFO from the receive one — which
is exactly what FR and FT answer, and the same rule the Yaesu backend settled on
after several wrong turns. FR is also trusted over IF for which VFO is in use:
they are asked in the same breath, and a rig vague about the split bit may be
just as vague about the VFO field.
Cost is bounded: a rig that rejects FR/FT answers "?;" once and is never asked
again, so this is two short commands per poll only where it works. Both paths
are tested against the emulator — split found through FR/FT with IF silent, and
IF-reported split still working on a rig that refuses FR/FT without re-asking.
Also extends the CAT wire trace to the Kenwood backend, ASCII quoted so an empty
reply is visible as such: "" and ";" look identical unquoted, and telling them
apart is the whole question when a rig half-supports a command. If this fix is
not the whole story on real hardware, the trace is what will say so.
Reported on an IC-9100: the MOX button does not transmit, it sets split. The
source sends the PTT command (0x1C 0x00) and nowhere sends the split one (0x0F),
so the discrepancy is between what OpsLog sends and what the rig acts on — and
that link has already been shown, in the same operator's log, to lose frame sync.
Rather than guess from the command table, this adds what settled the WinKeyer
bug in one line: the actual bytes. Settings → CAT → Log the CI-V protocol writes
every frame in both directions as hex. RX is traced BEFORE framing, since the
bytes as they arrived are what reveals a lost boundary — a decoded view would
hide exactly the fault being hunted.
Session-only, like the keyer trace: it is a diagnostic, and a log full of hex
helps nobody who forgot it was on.
I am not claiming a cause yet. The last time I inferred one from a protocol
document rather than from evidence, I inverted a digit and broke the case that
worked.
A sixth CAT backend, talking to a TS-590/890/990/2000 over its serial port with
no OmniRig in between — frequency, mode, VFO, split and PTT. Elecraft K3/K4 and
the "Kenwood" setting on other radios speak the same dialect.
The protocol was not researched from scratch: internal/catemu already ANSWERS
these commands, pretending to be a TS-2000 so an ACOM amplifier follows OpsLog.
The IF frame layout here is read from the same format string catemu emits, so
the two halves of the repository agree by construction — and the test caught my
own fixture being one character short, which is exactly the error that layout
invites.
Design notes worth keeping:
- IF; is the poll. One frame carries frequency, TX state, mode, VFO and split,
so simplex operation costs a single round trip; the other VFO is only asked
for when split is actually on.
- FA/FB take ELEVEN digits here where Yaesu uses nine. That is the likeliest
place to copy the Yaesu backend and be wrong by a factor of a hundred, so it
has its own test.
- Every lesson the Yaesu backend learned the hard way is built in from the
start: replies matched to the command that asked, "?;" remembered so a poll
stops paying a timeout for an unsupported command, the serial handle closed
before reopening, and a rig that answers nothing reported as absent rather
than "connected".
Untested on hardware — I have no Kenwood here. The frame parsing is covered by
tests against catemu's own format.
An ERC (Easy Rotor Control, incl. ERC Mini) emulates Yaesu GS-232A/B, which is
exactly what the backend written for the microHAM ARCO already speaks — azimuth
out (Maaa), azimuth in (C), stop (S), which is the whole of what was asked for.
So this is two small gaps rather than a new backend:
- Serial speed was hardcoded to 9600. An ARCO's virtual COM ignores it, but an
ERC runs at whatever its own configuration sets, and a mismatch reads as a
dead rotator. It is now selectable beside the COM port.
- The entry was called "microHAM ARCO", so an ERC owner would never have found
it. It is named after the PROTOCOL now: "GS-232A controller (microHAM ARCO,
ERC…)".
The help text states the condition plainly in both languages, because it is the
one thing that will otherwise waste an evening: an ERC left on Hy-Gain DCU-1
speaks a different command set and simply will not answer.
Untested on hardware — I have no ERC here, and the GS-232 path itself is proven
on a real ARCO.
Spotted by the author: on SQLite the database chip showed a.dbPath — the
settings/profile database — under a tooltip reading "Local SQLite logbook".
Those became two separate files when the logbook was split out, so an operator
checking where their QSOs live, or which file to copy before a trip, was pointed
at the wrong one. MySQL was already right.
It now resolves the logbook the same way connectLogbook does: the active
profile's own file if it names one, then the default logbook.db, and the settings
db only in the case where it genuinely doubles as the logbook.
Also moves the 4O3A mark beside its menu label instead of the far edge of the
row, as asked.
The wordmark I put there was not what the author expected: the brand is "4", a
green waveform of stacked lenses, then "3A".
Only the waveform is SVG. The digits stay HTML text so they keep the sidebar's
own typeface at any theme or zoom — an SVG <text> would pick its own font and
drift from the menu around it. Seven ellipses, tallest in the middle, match the
shape of the mark.
Still drawn rather than fetched: an image off the web has no verifiable
provenance, and this stays one small component to swap if the official SVG is
preferred.
Antenna Genius and Tuner Genius now carry a small 4O3A wordmark, so the two
panels that drive that hardware are recognisable without reading the labels.
Drawn inline rather than shipped as an image file, following the language
picker's flags: it scales with the row, follows the theme through currentColor,
and adds no binary asset to the repository.
It is a plain wordmark, not the manufacturer's logo artwork — I did not pull an
image off the web, since I cannot verify the provenance or licence of what I
would find, and redistributing a company's mark inside the product is the
author's call. The component is one function and takes the official SVG in its
place if that is preferred.
Not applied to the Amplifier panel: it covers both the 4O3A PowerGenius XL and
the SPE Expert range, so a single vendor mark there would be wrong.
The messages went to the radio exactly as recorded. Nothing in OpsLog could
raise them, so a microphone captured quietly drove the rig quietly and the only
remedies were the radio's own USB input menu or the Windows mixer — which is
where the operator was heading. There is now a level from 10 to 400 %, applied
with clamping (a wrap would turn loud speech into noise on the air), and Play
previews at that same level so the adjustment is made against what will actually
be transmitted.
The PTT method list also named only OmniRig, Flex, Icom and TCI, so choosing a
native Yaesu left "CAT" with no backend beside it — which reads as "there is no
CAT PTT for my radio" and sends the operator to RTS on a COM port that has
nothing to do with the rig. Same list-needing-every-member shape as three
earlier bugs in this feature. The TestPTT log line had the same rot: it said
"CAT via OmniRig" whatever backend was running.
Selecting the Yaesu keyer fell through to the WinKeyer branch of the settings,
which offers a serial port picker and a Connect button. So the operator went
hunting for the right port — trying the standard COM and the enhanced one in turn
— and neither connected, because this keyer uses NEITHER: it keys over the CAT
link already configured in Settings → CAT.
It now has its own branch, like the Flex one: a speed field, the warning when the
CAT backend is not a Yaesu, and a line saying explicitly that keying rides the
CAT link. Speed changes go to the rig's keyer instead of a WinKeyer that is not
there.
rouggy