Clicking a macro dropped the CAT for a few seconds, keyed nothing, then came
back.
ask() returned the first ';'-terminated frame it saw, whatever command it
belonged to. KY produces NO reply, so the next query — FA; from the poll loop —
collected a leftover frame, failed to parse it as a frequency, and ReadState
reported an error. The Manager reads that as "lost the rig": disconnect, wait,
reconnect. Hence the drop and the automatic recovery a few seconds later.
Replies are now matched to the command that asked for them: anything else is
discarded and logged, so a stray frame costs one log line instead of the link.
This also explains the silence — the send never got a clean run at the port
while the backend was being torn down under it.
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.
A native CAT backend owns the rig's serial port, and Windows gives a COM port to
one process — so choosing native CAT locked WSJT-X, MSHV and JTDX out of the
radio entirely. That is the cost of dropping OmniRig, which was itself a sharing
layer, and it has to be paid back.
OpsLog now becomes the server, as wfview does. It speaks the Hamlib net rigctl
protocol, which every one of those programs supports natively (rig model "Hamlib
NET rigctl", 127.0.0.1:4532) with no driver to install. It sits in front of the
MANAGER, not a backend, so an operator on OmniRig, Flex, Icom or TCI gets the
same server.
Two details that decide whether a client works at all rather than degrading:
dump_state is parsed positionally and WSJT-X refuses to proceed without a
well-formed block, so it is written out in full and its shape is pinned by a
test; and set_vfo / set_split_vfo answer RPRT 0 rather than an error, because
OpsLog follows the rig's own VFO and a refusal makes WSJT-X abandon the
connection. Unknown commands answer RPRT -11 — never silence, which hangs a
client instead.
The whole protocol is tested against a fake rig, plus one end-to-end exchange
over a real socket, since the framing is as much the contract as the text.
Also: the Yaesu backend is confirmed working on a real FTDX10 (frequency, mode,
VFO, split), so its "not yet verified" note is now wrong and is corrected.
Every Yaesu fault reported so far came from OmniRig's interpretation layer, not
from the radio: a rig file that never exposes the VFO, a Freq property meaning A
on one model and B on another, a split flag that alternates between polls. This
talks to the rig directly, so what the radio answers is what is shown.
Modern Yaesu CAT is plain ASCII with a ';' terminator — FA/FB for the VFOs, MD0
for the mode, VS for the selected VFO, TX to key. Frequency is written to the VFO
the operator is actually on, not always to A, which is the failure that made a
display disagree with the radio.
Two things are genuinely uncertain across the family and are treated as such
rather than guessed. SPLIT is read through ST, then FT if the rig ignores ST —
whichever answers wins and the choice is remembered, because the two commands say
DIFFERENT things (a split flag vs which VFO transmits). If neither answers, split
is reported OFF and the fact is logged, rather than invented. Unknown model ids
and mode bytes are logged raw for the same reason.
Split resolution, frequency parsing and the mode mapping are pure functions with
a table test — the OmniRig equivalent is where every Yaesu bug lived, and it had
no test until late.
Written from the CAT reference; NOT yet verified on a radio.
rouggy