Reported by one in the field. Kenwood's documentation gives 024 for that
radio; both are mapped rather than betting on which is right, and the log
no longer reads "Kenwood (022)".
d4bfd30 fixed a Xiegu G90 behind a DE-19 that keyed on connect, and I
applied the same line-lowering to Kenwood and Yaesu with no evidence that
either needed it. It silenced them: many USB-serial interfaces will not
transmit with RTS low — hardware flow control, or an output stage the
line enables. A TS-990 on COM3 opened cleanly and answered nothing, which
reached us as "CAT stopped working after the update".
Xiegu keeps the behaviour: that is where the fault was reported, and that
backend now has an explicit setting for which line keys the rig. The CI-V
backend keeps its own, which predates all of this.
Kenwood also distinguishes a silent port from one sending data that never
answers, and quotes what arrived — "the rig is not answering" sent an
operator checking the power switch on a radio whose frames were visibly
on the wire.
A TS-480 connected, answered ID, then never reported a state:
discarding " 000000000010000000;" while waiting for IF
connected on COM3 @ 115200 baud
cat:state → connected=false freq=0
A headless frame tail can only come from bytes that were thrown away.
ask() buffered into a local slice, so everything left after the matched
frame — including the head of a frame still arriving — went with it, and
the link could sit one answer behind its questions. The buffer now lives
on the backend, and Connect drains whatever the rig said before AI0 took
effect rather than inheriting it.
Also: the cat:state diagnostic prints RigState.Error. It read
"connected=false freq=0" and said nothing about why, so every report of a
CAT failure arrived without the one fact that explains it — the reason
only ever reached a tooltip.
New work moves to 0.22.8; 0.22.7 is released.
The cluster already answers this question for a spot; the entry panel did
not answer it for the station actually being worked. A county hunter
needs to know before the QSO ends — by the time the county shows up in
the awards table the station is long gone.
qso.CountyWorked asks about one county instead of loading the whole
worked set, narrowed to the state so it stays a few dozen rows on a
remote MySQL. It compares through award.USCountyKey on both sides rather
than in SQL, because logged spellings vary ("Los Angeles" against
"LOS ANGELES, CA") and that key function is what resolves it everywhere
else.
An empty or non-US county is not "new" but unknown, and shows nothing: a
badge on a guess is worse than no badge.
Six equal columns gave a US county name the same width as a two-digit CQ
zone: the county truncated while the zones, the prefix and the DXCC
number sat mostly empty. The row is twelve columns now, spans set per
field.
The bearing and the two distances are read-only and never exceed
"12345 km", so they move to a flex row at a fixed width and the address —
the one field here that was never wide enough — takes the remainder.
Two DARC DOKs are both called "Gießen" — two clubs share the town. Exact
matching finds both and both are right as far as the matcher can tell, so
it kept both and the operator got a QSO credited to a DOK that may well
have been the other one.
Picking one is not an option: it writes a reference into the log with no
evidence behind it. So a Def can now be marked one reference per QSO, and
an ambiguous match on such an award assigns none, names the candidates in
the trace and leaves the contact under missing references — where the
operator's choice now sticks (06e3437).
Off by default, and deliberately NOT a revival of the old `Multi` flag: a
field holding several references (an n-fer POTA activation, a VUCC grid
line) is several references, correctly, and stays that way.
Reported on the DARC DOK award, with DL2FDM: a German address matches two or
three DOKs, the operator deletes the wrong ones and assigns the right one, and
the next recompute puts the wrong ones straight back.
The manual reference was APPENDED to what the matcher found. Storage already
kept exactly one manual entry per award — setOverrideRef drops the previous one
— so it was an override everywhere except at the one place it mattered. The
operator was arguing with the matcher and could not win.
It now replaces. The trace records what was superseded, so a corrected QSO can
still be explained rather than being merely different. A QSO with no correction
keeps every automatic reference, which the test also pins: an override must not
quietly disable matching for everyone else.
This does not address the over-matching itself — an address containing "Berlin
Mitte, 10115 Berlin" genuinely matches two DOK descriptions. That is the next
question, and a separate one.
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.
Reported by an operator whose node sends little: nothing for two minutes, then a
reconnect — losing the login, the filters, and any spot that arrived during the
gap.
The read had a 120 s deadline and ANY error ended the session, a timeout
included. That reads a silence as a verdict on the link. It is not: a cluster on
a dead band legitimately says nothing for minutes.
Only a real error ends a session now. A genuinely dead peer is still caught, and
by the mechanism meant for it — TCP keepalive probes an idle connection and its
failure surfaces as an error on Read, not as a timeout. The dialer sets it
explicitly rather than inheriting a default, since it is now what the design
depends on.
One trap the advice this came from did not mention: ReadString returns the bytes
it HAD read along with the timeout. Discarding them would lose the first half of
any spot line straddling a deadline, so the partial is carried over.
Tested: a listener that goes silent past the deadline and then sends a spot —
the spot arrives on the ORIGINAL connection, and the listener never accepts a
second one. The tick is a var so that test runs in four seconds instead of
sixty; a slow test is a test that gets skipped.
The operator split it in one test: WAV is fine, MP3 is not. The MP3 path is the
only one that resamples — 16 kHz up to 32 kHz, because the encoder emits broken
frames at MPEG-2 rates — and it did so by averaging neighbouring samples.
That is an upsampler in name only. Every component at f is mirrored to
16 kHz − f, and the test measures the mirror just 7 dB below the wanted signal:
a second copy of the whole spectrum. On speech it adds brightness; on receiver
noise, which is broadband, it lays a second noise floor over the top of the
band. Hence "a hiss that is not the QRM, louder than the voice" — and hence its
absence from the WAV, which resamples nothing.
Zero-stuffing plus a 63-tap windowed sinc at the old Nyquist puts the image
56.8 dB down instead of 7, at a cost measured in microseconds against the MP3
encode that follows. Two tests pin it: the image suppression, and that the level
is unchanged — a fix that quietly halved every recording would be a second
surprise on top of the one being repaired.
A station with two radios has two sets of audio endpoints, and the recorder will
happily capture the one nobody is listening to — a Flex DAX channel while the
operator works a Yaesu over USB. The file is then full of hiss with no relation
to what they hear, unaffected by the rig's AGC, and nothing anywhere said which
receiver it came from.
The device names are now logged, resolved to their friendly names, once when
capture starts.
Reported precisely: on the air the voice is well clear of the noise; in the
recording the noise is louder than the voice. Same audio, so the fault is in how
it is captured, not in what is captured.
AUDCLNT_STREAMFLAGS_SRC_DEFAULT_QUALITY was set alongside AUTOCONVERTPCM. The
name reads like a sensible default and is not: it selects the CHEAP sample-rate
converter, for cases where quality does not matter. Taking a rig's 48 kHz stream
down to our 16 kHz, it folds everything above 8 kHz back into the audio band —
and receiver hiss is mostly high frequencies. The voice keeps its level, the
noise arrives twice.
Dropped, so Windows uses its normal converter, which filters before decimating.
This affects every capture and render path in the app, the voice keyer included.
Padlocks. LockBtn was declared INSIDE the App component, so every render gave
React a new component type and the button was unmounted and rebuilt — about four
times a second while the CAT polls. It flickered under the pointer and swallowed
clicks, because the node being clicked no longer existed when the click landed.
The padlock now lives at module level and is passed its state.
From-radio level. It reached the QSO recorder and nothing else, so an operator
listening through OpsLog heard no difference between 10% and 150% — the control
was not weak, it was disconnected. It now scales the monitor too, applied on the
captured chunk so the network-fed path keeps its own levels, and a running
monitor picks up a change immediately: making someone restart the monitor to
hear the slider is how a working control gets reported as broken.
Callsign field widened to w-56, the room coming from the RST pair which never
needs more than five characters. It is the one field always typed into, it
carries the REC badges, and a long portable call has to stay readable.
Reported precisely: press play again and it stops the current message, but you
then have to wait the whole length of the message before it will play — otherwise
the radio is keyed and the PTT released at once.
Play only SIGNALLED the previous playback to stop and started a new one straight
away. The old goroutine still held the WASAPI render client for a moment, so the
new client could not start; it returned immediately and the PTT tail was all that
was left. The log now shows both halves of that: a play line, then a release
120 ms later.
Stopping now waits for the goroutine to have returned — the point of stopping
before starting again — bounded at 1.5 s so a wedged device cannot freeze the
operator's click, and saying so in the log if it ever comes to that.
From an operator's log, playing a recording on the air repeatedly:
18:52:40.148 play → 18:52:48.420 PTT released 8.2 s, the whole take
18:52:57.759 play → 18:52:57.879 PTT released 0.12 s, nothing came out
Those 120 ms are the PTT release tail alone: the render device refused to start
and playPCM returned an error that was thrown away. The call reported success
every time, which is what "it plays once and then never again" looks like from
the outside — and why the search went to the recorder, which was innocent.
The error is now logged with the device name.
Reported: the recording plays once and never again, "as if it threw the sound
away after playing it". PeekQSO is what the playback reads and it is meant to
copy — TakeQSO is the one that clears — so this pins that, and that the copy is
independent of the recorder's own buffer.
It passes, which is the useful part: the take survives, so the one-shot failure
is downstream of it and the search moves to the file and the player.
All / CW / Phone / Digital, stacked on top of the worked/confirmed filter. The
question an operator actually has — which DXCC entities have I worked on CW but
not confirmed on CW — needs both at once; answering only one of them is what
sends people to a spreadsheet.
References carried bands but not modes, so the award computation now aggregates
mode CLASSES per reference, worked and confirmed separately. Classes, not ADIF
modes: nobody chasing CW cares whether the digital side was FT8 or RTTY, and a
list of twenty mode names would not answer the question. An unrecognised mode
counts as data rather than as nothing, so a new digital mode does not vanish
from the filter the day it appears.
Two rules the filter needs to be honest:
- Not-confirmed means not confirmed ON THIS MODE. An entity worked on CW and
confirmed on SSB is still a CW entity to chase, and that is exactly what the
filter is for.
- "Not worked" plus a mode is a contradiction — an unworked reference has no
mode — so the mode filter stands aside there instead of emptying the list.
The operator's own fetch settles it. One record, both fields:
<app_qrzlog_status:1>N <qrzcom_qso_download_status:1>Y
QRZ says the QSO is NOT confirmed and sets the download field anyway — it marks
what was handed back, not what was confirmed. OpsLog read it as a confirmation,
so eighteen QSOs came back "UPDATED" and green, none of them confirmed on QRZ.
The site's own logbook page shows them without a star.
Only app_qrzlog_status = C counts now. The test that asserted otherwise is
corrected and carries the real record.
And the download now takes back what it wrongly gave: when QRZ explicitly says
not-confirmed and our log says confirmed, the flag is cleared and reported on
its own line. These QSOs count towards award slots, so leaving them green until
someone noticed was not an option — and nothing else in the app would ever have
undone them. Only on an explicit no: a record with no app_qrzlog_status is QRZ
saying nothing, and silence is not a retraction.
Both faults reported on the air, both reproduced in synthetic signals first —
the existing tests all passed because each starts a fresh decoder and sends
textbook spacing, which is neither of the cases that hurt.
Speed change. A 32 wpm station followed by a 14 wpm reply decoded as
"TTT TTTT TTTTT TT…" for most of the over. Not the element classifier: the
CHARACTER-gap threshold is 2.2 dits, so at the stale fast estimate it stood at
81 ms while the newcomer's element gaps were 86 ms. Every single element was
flushed as its own character, and a lone element with no contrast reads as a
dah. A silence long enough to end an over now drops the estimate back to the
seed, which is exactly the state a freshly started decoder is in — and that case
was always fine. The threshold scales with the current estimate (12 dits, floor
600 ms) because a fixed one cannot serve both 10 and 40 wpm.
Callsign split. The word boundary sits at 4.6 dits, the geometric mean of a
3-dit letter gap and a 7-dit word gap. It assumes textbook spacing; a fist
leaving 5 dits between letters had every letter turned into a word, so a
callsign arrived as "O Y 1 C T". The boundary now also follows the letter gaps
this operator actually sends, whichever is larger. A wide sender's words may run
together — a far smaller price than a callsign in pieces.
The operator asked the right question: why wait 1.5 s at all, when the mode is
known from CAT?
Because the wait is not the problem — what happened during it was. The drift
guard, meant for two sound cards running on their own clocks, saw a starved
source as a one-second skew and trimmed the radio audio to match. So the opening
of every CW recording was thrown away although it had been captured.
The guard now applies only while BOTH sources are actually delivering. Waiting
then costs nothing: everything buffered is written whole the moment the silent
source is written off, which a test now pins with three seconds of audio.
Using the CAT mode to skip the wait would have been a second mechanism for a
case this one already covers — and it would not cover the others: a device
switched off, unplugged, or held by another program.
The log read:
recorder: the second audio source is silent — recording the radio alone
recorder: no audio at all from "DAX Mic" after 3 s — nothing is streaming
Both true, and together they read as a fault while the recording was going
perfectly well — it was saved seconds later. On CW the mic channel legitimately
delivers nothing; the mixer already said what it was doing about it.
The watchdog now mentions the mic only when the radio is silent too, which is
the case where the recording really is empty.
The operator said it from the start: in CW there is no sidetone, only reception.
My previous fix did not cover it — it wrote off a source that STOPPED, but a
source that never starts has no last-delivery time, so it stayed forever "not
yet dry" and held the mixer at min(A,B)=0. Three empty recordings while the
radio audio streamed perfectly.
A source with no delivery is now measured from when capture started. Tested both
ways: nothing is written off in the first moments, and a source that has never
spoken is written off once the grace period has passed.
Third empty recording, same station, and the sequence was as plain as it gets:
type the call, click record, log the QSO. The device opened and never streamed.
Endpoint ids are what gets stored, and a DAX channel that is reconfigured,
disabled or recreated comes back with a DIFFERENT id. The stale one opens
without complaint on some drivers and simply never delivers — indistinguishable
from a quiet band until the file turns out to be empty.
The recorder now checks the id against the current endpoint list when it starts,
which takes milliseconds, and says outright that the configured input is gone —
on screen, not only in the log. If it IS still there, the answer is equally
useful: the device exists and the fault is upstream, in whatever should be
feeding it.
The watchdog fired exactly as intended and said:
no audio at all from "{0.0.1.00000000}.{6a27abfd-f277-496b-b6f1-f92ec284c636}"
which tells the operator nothing they can act on. "DAX RX 1 (FlexRadio DAX)"
points straight at the DAX panel.
Endpoint ids are what gets CONFIGURED and stored, so they are what the recorder
holds; the friendly name is resolved only when something has gone wrong. When
the endpoint cannot be found at all the id is still shown — a device that has
disappeared explains an empty recording too.
Second empty recording from the same station, and this time NEITHER source had
delivered a sample — so the fix for a silent second source could not apply, and
the log still said only "recording was empty" at the end of the QSO.
Two blind spots, both now closed:
- captureStream's error was discarded. A device that cannot be opened — renamed,
unplugged, held by another program — looked exactly like one that is merely
quiet.
- A WASAPI device can open cleanly and then produce nothing at all. A DAX
channel with no stream behind it does precisely that, and it is
indistinguishable from silence until the file turns out to be empty.
A watchdog now reports both, three seconds in, and the first goes to the OPERATOR
as a toast rather than only to the log: they are mid-QSO, and by the time they
find out at save time the audio is gone for good.
From an operator's log: a Flex with From Radio on DAX RX and Recording mic on
DAX Mic, a full CW QSO recorded, and at log time "snapshot failed: recording
was empty".
The mixer took min(len(A), len(B)) samples. In CW the mic path does not run, so
DAX Mic delivered nothing, min stayed 0, and the drift guard then threw the
radio audio away a second at a time. Two devices configured meant the recording
depended on the quieter one being alive.
A source that has delivered nothing for 1.5 s is now treated as absent and the
other is recorded alone, with one line in the log saying so — half a recording
is worth having, silence is not. Both are mixed again the moment the missing one
comes back.
Neither is written off before it has EVER spoken: at startup both timestamps are
zero, and declaring one dead then would clip the opening of every recording.
That case is tested too.
SmartSDR moves its active flag onto the TX slice as soon as the transmit
frequency is touched, and OpsLog followed it. But the operator is listening to
the DX on the other slice: the S-meter, audio level, filter and DSP they are
adjusting all belong there, so following the transmitter handed them the
controls of a receiver they were not using.
In split the receive slice now wins. Simplex is unchanged, and two same-band
slices in different classes (SSB alongside FT8) are still not a split.
A slice clicked IN OPSLOG is remembered and overrides both the split rule and
the radio's focus — that is the operator speaking. Activating a slice on the
radio or in SmartSDR deliberately does not move OpsLog. The pin is dropped when
that slice stops being in use, so a closed receiver cannot strand the display.
The panel now highlights the slice OpsLog is working with rather than the radio's
focused one; reporting the radio's flag would light up one slice while every
control acted on another.
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 situation, in the operator's words: working VP2MAA, recording, and he asks
to hear his own signal. So: stop, play, and the recording is still saved with
the QSO.
Stopping FREEZES the take rather than ending it — nothing more is captured,
nothing is discarded, and logging writes the file exactly as before. Playback
reuses the voice keyer's path: same output device, same PTT keying and release
with its generation guard, so a replay cannot be cut short by a stale unkey.
Playing is refused while still recording. The transmitted audio would feed back
into the same take on any rig monitoring its own transmission, and stopping is
one click the operator has already made — it is their statement that the take is
finished, not a hoop.
The elapsed clock freezes with the recording and resumes from where it stopped,
because it now shows the LENGTH OF THE FILE rather than the time since the QSO
began. Only a fresh take returns it to zero.
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.
Nobody here owns a Kenwood, and a backend that has never completed a single
exchange is a guess however carefully it was written.
But this repository already contains the other half of the conversation:
internal/catemu ANSWERS this dialect, pretending to be a TS-2000 so an ACOM
amplifier follows OpsLog. The test's responder replies exactly as catemu does —
same FA/FB widths, same 38-character IF layout, same ID019 — so the two halves
are checked against each other instead of against my reading of a manual.
Connect adds a dialPort seam for this; nothing else changed in the backend.
Covered: model identification, simplex on A, everything following the VFO in
use when on B, tuning writing to that VFO rather than blindly to FA, split with
TX and RX the right way round (ADIF FREQ is the TRANSMIT frequency — swapping
them writes the wrong frequency into every logged QSO), the mode digit, and a
silent port reported as not answering rather than as a connected radio. The last
three are each a fault that actually reached a user through the Yaesu backend.
What this does NOT prove: that a real TS-590 answers on the same timings, or
fills every IF field the way its documentation says. That still needs a radio.
CONTEST_ID was reported as not imported. It is imported: this drives an
operator's own IOTA-contest record through a real SQLite logbook and reads the
row back, confirming contest_id=RSGB-IOTA and iota=EU005 in the database.
The conversion-level test was already green while the report stood, which is
exactly why it was not enough — a promoted field can be dropped at any of five
places between the file and the grid, and only the round trip says which. The
answer here turned out to be none of them: the Contest columns are simply hidden
by default in the QSO grid.
An operator worked the RSGB IOTA contest in another logger and got back records
carrying <STATE:5>EU005: N1MM-class software stores the received exchange in the
column its contest module uses, not the one ADIF reserves. Imported verbatim,
every QSO gains a US-state field reading "EU005" and the IOTA award sees
nothing — the reference is in the log, just not where anything looks for it.
The import dialog gains optional source → destination rows, prefilled with
STATE → IOTA since that is the case that prompted it. Applied to the RAW record
before conversion, so it works for promoted columns and Extras alike and the
destination is parsed exactly as if the file had carried it there.
Two rules, both from the same principle that the file outranks our guess:
- the source is CLEARED, so a reference does not linger in STATE where it
would show as the contacted station's US state in the grid and every export;
- a destination the file already filled is kept, judged against the record as
it ARRIVED — otherwise the result would depend on Go's map iteration order,
which is deliberately random.
The swap case in the test is what forced that second rule to be stated: "never
overwrite" and "exchange two fields" cannot both hold silently, so a destination
that is itself a mapping source is treated as an explicit swap and nothing else
is overwritten.
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.
From F4JND's log: a rig sitting on 145.550 MHz FM produced status lines reading
16445550000, 8364550000, 5817408364 and 12640 Hz between good readings — the last
of those even resolved to a 6 cm band.
BCDToFreq treated the nibbles 0x0A..0x0F as the digits 10..15, so a byte stream
that had lost frame sync still decoded into a number. The same log shows why sync
was lost: PTT round trips timing out and a scope stream the rig kept rejecting
(0x27), both competing with the poll on one serial line.
Non-decimal nibbles are now refused. Each caller keeps its last good value rather
than publishing noise: the frequency reader returns an error, the sub-VFO reader
returns not-ok, and the scope keeps its previous edges. Garbage that LOOKS like a
frequency is worse than a refused frame — it reaches the display, the band slots
and eventually the log, and it is the operator who then has to disprove it.
The test builds its fixture with FreqToBCD rather than by hand, because my
hand-written one was byte-reversed and the test caught it.
This does NOT explain the white screen that was also reported, and I have not
claimed it does: it removes one source of absurd values reaching the UI, which is
worth doing on its own evidence.
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.
Reported, and reasoned out from the half that already worked: a spot click now
tunes the right VFO, but it set the mode with MD0 — main — whatever VFO the
operator was on. Working from SUB, the spot changed the mode of the VFO NOT in
use and left the one in use as it was. The author inferred the sub half from
seeing main change, and was right.
The read had the same fault, so the console displayed main's mode while showing
the sub VFO's frequency.
Mode now addresses the receiver in use — MD0 for main, MD1 for sub — in the poll
read, in SetMode, and in the console's raw-mode setter. A rig without a sub
receiver never sees MD1: curVFO only becomes B where the rig reports its receive
VFO in the first place.
Reported on an FTDX101: with RX and TX moved together to the sub VFO, OpsLog
showed split — and took the MAIN frequency as the transmit one, which would log
the wrong frequency.
ST is a bare flag. It says "split" without saying which VFO transmits, and this
rig raises it whenever the transmit VFO is the sub one, whether or not the
operator is also listening there. FT names the transmit VFO, so where the receive
VFO is known as well (FR), split is derived from the pair: they differ or they do
not. That is a fact about the rig's state rather than a flag whose meaning varies
by model.
The fix is therefore in the probe ORDER, not in the reading: FT is asked first
when FR answered, and ST stays the fallback for rigs that have neither. A test
pins the order and both halves of the trap — that FT gets this case right, and
that ST alone gets it wrong.
The seven minutes of reconnects in the operator's log turned out to be the radio
switched off — no defect. But the log said otherwise:
20:14:42 yaesu: ID query failed (timeout) — continuing…
20:14:44 yaesu: connected on COM7 @ 38400 baud, model="FTDX101D"
Opening the port was treated as connecting, and the model name was left over from
the previous session, so a powered-down rig produced a line claiming it was
connected as a named model. That is what sent me looking for a software fault.
Connect now tracks whether ANY probe answered. If none did, it clears the stale
model, says so in terms an operator can act on — is it powered on, is the CAT
rate right — and returns an error so the reconnect loop keeps trying rather than
believing it succeeded.
Connect assigned a fresh handle to y.port without closing the one it already
held. It is called again on every reconnect, so a rig that fails to answer leaks
one handle per attempt — every few seconds, indefinitely.
Windows opens a serial port EXCLUSIVELY, which makes this visible as "yaesu: open
COM7 @ 9600 baud: Serial port busy" in an operator's log: OpsLog was competing
with itself for the port.
This is a real defect found while reading the reconnect loop, but I want to be
straight about its limits: it does NOT explain the seven minutes of "ID query
failed — timeout" in the same log, where the port opened and the rig stayed
silent. That one is still open, and the operator alternates between two separate
radios (a TCI SDR and the Yaesu) rather than sharing one port, so a conflict
between backends is not the explanation either.
Reported both ways round, which is what settles it. With RX and TX on SUB
everything worked; with them on MAIN the frequency froze and a spot click tuned
the sub VFO. The log shows the rig answering FR01 in the MAIN case.
So on an FTDX101 the state is the FIRST digit — 0 = main — and the second is a
separate parameter. Yesterday I changed this to the LAST digit, which read FR01
as SUB and inverted the whole thing. The fault that change was meant to fix ("SUB
shows MAIN") came from reading VS instead of FR, and probing FR had already fixed
it on its own; the digit change was an unnecessary guess layered on a real fix.
Nothing else needed changing for the operator's two questions: the display and
SetFrequency already follow curVFO, so a spot now tunes whichever VFO holds RX
and TX, and the main frequency is read when on main. A test states that in those
terms — active VFO and which command a spot writes — rather than only as a byte,
because the byte is what I got wrong while believing the logic was right.
The log named the cause in one line: yaesu: receive VFO is read through FR
(answered "FR01;"). An FTDX10 answers "FR0;" — one digit — so reading the digit
straight after the prefix worked there and took the 0 of "01" on an FTDX101.
The rig was on SUB and OpsLog said MAIN, which is the reported "Sub shows the main
frequency". It also explains the second half: split is "TX VFO differs from RX
VFO", so a receive VFO that alternated between right and wrong made the split flag
flip between consecutive polls and swap freq and rx in the log.
The state is now taken from the LAST digit before the terminator, which is correct
on both forms, and the same reading applies to ST/FT/VS rather than leaving the
next two-digit rig to be found in the field.
On the operator's question of whether freq should simply be the active VFO: no —
freq is the TRANSMIT frequency by ADIF convention (FREQ is the QSO frequency,
FREQ_RX the receive one, set only when split). In simplex they are the same, so it
does read as the active VFO; in split it must stay the transmit VFO or the log
records the wrong frequency. What the operator saw was this bug, not that rule.
The operator's description separates the two cases precisely, and that is what
identifies the fault. RX alone on SUB displayed VFO B correctly; RX AND TX on
SUB — entirely on the sub receiver — displayed VFO A.
VS was being read as "which VFO is in use". On an FTDX101 it does not answer that
question: with both RX and TX on sub it still reported the main VFO. FR is the
command that selects the RECEIVE VFO, and it is now asked first, VS remaining the
fallback for models that lack it.
Split falls out of the same correction: split means the TRANSMIT VFO differs from
the RECEIVE one, so a wrong receive VFO made the comparison wrong too — which is
the second half of what was reported. A test covers all four RX/TX combinations,
including the one that is NOT split (both on sub) and reads as split if you take
the transmit VFO alone.
Translating the schema correctly does nothing for a database that already
exists. This operator's had been created by an earlier attempt, so qso.state was
already TEXT and every launch died on the same statement — CREATE INDEX … ON
qso(state), error 1170 — with the connection failing at startup and no way
forward from the UI.
Columns that MUST be VARCHAR (the indexed and keyed ones) are now converted
before the migrations run. It reads information_schema, touches only the columns
in varcharColumns, and only when they are actually TEXT — a no-op on a healthy
database, and it preserves each column's NULL/NOT NULL.
A failure to repair IS reported: it is the difference between a logbook that
opens and one that does not. A failure to READ information_schema is not — a
server that will not answer it can still be running a perfectly good schema, and
refusing to open would turn a non-problem into an outage.
The quoting fix was necessary but not sufficient: "column 'op_name' can't have a
default value" persisted.
The translation worked line by line and rewrote only the FIRST column on each
line. Our own migrations put one column per line, so nothing showed there — but
sqlite_master stores a table's CREATE statement with every ALTER-added column
appended to the SAME line, and the baseline is built from exactly that. On a
logbook that had been through upgrades, most columns therefore kept their TEXT
type and MySQL rejected the schema.
Two consequences fixed together: every match is now rewritten, and each one is
decided from ITS OWN declaration — the text between the surrounding commas —
rather than from the whole line. Deciding per line would have made every column
sharing a line with a default-bearing one into VARCHAR(255), which breaches the
InnoDB row-size limit the TEXT rule exists to respect.
Tests cover the many-columns-on-one-line shape and pin that a neighbour's DEFAULT
does not leak.
rouggy