The specification settles what a night of experiments could only guess at.
TRX takes an optional THIRD argument naming the signal source — tci, mic1,
mic2, micPC, ecoder2 — and TCI 2.0 says it plainly: 'The signal for
transmitting is always taken from the microphone selected in the
ExpertSDR3. If a third-party software connected via TCI wants to transmit
its audio signal, you must specify the third argument - TCI.'
Without it the radio sends no chrono at all, whatever the mode. That is
what the SSB attempts ran into, and what was misread here as 'digital
modes only' — the mode was never the rule, the missing argument was.
So OpsLog says it, following the 'To radio' device: 'tci' when the voice
keyer owns the transmission, nothing at all otherwise, which leaves the
operator's own microphone alone for every other PTT. Nobody has to find
that setting in ExpertSDR3 and set it again for every mode, which is how
it is remembered there.
Two more things from the same document. A chrono with no audio ready is
now answered with silence rather than left unanswered — the vendor calls
that preferable. And the receive stream declares float32 and two channels
instead of trusting the defaults: they are the documented defaults, but a
default is something another program sharing this radio can have changed,
and a stream in an unexpected format is heard as noise rather than as a
mistake.
The transmit path works: six passes, the radio asked 231 times and was
answered 231 times, none missed, and the tone was there on the panadapter.
What was missing was power on the meter, and the cause was the level. The
tone went out at a quarter of full scale, out of caution, into a radio set
to 15% drive — enough to draw a clean signal and not enough to move a
needle. In a digital mode the radio expects a line level it can drive to
full output; the POWER is its own drive control, so sending quietly only
wastes the range. Now 0.7, short of 1.0 to leave room for the peaks.
The start line carries both numbers — ours and the radio's drive — because
a quiet transmission has two possible causes and one line should settle
which, rather than an evening of guessing. Reading 'drive' off the radio
is the only reason it is parsed at all.
A first real transmission settled one question and raised a better one.
With the receive stream open and six seconds of transmit, the radio sent
282 frames of receive audio and NOTHING else: no chrono, no transmit
audio. So the chrono the documentation describes is not offered to a
client that merely happens to be connected while the operator keys the
microphone, and waiting for it to appear is waiting for nothing.
The reading that fits is that the radio asks for audio when the
transmission is the CLIENT'S and takes the microphone when it is the
operator's — which makes the experiment obvious. Key it from here, push a
1 kHz tone, and watch. Chrono frames appearing gives their size and
cadence by measurement instead of by guesswork; no chrono but a tone on
the meter is just as useful, because then the pacing is optional and the
voice keyer can push frames at the rate the stream already runs at.
A tone rather than silence so the answer shows on the power meter and not
only in the log.
It transmits, so: an explicit button inside a warning box, five seconds,
capped at ten, and every path out unkeys — including the panic that has
not happened yet and a socket that dies mid-tone. A transmitter left keyed
by a defect is the one fault here that would reach somebody else's band.
Writes are now serialised too. send() held the lock only long enough to
read the connection, which was enough while every command came from the
poll loop; a stream of audio frames from a second goroutine is not, and
gorilla panics on a concurrent write rather than failing quietly.
The first transmit test came back with a log that said nothing, which is
the one answer that cannot be read: either no transmit frames arrived, or
they arrived and went unlogged.
So each pass is now bounded by a line of its own, and every stream type is
counted without limit. A pass that reports 'receive audio: 240, and
nothing else' is a result — it says the radio sends no chrono unless
something more is asked of it — where a log with no transmit lines was
merely a silence. The forty-frame logging budget is also handed back to
the transmit types on each pass, since it was always spent on receive
audio long before anyone got round to keying.
The start line says whether the receive stream is even open, because a
radio with nothing streaming has no reason to send chrono, and that is the
likeliest reason the first attempt saw nothing.
The SunSDR announces its own stream at connect —
audio_stream_sample_type:float32 and audio_stream_channels:2 — and both
were being logged as unhandled while the code worked the format out from
frame arithmetic. The declaration is better evidence and arrives before
the first frame; the arithmetic stays as the check on it. The channel
count now drives the mix-down instead of an assumed stereo.
Adds a ten-second test recording, written as a WAV beside the QSO
recordings. Counting frames proves a socket is delivering bytes; it says
nothing about whether those bytes are the receiver's audio, at the right
rate, in the right order. A stream decoded with the width wrong or the
samples misaligned counts exactly as well as a correct one and sounds
like a fan — so the test is a file the operator can play, the same way
the CW decoder was settled on the air rather than on a spectrogram.
The file is written at the rate the RADIO reported, not a constant: a
recording at the wrong rate plays at the wrong speed, which is the one
fault that would be blamed on the decoding.
A SunSDR already carries its receive audio on the same WebSocket as its
commands, so a virtual audio cable and a second sound card are two pieces
of plumbing an operator installs for no reason. This is the receive half:
what the QSO recorder and the CW decoder need.
The reader now looks at the frame type. It used to ignore it and split
every frame on ';' -- harmless only for as long as no stream was ever
opened, since audio bytes would otherwise have been handed to the command
parser a hundred times a second.
NOTHING HERE IS CONFIRMED ON A RADIO. The header layout comes from the
TCI documentation, and the stream-type numbers are exactly the sort of
detail a document gets right and a memory of it does not -- so the first
forty frames of a session are logged verbatim, and a test bench in
Preferences > Audio reports the sample rate the radio chose, the frames
arriving and the peak level of the last second. 'The stream is open' and
'audio is arriving' are different claims and only the second is worth
anything to whoever tries this first.
Transmit (the voice keyer) is the other half and is deliberately absent:
it has to answer the radio's chrono packets at the right pace, and that
is worth doing once the format is settled on real hardware.
"PTT via CAT does nothing on TCI." What OpsLog sends is right — trx:0,true; is
the documented command and the same one the reference clients send — so the
command was going out and the radio was discarding it.
ExpertSDR announces transmit permission with TX_ENABLE: on connect, and again
whenever the band changes, "in case transmitter permission was changed" (§4.3).
While it is false the radio simply IGNORES trx. OpsLog never read that command,
so there was nothing in the log, nothing on screen, and a dead key.
Now the permission is tracked and SetPTT refuses out loud, naming where to look:
the frequency must be inside a transmit band and TX enabled in ExpertSDR. The
refusal travels the path that already exists — Manager.SetPTT to pttKey, which
logs it and hands it to the UI.
Silence is not a "no". A radio that never mentions TX_ENABLE — an older
ExpertSDR, or another program speaking TCI — is not treated as refusing: we key
and let it decide. Permission is also forgotten on connect, so a refusal
remembered from a band since left cannot block PTT until a restart.
This may not be the operator's own cause, and that is the other half of the
change: if it is not, the log now settles it in one line. cat: TCI: → trx:0,true;
present means the command left OpsLog and the radio ignored it for a reason it
has not told us; absent means the fault is on this side.
Spot mirroring drew the same station two or three times, a few hertz apart.
Not a loop in the spot pipeline — one cluster line produces exactly one
SendSpot. It is that a popular DX station IS spotted two or three times, by
different operators inside the same minute, and no two of them agree on the
frequency to better than a few tens of hertz. This backend assumed ExpertSDR
replaced a spot bearing a callsign it already held, and said so in a comment;
it keys on the frequency too, so each of those became its own marker and stayed.
The FlexRadio backend has always done this properly (spot remove before spot
add, "one live spot per call"). TCI now does the same: the frequency drawn for
each call is remembered, a re-spot within 500 Hz sends nothing at all, and one
further away deletes the old marker before drawing the new one — so a station
that really moves still moves, instead of collecting markers.
SPOT_DELETE was not in the protocol document this backend was written from.
Confirmed before use against ars-ka0s/eesdr-tci, an independent TCI library that
lists SPOT with 5 arguments, SPOT_DELETE with 1 and SPOT_CLEAR with 0 — the
other two matching exactly what already works here, which is what makes the
third trustworthy.
The memory is cleared where Connect sends spot_clear. Left standing, it would
suppress the next spot for every remembered call as "already drawn" onto a
panorama the radio had just emptied — spots would quietly stop appearing after
a reconnect until each station changed frequency.
Five tests on the decision, which is split out from SendSpot so it can be
checked without a radio.
- 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.
rouggy