Three transmissions on a real SunSDR settled how the transmit side works,
and none of it was guessable from the documentation.
The radio asks for audio only when the transmission is the CLIENT'S: with
the operator keying the microphone it sent 282 receive frames and nothing
else. And it asks only in a DIGITAL mode — keyed from here in SSB it stayed
silent four times over, and answered in DIGU immediately. In SSB the
modulator is wired to the microphone, which is also the honest answer to
'why can I hear myself but not the tone'.
The chrono turns out to be a REQUEST, not a clock. It carries no payload —
the message itself is the ask — and it names the size it wants in the
header: 2048 samples, two channels interleaved, 47 times a second, which
is 1024 pairs at 48 kHz, exactly real time.
So audio goes out in answer to a request and never on a timer of our own.
The timer was the first attempt and the radio ignored all 234 frames of
it. Answering also hands the pacing to the radio: no drift, no buffer to
tune, and the size taken from what it asked for rather than from what we
assumed. The sine keeps its phase across frames, since one restarted every
frame is a click 47 times a second.
A pass in SSB is now refused rather than attempted. It keys the
transmitter, produces nothing and teaches nobody anything — and it is
still a transmission.
The feed mechanism is the one the voice keyer will use: WAV samples in
place of the sine, everything else unchanged.