A Kenwood answers "?;" while it is busy, and the TS-590SG does it for a moment
after RX; — which is exactly when the poll resumes. One rejected IF; then tore
down the whole CAT link.
The code already knew this. Its own comment says a "?;" to IF; is "a transient
busy, NOT unsupported" and that latching it off "would read as lost the rig".
That reasoning was applied to the unsupported-command map and stopped there: the
call still returned an error, the poll loop still turned it into connected=false,
and the link still dropped.
What it cost was not cosmetic. WSJT-X keys through shared CAT, so it lost the
rig mid-sequence; Hamlib then sent "F 9223372036854775808.000000" - an
uninitialised 2^63 - which OpsLog refused and logged. The operator sees a
frightening frequency error whose actual cause is three lines earlier.
A "?;" is now sentinel-wrapped so the poll can tell "the rig declined" from "the
serial link is gone", and three consecutive ones are ridden out on the last
known state before the link is called dead. Under a second of tolerance: enough
for the rig to finish, far too short to hide an unplugged cable. A serial fault
is untouched and still drops immediately.
Tested against the emulated rig already in this package, with a hook that
answers "?;" on demand: the link survives inside the grace and still reports the
last good frequency, the count resets on recovery so a later busy spell gets the
full allowance, and a rig refusing forever is still reported as broken.