Friday, April 17, 2009

Fast action from Finland

Yesterday I mentioned that I was trying to create a rig control file to enable Fldigi to work with the Juma TRX2 transceiver. The Juma supports two control protocols. One is a small subset of the Yaesu FT-897 CAT protocol. The other is its own native TRX2 protocol. This provides some capabilities not available when the Yaesu protocol is used, such as the ability to set the receiver filter passband. But I noticed that the Juma protocol did not include a PTT command that could be used by software to put the transceiver into transmit. So any software that used this protocol would have to use the serial RTS or DTR signal for PTT control, and I would have to make up a special interface for it.

I mentioned this last night on the Juma forum, and a reply was posted a couple of hours later. I was not around to reply to it, but by the morning in my inbox was an email containing a new version of the firmware to test. Quick work!

One problem that has me scratching my head is that I can't send commands to the TRX2 manually using Windows HyperTerminal. The terminal displays output from the radio, but the radio does not appear to receive anything I type. I know that communication is working because I have updated the firmware three times now using the same serial cable. So to test the commands I had to use my work laptop which runs Linux.

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