开云体育

While working on the Hamlib CAT interface improvements I've come two items that are "new" to me and are not documented/well-documented:
1. 4 "Hidden" Memories only accessible via CAT
2. 3 "Aux" Bands, only controllable via CAT

The four hidden memories bring the total from 12 -> 16 ... but you can't access 13-16 via the front panel ... only through the CAT interface. Page 1 of the operating manual clearly states that their are only 12 memories ... not 16.

The 3 Aux bands are shown as "VFO"s: AUX1, AUX2, AUX3 in the CAT manual. I believe that it isn't a coincidence that their are 3 AUX band spaces on the RF board. It will be interesting to see if these can also be activated via CAT control ... meaning we might not need to have/make an "AUX Band Data ROM" to add 30M, 60M to the rig ... just the RF board components. I think the only way to tell for sure is to give it a try ... unless anyone has tried (or knows of someone who tried) this before.

I'll add this as a follow-on project after I get the Hamlib interface done.

-Mat

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-Mat Breton, N8TW

The Aux Band ROM sets a few things via programming:

VCO range, display range, filter selection - and possibly Ham/Gen VFO ID. The RF Board has logic on it that will select the appropriate filter for a given ham band or general-coverage "range", based on the state of the FILT lines and the Ham/Gen line.

An experiment for you to try - assuming you can instrument the various control lines from the CPU Board into the PLL/VCO and RF Board - would be to use a modified version of rigctl to individually set every 500KHz range from 1.5 through 30MHz on those three Aux VFO IDs in both "Ham" and General" modes, and see what you get. Or place the required sources in the Dropbox project - I'll compile and test with my 'bench mule'.

Interestingly, I'd thought about doing same with just a CPU Board and enough peripherals (display, keypad, etc) to mimic the operation of a '980 on the bench - stepping through every possible combination of VCO, display and filter data to reverse-engineer what's going on with the accessory band PROM. This effort was to be nicknamed 'Project Ashe'; Alien movie fans will get the reference WRT the android's head on a lab table.

In my parts stash, I have something called a "Flep" - an adapter board that allows modern-day flash EEPROMs to be used in place of 82123s and the like, which were the intended series of ROMs for this rig (along with their Toshiba equivalents). Though it would take a while to write and test all 256 possible data combinations for an auxiliary band, this can be done too and the results posted in a spreadsheet.

Food for thought.

73 - Fred, N8YX

I can't see any way of directly "activating" the AUX bands via CAT ... I was a bit too optimistic.

I'll wait until I crack open the FT-980 again to tap those lines ... perhaps combine a few projects together (TXCO, etc).

What I will do is drop the latest ft980 backend files in (just accepted by the github master), as well as a test file called "ft-980_test.c". Instructions to compile are in the top of the file (make file not required), but you need to put it into "Hamlib\tests" directory to compile to avoid having to add some paths.

This file was designed as a test-vector, to automate the ft-980 backend testing a bit. It should be easy to modify to do whatever you want ;) I will actually be doing a version to optimze the serial timing parameters (running lots of loops and playing with the parameters).









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-Mat Breton, N8TW