FAIL ERROR is in the firmware along with programming and other system messages as well as the alpha character sets with the? / -? _? characters.? The head is of course programmed via SB9600 but it seems the only thing it can do is react to a mode slot and then look up what mode alpha name corresponds to it.
Perhaps a spectra systems 9000 head could be used since,? if I'm correct, it actually displays data from the radio via SB9600 and is not separately programmed. There are FW updates to convert syntor heads to spectra heads if I remember right. That should mean that the rest of the design is the same.?
On Sun, Aug 28, 2022, 20:53 Dennis Boone <drb@...> wrote:
?> Can the X9000 VFD display be written to externally via the SB9600
?> bus? If so the XCAT9K could push channel labels to the control head
?> and multiple pages of channel labels displayed. Of course that begs
?> the question as to whether that traffic can write to the head without
?> bogging down the resto of the system. Has anyone tried this? The
?> radio apparently can write certain things to the display like BITE
?> errors and scratchpad memory for DTMF dialing.
SB9600 does provide a mechanism for writing labels and such to a control
head over the bus, but it's not clear to me whether that's ever used by
the radio.? Since you have to also program the control head, and its
code plug is supposed to match the radios plug, I suspect it mostly
doesn't.? Interestingly, the string FAIL isn't apparently in the ROM.
