As far as the Yaesu CAT light, there are several approaches to fixing
that problem one local found - both are from the same manufacturer.
I have seen both part number 33 and part number 88 used to fix this
problem. Correctly trimmed and fitted they do a great job of fixing the
CAT light problem.
Manufacturer for both is Scotch, aka 3M.
Personally I think that the Yaesu rigs should have to changes in their
polling scheme to become more contester friendly - do it faster and more
frequently. Why 4800 baud, this is really slow - this is slowest thing
in the shack next to this old farte...
And why poll so infrequently? If this slows down the computer when it
happens I have never "felt" it - why not do it more often? When you
tune the band and it ain't packed you tune pretty fast... if you
overshoot the bottom of the band and the rig polls at that moment then
you get an "out of band" message...
Enough Yaesu bashing...
Heah Dave you know how many years I have been using NA - for the first
time EVER in a contest it locked up on me this past weekend. I do not
know if I hit a couple keys simultaneously or what but for the first
time it froze on me. I rebooted the computer and all was fine and jolly
- lost about a minute and a half.
Thanks for NA - I wonder how many tens of thousands of QSOs I have
logged on it!
73,
Jim, K4OJ
Dan Zeitlin wrote:
Thanks for the fast response Dave.
I understand. I will install SMARTDRV. I should have
thought of that (or read the manual) myself.
WRT the CAT light, I could live with the faster blink.
Perhaps the next time you are modifying code, you can
think about a command line switch to increase the
blink rate.
73,
Dan
--- "David A. Pruett" <k8cc@comcast.net> wrote:
At 02:47 PM 1/11/04 -0800, Dan Zeitlin wrote:
I noticed a disturbing NA behaviour this weekend
that someone may be able
to shed light on. I run CT more often than NA, so
it is possible that
this condition existed in the past without notice,
but I don't think so.
The first two problems below only occur when I have
Autocheck enabled,
independent of which callsign database is used. I
tired them all from SS
through All.
1. There is a significant delay (>1 sec) from when
I hit F4 my call is
sent. I think this condition got worse as the QSO
count increased. I
only made about 650 Q's.
At the K8CC multi-op station, we used to have a room
full of 486 computers,
from 486DLC-40s, 486DX2-66s and even some
486DX4-100s, all running DOS
6.22. We did a number of multi-ops where we put
several thousand QSOs in
the logs. While the response time does slow down a
little with a very
large log, we had no complaints from our ops.
The secret is having disk cache software enabled.
Disk cache is a software
program with a big blob of memory which buffers the
hard disk so that data
stays in memory (which is very fast) and does not
have to be retrieved from
the drive (which is not so fast).
DOS 6.22 comes with a disk cache called SMARTDRV.
It can be implemented by
adding the following line to your AUTOEXEC.BAT file:
C:\DOS\smartdrv.exe /x
This assumes your DOS files are in a subdirectory
called DOS.
SMARTDRV needs to have enough memory to hold your
log, plus the MASTER.DTA
file so it's not swapping the contents in and out as
you CheckPartial, then
log a QSO, CheckPartial, log a QSO, etc. With 256MB
of memory as you
describe, just enable SMARTDRV and you should be in
good shape..
All of this is covered in the NA manual in Section 6
under "Callsign
Database Checking", so you can find this same info
there.
2. When RUNning, if I hit INSERT with an
incomplete call and fill in the
remainder on the fly, always staying ahead of NA's
actual sending of the
call, the "on the fly" part of the call is not
sent. I noticed this right
away, early in the contest.
This is related to #1 above. The master call
database checking updates
with each keystroke and has to finish the previous
key before reacting to
the INSERT. Implement the suggestions given to fix
the checking speed and
this problem will disappear.
3. The update rate of the CAT interface is a bit
slower than I would like
for updating the bandmap. This one appears
independent of Autocheck.
The update rate on Yaesu radios is every three
seconds while others are
every one second. Yaesu radios is deliberately set
slower because of the
@#%&@%#&% blinking "CAT System" lamp. When I got my
FT-1000D in 1995, I
found that the slower update rate bothered me a
whole lot less than having
"CAT System" blink in your face every second.
Dave Pruett, K8CC
DATOM Engineering
datom@contesting.com
http://www.datomonline.com
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=====
Dan Zeitlin
Annapolis, Maryland
http://members.tripod.com/~danzee/index.htm
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