I have been having a chronic problem with rig control that really got out of
hand this past weekend.
I use Writelog 10.28D with two TS850's. Historically, when I turn the VFO
dial rapidly, Writelog will temporarily loose synch and briefly display
either "No Rig" or some incorrect frequency and then settle down. For some
reason, it seemed worse on 160 meters. It has always been this way with my
Win98 computer. For completeness, one radio is connected to a KIY box and
then through the Multikeyer and the other goes through a USB to serial
adapter and a home made level converter. I see the problem on both radios
and ports. I have changed the RigPollInterval and it has some impact but
the problem persists.
The reason this is a problem is that Writelog drives all of my antenna and
filter selection logic. When Writelog looses synch, all of the relays
chatter and then settle down.
I have also had a long history of Writelog crashing at least once in every
48 hour contest. My theory was that it was really the networking software
in Win98 and I had been hoping to deploy my new laptop running W2K.
The net result is that there were no crashes with Win2K but the rig
frequency problems got much worse. Virtually every time I turned the dial,
Writelog would loose synch. If I moved a long distance, it would take
seconds for the correct frequency to be displayed. It was very annoying.
The port is set up for 4800 baud with polling enabled. Turning off polling
produces no frequency tracking.
My theory is not a good one. The TS850 is expecting hardware flow control.
However, I think the cabling is precluding this and merely wrapping the flow
control signals around and they are not being used to control flow. For
example, I know that a 3-wire (no hardware flow control) will not work at
all with the TS850 so the signals do matter. With the multiKeyer on the
same serial port, only the data bits from the radio are passed and the flow
control signals are simply hard wired. One would think that a 2GHz PC
should be able to service 4800 baud without flow control but you never know.
I also tried an interface directly to the serial port without the multikeyer
and the results were the same. However, I don't not know whether the
hardware flow control is actually enabled by Writelog.
My questions are many. Does a newer version of Writelog work better? Is
there a Writelog setup parameter I am missing? Is there a serial port setup
parameter (buffering, flow control, etc) that I need to set differently?
Also, my rigs are in Barbados so I can't do much experimenting.
Thanks in advance for your responses
73, Tom W2SC 8P1A
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