Saturday, May 23, 2009

IC-7800 PSK utility interface again

So far, no response on Icom Elmer (an Icom user's help site) regarding whether there's a way to scroll back through the text buffer of the PSK31 (or RTTY) tool built into the 7800. It strikes me that I'm either being dumb, or nobody knows of a way either but can't say categorically that one doesn't exist, or perhaps my question is too specific for many people to have any idea. Anyway, I'll keep monitoring for a few more days to see if anyone has anything useful to say on the subject.

In a related matter, I had a mind the other day to write a light-weight computer application for the IC-7800 to provide a richer PSK client for radio (e.g. including substitution macros and some logging capability). The idea was to continue to use the internal modulation/demodulation for PSK (or RTTY), which is presumably rather well integrated with the radio (e.g. correct drive level, filtering, AFC etc.), and to provide nothing more than a rich terminal client. My plans looked promising when I saw that the radio's RS232 interface can be configured to send decoded characters out... but there's no mention of receiving characters for transmission in the same fashion.

Assuming there's no way to inject characters into the PSK utility other than via a directly connected USB keyboard, there's still the option of building/obtaining a keyboard emulator and driving this to send appropriate keyboard key presses. This seems rather "round the houses" when one of the first things the PSK utility will do is convert key presses back to characters... but it might be the only way to achieve the desired ends. More research needed...

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