| KAM Transmit on RTTY Resolved |
| Below is a post to the WriteLog Reflector by Bill Wortman, N6NW, on how we was able to resolve a transmit problem with his KAM on WriteLog. Bill had trouble initiating the KAM and also with transmit characters dropping during transmit. Bill Wortman, N6MW: Using a number of helpful suggestions from posted and direct responses to my recent inquiry about problems running a KAM on RTTY with WriteLog, I have succeeded in getting the combination to work. There appear to be 3 sets of serial COM parameters whos setting can affect the operation. The combination that works on my 130 MHz Pentium under Win95 with the KAM (not KAM+) on COM1 with a serial cable that has all 5 serial pins wired as: 1. PC CommPort (under control panel/system/port, or just control panel/port for some systems) set to default which is 9600,1,N,8 and None flow control. (But baud rate and flow control do not appear to matter). FIFO (advanced) is ON with moderately high values. 2. Writelog.ini under PORT has COM1 set to 9600,N,8,1, (NOTE: not 9600,N,8,1,x) 3. KAM is preset to ABAUD 9600 (XFLOW in ON and MONITOR is ON, at least before initialization) It was found that if FIFO is OFF, Transmitted characters are sometimes skipped as displayed in the KAM window (RTTYRITE window in WriteLog) and apparently also skipped on the air (seee XXX). Most, but not all, of the time on startup the RTTY window is inert and the KAM panel display lights act like it is not in the right mode. If you then select FSK-Norm (or transmit a signal) the window (display on on the KAM) starts behaving correctly and the KAM is put in the right state and all the TX characters are displayed. It is not clear just which of the settings is critical. For a while it was working fine with Xon/Xoff for PC flow and WL.ini with 9600,N,8,1,x but when I shut down and did a full cold restart, it failed. It initialized ok but after getting the window active no TX characters were displayed at all even though it seemed to key the transmitter ok based on the length of an additional transmission. This may be related to my use of the fully wired serial cable which the KAM uses for Hardware flow control. Perhaps with a lesser 3 wire serial cable, that does not support Hardware control (CTS/RTS), the Xon/Xoff may be needed as the flow control method (that is, with 9600,N,8,1,x in the WL.ini file). With the 5 wire cable and Xon/Xoff active, there may be flow control conflicts. In the course of my approximately 60 trials (my lost weekend) with various parameter selections, I had thought I used the same settings that are currently successful, but it failed to display any TX characters. Either I was getting woozy or it may be due to some KAM parameters that were incidentally set since I went though several rounds of pre-setting the KAM using the WF1B RTTY software which provides access to the KAM command functions. At times I just set the baud rate (ABAUD 9600_ and switched back to WriteLog with no other changes, and at other times I did a RESTORE D followed by ABAUD 9600 and PERM to use the default factory settings. Bottom line is I'm not certain of all the current KA settings and I'm not willing the risk going back to not working again to find out - at least until I recover. (I think they are the original factory setting except for ABAUD 9600). Note that every piece of KAM software seems to alter the KAM parameters, both on startup and shutdown, although it does return to the last PERMed values when turned off. I once attempted to keep all parameters the same except for using ABAUD 2400 rather than 9600 for all 3 settings. It never was able to initialize the KAM using this 2400 in spite of the fact that in my pre-posting days, this was the baud rate at which I first found the skipped TX characters! Additionals Notes by Dean, WA4TK, on the KAM XL: Make sure the KAM XL is in host mode prior to Startup of WriteLog. The KAM XL manual is downloadable (pdf) from www.kantronics.com. In manual see: The Serial Port of the Computer, The Serial Cable, Kantronics host mode, Exiting Host mode. Pacterm98 will leave KAM XL in host mode upon exit if that option is selected in menu. Pacterm98 link is available at kantronics.com or http://www.cssincorp.com/pacterm/. WriteLog really should be able to set the KAM XL from any mode to Host while initialization is going on but for now this will get it going. |
 |
 |