Support for older rigs IC-7100, IC-7200, IC-7410

1

Hi All,

I found a few bugs in the code for these older rigs, and we now have updated builds for linux and windows which incorporates these changes. Mac builds will follow later along with some other updates.

In general, you will still need to manually set the baud rate for wfview by manually editing the preferences. You should set your rig to use the highest baud rate supported, turn off CI-V echo (if present), and turn on CI-V Transceive.

If the rig isn’t detected automatically, wfview will say “NONE” in the lower-right corner text. If it says the model name, then it was detected.

To force detection, needed for some rigs (IC-706, for example), try defining the CI-V address manually in the preferences.

These procedures are detailed in the Using Older Radios section of the manual.

Supporting these older rigs is definitely experimental at this point, but I am hopeful that we will be able to provide live streaming audio and CI-V control soon, at least for the 7100 and 7200.

Please give it a try if you have an older rig, even one not listed, and let us know how your experience goes. And of course, if you really want it, send me your radio and I’ll have it supported in 2-3 weeks and send the radio back to you. Really, I’m up for it.

Thanks everyone, and 73,

–Elliott
de W6EL

PS: Here is a list of radios with some level of support. Remember, our core radios have a lot of testing (IC-705, IC-7300, IC-7610, IC-7850, IC-R8600, and IC-9700) but some of these other radios we either haven’t tested or have very incomplete features:

  • IC-9700
  • IC-7300
  • IC-R8600
  • IC-910H
  • IC-7610
  • IC-785x
  • IC-705
  • IC-7000
  • IC-7410
  • IC-7100 (untested; many features coded)
  • IC-7200 (untested; many features coded)
  • IC-706 (no PTT commands available, very basic)
2

One other thing – the IC-7K supports WFM (as a mode), which is not on your pull down (makes it impossible to tune in commercial FM stations – which the radio supports).

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3

Elliott,

Well done… the IC7K now has the following characteristics:

Working:

· S-Meter –

o like the peak/decay aspect of your implementation

· Pre-Amp enable

· All bands can be selected on the ‘band’ tab

  • When you select the band, drops back into the ‘View’ tab – makes leveraging ‘band-stacking’ a bit awkward
  • May wish to consider cycling through band-stacking (as you can with the mic)

Not working:

· Receive Filter

· Attenuator

· I can enable the IP server (after I connect to the rig via USB)

o can initially control the radio, even with the ‘Enable LAN’ – could not do previously – not sure what to do with this capability yet

§ If I save settings, and restart the program – no connectivity to the rig (when starting in ‘Enable LAN Mode”

§ If I disable the LAN server, and go back to USB, there is no connectivity to the rig (even after saving) until I reopen the program

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Making great progress……

73’s,

Glenn – WA6BJQ

4

Hi Glenn,

This is great! Thank you very much for testing! I can add more of those features if the rig supports.

The “Enable LAN” should only be checked for rigs that have a LAN port. So for the IC-7000, keep it set on “Enable USB (serial)”. This is something we should clarify more. These two “radio buttons” are only for setting how the rig is connected to the computer. Just enable the server under “Server Setup”, define username, password, and select your rig’s audio interface (perhaps the line input for your computer) from the Audio drop-down menus. Save Settings, close, re-open. Then go to another computer, launch wfview, and specify the server’s ip address.

We’ll write some more about this soon in the remote operation manual.

–E
de W6EL

5

Will the setup you described below work with a dns name instead of an ip address?

6

Hi Jamie,

It should, I regularly use dynamic DNS without any issue when I am out.

–E
de W6EL

7

Hi Glenn,

I found the issue with the attenuator. I’ll check that in this evening, and in a few days it’ll be up.

The rig doesn’t seem to have a receive bandwidth command – but if anyone knows, I’ll add it.

I’ll do the WFM a bit later. Shouldn’t be too hard.

Thanks,

–E
de W6EL

8

Thanks Elliott….

On the CIV codes, maybe this reference will be of value: http://www.plicht.de/ekki/civ/civ-p4.html

$1A (command) / $06, $07, $08 (subcommands) / b (data variants) – bandwidth related

Fingers crossed that this will be helpful (for other rigs as well).

73’s – Glenn

9

Hi Glenn,

That’s a good link. Do you think the command will likely be the “IF Filter Width”? This is a command we haven’t tried on the other rigs. It’s in the IC-7000 owner’s manual on page 143, command is 0x1A 0x03, followed by 0x00 through 0x50. It really seems like this might be it.

The other commands you mentioned are interesting but I think they are for the DSP notch filter, transmit bandwidth, and DSP edge shape. It’s really odd, because pretty much every radio after this one allows an additional argument to the mode command that specifies one of the three user-saved receive bandwidths.

So ok, we’ve got a drop-down menu for selecting bandwidth now in wfview, but this rig seems to need a knob.

If enough other rigs can use this setting, we’ll put in an IF knob. Looks like a few do:
http://www.plicht.de/ekki/civ/civ-p43.html
Maybe others. I’ll investigate.

Thank you very much, this is good to know, I learned something today.

–E
de W6EL

10

I want to update everyone on some interesting findings we’ve had working with older rigs.

1: Baud rate: We had a bug where sometimes, at lower baud rates (generally 9600 and lower), we would receive heavily fragmented messages from the radio. We’ve mitigated this bug, and the fix will be in the provided builds soon. I ran my IC-7300 at 4800 baud and it was actually a good experience (except for the lack of waterfall).

2: Full vs Half duplex serial: This is an interesting one. A traditional CI-V bus shares a single wire for transmit and receive data (TXD and RXD). This has two interesting effects on communication. It means that communication is inherently half-duplex, and, that the sender will receive what is sent out back in as received data (“echo”). For some radios, the CI-V over USB can be operated like a full-duplex serial connection, because the TXD and RXD are not physically connected together inside the radio. For example, the IC-7300 has separate TXD and RXD to the processor. The IC-7100 has separate pins on the processor for TXD and RXD, but the two are connected together before the USB to serial chip, and thus one cannot operate this rig full-duplex.

The second issue is certainly more difficult to deal with. wfview was written with the IC-7300 as the primary test subject, and this radio is a very good CI-V over USB citizen. The 7300 clearly has the facility to deal with receiving multiple commands in a row, for example, whereas other radios may not be designed with this as a possibility let alone something they would respond to correctly. Somewhat fittingly, our modern multi-threaded paradigm is biting us with the older radios, basically.

The effect of the half-duplex 1-wire communication is that if a message is sent from one side while a message is being sent from the other end, the two messages can “mix” together and end up corrupting. This is likely the root cause of 7100 and 7200 owners here speaking of erratic behavior.

We’ve got some fixes for the half-duplex issue in the works. We are basically implementing a “BUSY” signal for the half-duplex rigs, where we will not transmit any data while data is being received. This is not without consequence though, and it may take some time to really sort out a good, solid solution.

I will keep you all posted here. As a hopeless collector of older radios, I’m quite driven to get this working.

Thanks,

–E
de W6EL

11

Hi Elliot ,

Great job, as always if you need help you can count on me.

73 Ale iz4osh

12

Just got the IC-7100 controls working, No waterfall.

Is/Will a waterfall be possible?

13

Hi Frank.

Yes that’s correct as the 7100 has no mechanism to create a waterfall. On the IC7300, 9700, 7610 etc. the waterfall is generated by the radio but we are investigating methods of creating something from the 12Khz IF audio output that the 7100 can provide.

73 Phil M0VSE

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14

I am using my IC7100 with an IF tap and an AirSpy SDR and HDSDR on a local PC to give a waterfall and control of the radio tuning and PTT. Is it possible to get wfview to control this combination remotely?

15

Hi Tony,

Many inexpensive SDRs do have a streaming option which could be accessed on a remote host. For example:
https://www.rtl-sdr.com/rtl-sdr-tutorial-setting-up-and-using-the-spyserver-remote-streaming-server-with-an-rtl-sdr/

wfview doesn’t have any methods to talk with an AirSpy, so you would need to continue to rely on SDR# or whatever the latest software is for that SDR.

You can use wfview to remotely control the IC-7100, including operating the radio’s controls, such as tuning and PTT. wfview also streams the audio both directions. Since wfview provides a pseudo-terminal serial device and a TCP/IP hamlib-compatible socket, other programs you might otherwise connect to the serial port of the IC-7100 can instead connect to wfview for rig control.

You might just try a “pure” wfview server to wfview client setup and see what you think, and then branch out to try remote SDR options, lastly connecting them together for synchronized control at the client side using the pseudo-terminal.

–E
de W6EL

1 Like
16

Hi Elliott

Thanks for the suggestions. Tying everything together might be difficult if they are separate programs - HDSDR and Hamlib work together seamlessly to enable tuning of the 7100. by clicking on the spectrum/waterfall.

Tony

17

If HDSDR knows how to talk to hamlib, then it can talk to wfview just as easily. That may help out a bit.

https://wfview.org/wfview-user-manual/hamlib-rigctld-emulation/

–E
de W6EL