www.dl2rum.de

Something seems up with CAT control of RL and Elecraft rigs. I've seen this on both my KX2 and a K3.

1. Enter a frequency in the Call sign to QSY. Radio immediately QSYs.
2. RL is frozen for several (5-10) seconds. You can hear several clicks, a couple seconds apart in the earpiece, like the radio is doing something.
3. RL unfreezes, clicking stops.

I saw this when I got my KX2 about a year and a half ago, but since I rarely use it at home didn't think anything about it. I'm normally using my IC-7300 which works fantastic with RL. This was on an older computer (2016 Intel Mac) I no longer have.

I also think RL is trying to control the radio during this time, because I'd QSY and then want to change the mode. So it would QSY and switch to LSB (for example), I'd hit the mode button on the radio, it would go to data, and then back to LSB. Whenever RL sorted itself out, I could change the mode properly.

Get a K3 (K3IO board with the DB9 connector and a USB Serial cable). Same QSY behavior. Does not appear when using N1MM+ (same serial cable, different computer, a 2015 Intel Mac running Windows on Bootcamp). Also happened on a different USB serial cable.

Add WSJT-X to the mix, doing CAT control over IP with the DX Labs Commander option. Always worked on the 7300, I only changed the sound card settings.

1. Click on a call in WSJT-X to begin a QSO. Get the Yellow highlighted message saying that I'm sending my message at the proper time
2. Radio doesn't go into transmit mode for 7 seconds. Stops roughly on time though.
3. Shut down RL, reconfigure WSJT-X to control the K3 directly through Hamlib
4. WSJT-X works perfectly.

I saw another thread where someone initially thought it was drivers, and later decided it wasn't.

Some of this is intermittent. After seeing some logs to do with the FLDigi RPCXML port I removed that setting, WSJT-X worked ok, I put the setting back on, and it still worked. So maybe there's some logging I can gather for the next time?

Thanks

Sean N3RTW

Restarting RL seems to make the WSJT-X issue better. Still happening on a different K3 though.

Last night my K3 was behaving very strangely. The P3 lagged the VFO, and the waterfall would pause every couple of seconds. At one point I got a DSP error on the K3. Tried rebooting the K3 and P3. Then I closed RL and everything started working again.

Heh, I'm wondering if this is because I had my polling interval set too low.

This has been bugging me so much I finally got around to learning enough dtrace to be able to see what RL is reading and writing to the serial port in hopes of giving you a better bug report.

There was so much activity it was hard to parse and I saw there was a polling interval which was set at 0.5s. I cranked it up to 3 so that the messages wouldn't scroll so fast. Now it's not doing that awkward pause thing.