IC-706mk2g separation cable cw configs and other questions

[WW2DX (Lee)]

Hello group,

I have been testing out the remoterig for the past week or so and things have been working very well! A very elegant solution indeed.

Here is my first contact with it with ZS6CCY Thanksgiving night when I tweaked the final firewall rule.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TeLc-b3UEek

What works:

SSB works flawlessly. The current test setup consists of the following setup.

Operating Shack: Pawling, NY FN31en with the face of the IC-706MK2G with the RR between the Separation cable.

Transmitting station is in Summit, NY W2RE.com a contest station in the northern catskills mountains of NY about 120 miles away.
We have the 706 at this end connected to a IC-PW1 and on the 4 antenna ports on the amplifier we have

Port 1 - 5/5/5 on 10m
Port 2 - 5/5/5 on 15m
Port 2 - C321Xr @ 35m
Port 4 - 3 ele mono 40 @ 35m

As you can imagine its completely insane! The real win with the Summit QTH is there is ZERO QRN and being at 700m ASL does not hurt either.

I spent a number of months looking at options on how to remote the station and settled on the remoterig because of its elegant solution and moreover its "unique" method of doing CW which is the preferred method for us.

What Doesn't work (so well).

CW:

I am having a heck of a time getting CW to work properly. Let me start off with the specs of the RR boxes.

Both boxes are running 2.46 Firmware

Control side:

Info

Name   Value
Company   Microbit
Product   1258
PID   4
Hardware   6
Software   2.46
Bootloader   1.9
Compiler   4.1.2 (WinARM 4/2007)
Build   Nov 3 2011 13:11:42
ROM/RAM   368932/50680
ETH-RAM   2944 (max 3kB!)
ResetSrc   0 [3]
Uptime   60255

Serial number   4259

Radio Side:

Name   Value
Company   Microbit
Product   1258
PID   4
Hardware   6
Software   2.46
Bootloader   1.9
Compiler   4.1.2 (WinARM 4/2007)
Build   Nov 3 2011 13:11:42
ROM/RAM   368932/50680
ETH-RAM   2944 (max 3kB!)
ResetSrc   0 [3]
Uptime   61678
    
Serial number   4045

I have the CW keyer in the 706 disabled (OFF).

On the control side I have these I/O settings:
IN0 mode   I/O
OUT0 mode IO   
OUT1 mode I/O   
OUT2 mode Keyer   
USB RTS as PTT     Disabled
USB DTR as CW    Disabled

On the Radio side I have these settings in I/O:

OUT0 mode   I/O
OUT0 on/off   Off
    
OUT1 mode   I/O
OUT1 on/off   Off
    
OUT2 mode   Keyer
OUT2 on/off      Off

In the Keyer settings I have:

PTT activated by Keyer   No


At the present time I can send CW with the paddle but its horrible. First off the delay is too great and there is no way to get the timing right with the paddle with the sidetone coming from the remoterig. I do have the speaker hooked to the 706 face and not the RRC-1258 (Just thought of this while writing). Also I get a "Buzzing" sound along with the sidetone when transmitting. If I send a series of dits then transmit fine and same for a series of Dah's while some of them will "mold together". I have played around with the LF delay and Key delay, trying different combinations but no luck. My ping times look like this:

8 packets transmitted, 8 packets received, 0.0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 79.470/81.679/83.668/1.386 ms

So I hope someone can enlighten me on what I may have misconfigured or needs to be tweaked so that CW is useable.


Looking forward:

I have a Green Heron RT21d connected to the COM2 port on the back of the Radio end. I would like to know how people control rotors and other devices on the control end using these ports. My assumption is I hook at PC to com2 then run some rotor control software and magic happens?
Also can I hook the PC to com1 and have the logging software read band data in the similar way? I would enjoy hearing about how others are using these com ports.

OK, enough for my first post! Thanks for a really cool product!

Looking forward to seeing it grow.

73 Lee
WW2DX

[roland]

Hi and thank's for the video. Nice

[sm2o]

Hi

The sidetone for the Internal CW keyer is generated in the Control-RRC and you should hear it without even switching on the IC-706. If you can't live with the behaviour of the internal keyer without switching on the IC-706 it's not much to do, then you have to use your own keyer. It sounds strange beacuse I have really skilled CW operator friends which have no problem using the internal keyer.

Then when starting to test with the IC-706 remeber to turn down the CW-sidetone with the pot on the side of the IC-706 body. With 80 ms ping time I should set "key delay ms" to 100 ms to start with. Then let somebody else listen to you over the air. You can't listen to the transmission and using the paddles, it's impossible with more than 100 ms delay.

You can use the serial ports for Rotator and loggin, no problem it's just a matter of cables and settings

73 de mike

[WW2DX (Lee)]

Thanks for the reply.

"The sidetone for the Internal CW keyer is generated in the Control-RRC and you should hear it without even switching on the IC-706."

Interesting, this does not work for me. If I have the 706 powered off, I do not hear the sidetone on the RRC with the paddle plugged into the back of the RRC and the speaker plugged into the SP on the RRC. Maybe missing a setting?

"Then when starting to test with the IC-706 remeber to turn down the CW-sidetone with the pot on the side of the IC-706 body"
I have the keyer in the "OFF" setting on the 706, so I assume I should not have to do anything else with the radio itself?

I will play around with the settings some more and see what I can come up with. I may take a video and post it to show exactly what is going on if I can't figure it out.

73!

Lee
WW2DX

[sm2o]

Hi

You must use the pot to disable the sidetone of the IC-706 it's not possible to do from the menu.

I think you have not Enabled the Keyer in the Control-RRC if you do not hear the sidetone from the RRC.

73 de mike

[WW2DX (Lee)]

OK Got it!

I had to crank the sidetone all the way down (too bad you can't actually silent it totally) on the 706 with the pot on the side of the radio. Then I had to increase the sidetone of the RRC and now it works PERECT!! Wow! Been running at 25-30wpm and its been great.

I also was able to turn the Green Heron controller using COM2 on the RRC's and using the RT-21 setup software running on a local PC. Next will be testing out logging software and computer generated CW.

I also made a second OPC cable for an additional 706 head we had and tested using 2 706 heads with one radio remotely. When a head is in use you get a beeping tone to alert you that you can't turn the radio on. This is behavior we expected but we wanted to confirm it.

Thanks again! Will keep you posted as we make more progress.

73 Lee
WW2DX

[w2re]

Hi All,

I am working with Lee WW2DX on the remote here in NY.

I have posted a few videos:
http://www.youtube.com/user/rayw2re?feature=mhee#p/a/u/2/5ejNzQFYU1U  Part 1
http://www.youtube.com/user/rayw2re?feature=mhee#p/a/u/0/5p6GtRFm8v0 Part 2
http://www.youtube.com/user/rayw2re?feature=mhee#p/a/u/1/dIC_8Z2R_XQ  Part 3

Ray W2RE.com