CAT Operations

Controlling the Ham Radio transceiver by interaction from a PC is one of the highlights TurboLog 4 offers. You should really try using the CAT interface. We promise.....you will never ever want to miss it for the rest of your Ham Radio career....

The more experienced operator even has the opportunity to run more than one transceiver on TurboLog 4 and rapidly switch among them from the user interface.

In order to enjoy the CAT facility you  first need to provide a hardware connection between your rig and your PC as described in interfacing transceivers. This hardware interface is the channel over which data will be communicated between both units. And this is the second part of the business: The software handshake between your TRX and TurboLog 4.

In most cases you will find your rig's name on the menu of the available transceivers. It only takes a few clicks for activating the CAT facilty and you will be ready to start. In this case you need not to worry about all the bulk of software that is behind the software handshake.

In case of trouble, however, you may have to dig deeper into the software handshake and will benefit from the complete documentation of the parameters and commands the handshake is based upon and which follows below.

An asynchronuos serial interface like RS-232 is the standard case for data transfer but it is by no means a trivial communication link. Possible causes for troubles are the following areas which need to be checked very carefully for possible errors or malfunctions:

•The cable may have a false connection.

•The communication parameters may have been selected incorrectly or changed in a new firmware version of the rig

•The rig's address or commands may have been changed by the manufacturer without any notification

Most problems will be tackled quite easily by means of the built-in CAT trace facility. This again requires some knowledge of the details below the surface and some expertise with serial interfaces. The non-experts are invited to contact TurboLog Communications for further advise. So far we have always been able to connect rigs with troubles that were reported to us.....as long as the manufacturer provided the necessary basics, i.e. hardware, firmware and documentation(!).

Modern transceivers may not provide a RS232 interface any longer but will offer a CAT access via the USB serial interface. However, this is not much of a burden since the manufacturer will offer a dedicated driver which creates a virtual COM-port in the WINDOWS devices manager. More on this topic will be reported in the following paragraph(s).

This topic was last edited on  Monday, 03-Jul-2023,  at  23:57