I did some testing last night. To be clear, I have a FT-847
that has single direction CAT.
Rigs with serial numbers later than 8G05xxxx have
bi-directional, rigs younger are likely
to have single (Yaesu did go back and offer uProc
replacements for a time, so if a rig is
older, it may still do bi-directional CAT).
More here:
http://www.supercontrol.de/cat/ft847faq/page4.htm#catcontrol
I installed and tried Gpredict on Ubuntu. The software and
the rig won't link up for more than a few
seconds, so there must be some bi-directional handshaking,
and then a timeout. I ruled out my
cable, etc, by using the Grig executable that comes with
Hamlib. With Grig I can push changes to the rig,
but no response to anything I do on the rig. More here:
http://www.neodux.com/read/HOWTO:_Configure_Hamlib_for_Linux_Hams_-_Part_2
So then I tried SatPC32 on a WinXP machine. Actually, "out
of the box", it works somewhat...
changing birds will correctly set up both VFOs and the
modes. However, driving the VFO from the
software, or letting the doppler correction take over, only
effects the main VFO on my rig,
not the sub-VFO.
Greg suggested that I let the PC control the rotor instead,
and manually adjust doppler on the rig.
Probably a good suggestion, and something I had no problem
doing in the AO-40 days,
but I won't have a computer controlled rotator, a different
FT847, or the skill to swap out a
surface mount quad flatpack (the processor in the FT847 than
needs to be swapped to get
bidirectional) by FD; I'll take what automation I can get.
I'll continue playing.
Bill W1PA
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