Rigctld and PowerSDR

Gpredict
1

I have hamlib rigctld v4.5.5 up and running.
I have gpredict 2.3.37 setup with “b up” and “a dwn” and “duplex TRX” for my PowerSDR Flex-5000 (with the 2m/70cm option).
I open the Radio control panel, select a Satellite (thats 2m up and 70cm down FM), and hit the “Engage” button.
gpredict sends my Flex-5000 a 70cm freq to FA, and 2m freq to FB (everything correct so far).
Then I hit the “Track” button on gpredict radio control, and it appears (rigctld in verbose mode) gpredict sends a 2m frequency to FA (which causes PowerSDR to fault) when it should have been to FB.
What am I doing wrong, or what can I change in the settings of gpredict or rigctrl or powersdr?
Thanks
ke9ns

2

For historic purposes… Found the issue and fixed it in PowerSDR ke9ns v2.8.0.278. Gpredict is now running fine.
Gpredict is expecting PowerSDR to be in SPLIT mode, but with the 2m/70cm option in the Flex-5000, it does not run in SPLIT mode, it runs as essentially 2 radios in Full duplex. So I modified the CAT IF command (in PowerSDR .278 to fake a SPLIT mode as long as the 2nd receiver is ON and VFOB is set for TX

1 Like
3

Thanks for sharing, pretty interesting how the different rigs solve these things (:
It is also possible to use gpredict with two separate rigs/rigctld, one for TX and one for RX, not sure if PowerSDR has two control ports thou.

4

The Flex-5000 with the VU5K option is a full duplex radio with separate antenna ports for HF/2m/70cm.

VFOB becomes a separate radio, when the second receiver RX2 is turned ON (each VFO can even run its own SPLIT).

PowerSDR ke9ns has 8 CAT separate interfaces (7 Serial and 1 TCP)
FlexRadio came up with the ZZxx Cat commands to allow talking directly to A-RX1 or B-RX2, but nobody ever uses them correctly.
Because of that RX2 issue, a year ago I created a separate CAT interface in PowerSDR dedicated to RX2 (meaning that all CAT commands on this interface only go to the RX2 side of the radio).

So your idea is good. I could point the RX to standard virtual COM port and TX to the RX2 virtual COM port.

But fixing the SPLIT issue was the easiest way to solve it.

Darrin Ke9ns