VARANY VHF rig control?

varanny
1

I have a BTech UV-pro which sets the operating frequency for packet. I’d like to have the same Bluetooth frequency setting rig control for VHF varany operation. I realize that I would have to use my Digirig lite for audio and ptt.

73,
Steve W6WU

2

Good idea, but it isn’t really feasible today. The UV-PRO doesn’t expose a standard CAT interface over BLE (that I know of). What you’re seeing in RadioMail or Packet Commander is a firmware “hack” that treats the radio like a KISS TNC and then embeds two proprietary commands to change frequency. Those commands were defined by the PicoAPRS author and me, and first implemented in his device, see GitHub - islandmagic/kiss-tnc-hw-cmd: Documentation of known KISS TNC hardware specific commands.

In practice, when the radio “sees” a host send frequency cmd in a KISS session it switches its display and behavior to TNC mode. I’m assuming it only works when the TNC is active.

To support a more general Bluetooth rig-control for varanny, the radio maker would need to publish a CAT-style protocol over Bluetooth separate from the KISS TNC pathway. Some radios (like the Kenwood TH-D75) allow serial CAT commands over Bluetooth irrespective of TNC mode. I’m not aware of a documented one for UV-PRO.

3

Georges ,

I agree that vendor supplied documentation would be desirable. There is a repository on GitHub, khusmann/benlink - a python implementation of controlling these radios, that is attempting to document what the radio mfg has not. One derivative work at Ylianst/HTCommander is built on it. It wasn’t clear to me if what I was thinking about would be possible.

Thanks for the thoughtful and quick reply. I’m enjoying Radiomail and in the process setting up a headless Beelink mini, thanks for the setup info.

All the best,
Steve W6WU

4

Hmmm, looks like benlink’s command.py ChannelArgs class can be used to set:get tx and rx frequencies.

I’m not a python guy ( C , Java, etc here, and I retired from the rat race in 2016 ) but maybe when the varany ini file is swapped a derivative work of benlink can listen to the port normally assigned to rigctld or some such thing. Of course this is all thinking out loud. Anyway, fun to think about.

Steve

5

Adding support for those radio commands in hamlib would be the way to go.

6

Yes it would, universal support.

7

What is VARANY anyway?

8

It’s a misspelling of cranny

1 Like
9

I thought there was some new version of VARA that just came out. LOL