RIGLIB v0.1

RigLib aims to be a library for ham radio remote control and management. At the time of writing it has near zero features but I am publishing it now in order to encourage myself to continue to develop it. I'm publishing it under the terms of the General Public License version 2. My reasoning is largely selfish. I have three rigs and all have programming ports. I recently bought an Icom 756 Pro III and, when I discovered the programming port, went looking for software. The rig can be remote controlled by software. All the software that I found is payware. I am a programmer by day and noticed the manual described the control commands. My home built programming cables for my other rigs work with the Icom rig. So, I couldn't resist the idea of starting a rig remote control/programming library in the hope that it would spark an effort to develop free rig control software. I'm aware of hamlib and it's probably always going to be better than this library, it certainly has much broader rig support. I don't offer this as competition, just as something I'm working on.

As of the time of writing the library is Win32 only. However, only the serial port library should be using serious Win32 specifics. If someone implements a RigLib::COMPort class for another platform and adds the necessary conditional compilation directives in the COMPort class then the higher level library functionality should be immediately available on that platform.

At this time, the library has the ability to send arbitrary commands to an Icom rig with CI-V support, receive commands from such a rig . It currently supports:

• Read/set frequency on active band
• Select modulation mode (AM/FM/LSB/USB/CW/CW-R/RTTY/RTTY-R)
• VFO features
  • Select main band
  • Select sub band
  • Exchange main/sub
  • Equalise main/sub
  • Dual watch on/off
• Set tuning step size
• Read/set attenuator
• read/set active antenna connector

It's my plan to continue to extend RigLib::Icom756Pro3 to support all the generic features the rig's programming interface supports. I'll probably develop classes for my other rigs as well. By making the library available under the GPL it's my hope that others will contribute classes to control other rigs and RigLib can add value to the ham community. I'm aware of the Hamlib project and it is orders of magnitude more developed than this library and probably always will be.

I'll probably only ever maintain the library and never get round to building any applications that use it. However, I have advice for anyone using the library. Don't just build a facsimile of the front panel of a radio. I already have one of those on the radio. The front panel model is relatively ergonomic for hand operation but you can't do a tuning knob justice with a mouse operated control on a PC screen. Build something that makes using the rig better. For example:

The 756 Pro can stack three settings per band and you can skip between them with a single button press. That's a cool feature and handy on HF when a band is busy. Remote control software can make it better. On the rig you have to press the button to see what the stacked settings are, there are only three registers and you can only cycle through them. I imagine an application that lets you browse a band and stack frequencies with a single mouse click (maybe with the ability to annotate). The saved frequencies are displayed as a vertical stack. Clicking on any stacked frequency makes it active. Now you can browse a band and save (more than three) things of interest and switch to any one of them with a single click.

Download RIGLIB v0.1 MD5: 14d2684d8a7d1f8b16e4f12ad5786cf5

CHANGES:

2006-06-19

• Added many new rig functions
• Modified the test program to drive those functions

2006-03-26

• Added access to COM driver flow control lwm/hwm
• Added access to COM driver timeouts
• This fixes several bugs arising from blocking reads into large buffers never completing
• Added an Open() over-ride in ICOMPort to setup default COM port config
• Modified the test program based on the above