------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Windows Driver for Satellite Rotors and Radios Version 0.73b beta Dated September 14, 1994 (C) Copyright 1994, David A. Hoatson, KC6WYG. All Rights Reserved. This software is provided as is. No warranty is expressed or implied. By installing this software onto your system you agree to hold harmless David A. Hoatson for any for any damages whatsoever (including, without limitation, damages for loss of profits, interruption of service, loss of information, lost savings, other incidental or consequential damages or other pecuniary loss) arising out of the use or inability to use this product, even if David A. Hoatson has been advised of the possibility of such damages. This software is written for the AMATEUR RADIO SATELLITE community and may be distrubuted for NON-COMERCIAL PURPOSES ONLY. You are granted a 30 day trial period to use this software. If, after 30 days you continue to use this product, please send a donation of $10 to AMSAT. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Hello Satellite Users! Thank you for using the Windows Driver for Satellite Rotors and Radios. This release supports the Kansas City Tracker / Tuner from L.L. Grace and the following radios: Yaesu FT-736R Kenwood TS-790, Kenwood TS-711, Kenwood TS-811 Icom IC-970, Icom IC-275/IC-475, Icom IC-271/IC-471 Other radios will be supported in future editions. I am not connected with L.L. Grace, Yaesu, Kenwood or Icom in anyway. *********************** INSTALLATION PROCEDURE *************************** Start with all of the files in a directory call \SATDRV. We will start with the files that you must copy manually. I have created a file called INSTALL.BAT that will copy these two files for you if you wish. SATELITE.DLL in \WINDOWS\SYSTEM KCTDRV.INI in \WINDOWS PLEASE DO NOT MODIFY ANY OF THE PARAMETERS IN THE KCTDRV.INI FILE DIRECTLY! The driver has most error checking in place but you might change something that doesn't have an error check and cause the system to crash! The next two files should be in an install directory called \SATDRV. KCTT.DRV Control Panel Copies This For You OEMSETUP.INF Used for Installation Only Now you must load the Control Panel in Windows. Double Click On "Drivers". Click On "Add". Double Click On "Unlisted or Updated" in the list box. The system will now prompt you for a drive and directory. Type in the drive that you started from (Probably C:) and the name of the install directory (Probably \SATDRV). Another dialog box should come up with one item in it. It should be "Kansas City Tracker Driver For Windows". Double Click On that item. Now th Drivers Setup dialog box should appear and you can configure the driver. All of the items are set to a default configuration (mine!) and should work if you have a similar setup. When you are done, press "OK". Your driver installation is complete. You may delete the directory \SATDRV if you created it during this installation process. *********************** UPDATE PROCEDURE *************************** If you have a previous version of the Windows Driver installed on your system, all you must do to update to the most current version is: Exit Windows (Not just load a DOS Command Prompt!) From the C> prompt: COPY SATELITE.DLL into the \WINDOWS\SYSTEM directory COPY KCTT.DRV into the \WINDOWS\SYSTEM directory COPY KCTDRV.INI into the \WINDOWS directory You may now restart Windows and you driver has been updated. There is a file called UPDATE.BAT that will copy the three files above for you. ================== Installation Notes ================== * Make sure that you have "Level 1" checked in your GSC "Rotator Setup" dialog box. * Flip Mode Tracking - The driver allows elevations of greater than 90 degrees by default. It is upto the application program to figure out that a particular satellite pass is going to go thru 180 degrees azimuth and flip the antenna over at the beginning of the pass. NO PROTECTION from flipping is provided in the driver. This means that if your antenna cannot safely flip over - the driver will not keep an application from setting a elevation of greater than 90 degrees. If you your antennas cannot safely flip over, just specify 90 degrees as the maximum elevation during calibration. This will keep the driver from setting a elevation of greater than 90 degrees. Currently, WiSP (GSC V0.82x) does not allow for flip mode tracking, so this is not an issue. * The driver now supports calibration of the rotors. Press the "Calibrate" button on the KCT Driver Setup dialog box (from Control Panel, Setup) to enter the values for your rotor. If you have a rotor that cannot go past 90 degrees elevation, you can now specify 90 degrees as the maximum elevation. The driver will not allow an application to move the rotor beyond 90 degrees. If you have a rotor that can go to 180 degrees, specify that during calibration and the driver will allow the application to set a elevation beyond 90 degrees. (Hint: If you are a real techincal person, AND understand what you are doing, you can click on the "Cancel" button while holding down the "Control" key on your keyboard. This will cancel the calibration questions and let you enter the eight values derived from the questions directly. NO error checking of these values is provided, so can can easily set values that would cause a divide by zero error or worse. If this happens, you will have to reload the default KCTDRV.INI manually from DOS.) * The driver now uses the Band information to determine which radio it is going to send commands to. You will need to setup the driver so the correct bands are checked for the radio you have attached. For example: If you have a Icom IC-275 / IC-475 you would check 144Mhz RX and 144Mhz TX for the IC-275 and 430Mhz RX and 430Mhz TX for the IC-475. Then when the driver gets a RadioSetFrequency command it will know which radio to send the information to. You may have the IC-275 / IC-475 on different ports or an the same port, it doesn't matter to the driver. * Dual Band Radios such as the IC-970, FT-736 and TS-790 must have the main/sub bands set to the correct frequency band or the driver will not set the frequency correctly. The driver does not read any information from the radio, so it cannot determine if the radio is in 144Mhz RX/430Mhz TX mode. Therefore it cannot change the radio back to 430Mhz RX/144Mhz TX - so you must do this manually. This limitation will always exist for the FT-736, but will be fixed for the other radios when the driver supports reading data back from the radio. * If you have no radio and select "None" for all four radios in the setup dialog box, GSC V0.82x will produce a error dialog box upon AOS of a satellite. Some users have reported that this is followed by a general protection fault with GSC. If you encounter this, set your radio 1 to "Yaesu FT-736R" on "Port A" and select 144Mhz and 430Mhz for both the TX and RX bands. The Yeasu radio selection never expects to get data back from the radio so the driver will think that everything is tuning even though there really isn't a radio connected. Also, make sure that you set your baud rate to 4800 or 9600. This will keep the driver from spending alot of time waiting to send the data to a radio that isn't connected! * Some older KCT boards had a layout error that changed the pins for the rotor contols. If you have to use the RIO option for the DOS TSR driver to work, you have one of these boards. This driver currently does not support these boards but will in the future. (Hint: You can change the wires in the DB25 connector going from the KCT to your rotor and that will fix the problem as well). ================ Update / Changes ================ Version 0.73b beta September 18, 1994 ---------------------------------------- * Fixed bug with BRAKE control that caused the brake to be locked upon azimuth motion and released when motion stoped. Brake bit is now HIGH when in motion and LOW when at rest. Version 0.73a beta July 18, 1994 ----------------------------------- * Added Rotor Parking Feature. The variables that control parking have been added to the KCTDRV.INI file but are not brought out to any dialog box in the setup screens as of yet. If you want to change the parking values for your rotor, you must edit the KCTDRV.INI file and then restart Windows to have the values take effect. There are three values: ParkTime, ParkAzim and ParkElev. The ParkTime value is in seconds after the application closes the rotor (LOS) and ParkAzim and ParkElev are in degrees. ParkTime can have a maximum of 65 seconds. This keeps the rotor from moving to the parking position if there is another satellite that is just about to come up. * Enabled the BRAKE control when moving the rotor. The brake is released when the azimuth rotor is started, and turned back on when the azimuth rotor is stopped. * Disabled the rotor stop when at idle. Previously the rotor would be sent a "stop" command once a second just in case something were to start moving. This would conflict with the DOS box if another program was trying to start the rotor (Such as InstantTrack). Now you can run a program in the DOS box that controls the KCT as long as you don't have it running when a GSC pass starts. You also would load the TSR from the DOS box inside of Windows and not before Windows starts. Version 0.72c beta July 17, 1994 ----------------------------------- * Added preliminary support for the Kenwood TS-711 / TS-811. * Fixed a bug in the azimuth position reporting functions that would cause a rotor with a minimum decimal azimuth value that was not zero to report the wrong azimuth. (See 0.71a elevation bug notes below) * Increased the time-out values for the radio write byte routines to allow for faster bus speeds. The time-out value is bus speed specific, not processor speed specific. * Added AzimDeadBandDec and ElevDeadBandDec to the KCTDRV.INI file. These are not brought out to any dialog box in the setup screens as of yet. If you want to change the deadband values for your rotor, you must edit the KCTDRV.INI file and then restart Windows to have the values take effect. Please note that these values are decimal values, not degrees. You can convert from degrees to decimal with the following formula: DecimalValue = ((DegreeValue * TotalDecimalCount) / TotalDegrees) Where TotalDecimalCount is the Maximum A>D Decimal Position minus the Minimum A>D Decimal Position (255-0 = 255) and TotalDegrees is the Total Number of degrees that the rotor can span. This is generally 360 for the azimuth and 180 or 90 for the elevation. Generally increasing the DeadBand Values will make the rotor wait longer before movement starts and keep the rotor running longer and decreasing the DeadBand Values will make the rotor start sooner and run for a shorter period of time. Smaller values will keep the rotor pointed at the target more accurately where larger ones will have greater error, but run the rotors less often. Version 0.72b beta June 23, 1994 ----------------------------------- * Fixed bug that kept Kenwood TS-790 from working properly. * Changed the TS-790 macros to update the frequency correctly. * Verified TS-790 operation. * Removed the "Parser Error" message box. Version 0.72a beta May 22, 1994 ----------------------------------- * FT-736R Macro changed to keep from going into Transmit Mode upon open. * IC-275/IC-475 Removed @CANCELDUPLEX command from open macros * The Elevation rotor now seeks to the correct position when the calibration has the minimum position something other than 0. This fixes the problem of having a -90 / 0 / 90 degree rotor instead of a 0 / 90 / 180 degree one. * Some of the text for Calibration has been updated to be more accurate. * Added preliminary support for the Icom IC-271 / IC-471. Version 0.71a beta May 17, 1994 ----------------------------------- * Driver now correctly handles elevation rotors that have a maximum of less than 180 degrees. Previously if you had a elevation rotor that could only do 90 degrees, the driver would report half of the actual elevation. * After driver setup, Windows now must be restarted to reload the changed parameters from the KCTDRV.INI file. * NumberOfRadios=4 has been changed to NumberOfRadios=6 in KCTDRV.INI * The Satellite Window (DEADBAND) has been decreased to 5 degrees azimuth and 3 degrees elevation to provide slightly better tracking. Version 0.70a beta May 15, 1994 ----------------------------------- * Added calibrate rotor feature to setup dialog box. * Added support for up to four radios at once. * Added support for using Port B on the KCT/Tuner. * Added band support. Please see installation notes above. * Added support for NFM and NCW. * Fixed a problem with SATELITE.DLL that would cause a error in RadioOpen to leave the device opened instead of closed. This caused a GP fault when the application would try to close a device that wasn't really opened. * Changed the TS-790 macros to select the VFO A for each band on open. * Changed the IC-970 macros to cancel duplex for each band on open. * Added preliminary support for the Icom IC-275 / IC-475. Version 0.61b beta May 6, 1994 ----------------------------------- * Fixed a problem with the stall code that would cause the driver to think the rotor was stalled when in fact it was not. Version 0.61a beta May 6, 1994 ----------------------------------- * Fixed the spelling of "Yeasu" to "Yaesu" in KCTDRV.INI again! * Fixed a problem with the "Invalid Command" message box that could cause multiple message boxes to appear - and lock up the system. * SATELITE.DLL now changes negative elevations to zero. This allows GSC to position the azimuth correctly before the pass begins. If the azimuth is negative or greater than 360, ERR_INVALIDPARAM is returned. * Added Stall Function to rotor. If the rotor doesn't move for two seconds the driver will shut that rotor off and wait 15 seconds. If another RotorSetPosition command is issued during the 15 second timeout, the rotor will not be restarted. After 15 seconds has elapsed the RotorSetPosition command will restart the rotor and the cycle will be reset. The driver now returns two additional error codes, STATUS_AZIMSTALLED (0x2000) and STATUS_ELEVSTALLED (0x1000). If both rotors are stalled the error code would be 0x3000. * When the rotor device is closed by the application with ACCESS_READWRITE all motion is now stopped. * Rotor functions now are much smoother. The Satellite Window (DEADBAND) has been increased to 6 degrees azimuth and 4 degrees elevation. * Satellite Monitor program now included with driver. This program will display the current status of the rotor and radio. No controls are provided. * MAKE SURE YOU READ "INSTALLATION NOTES" ABOVE FOR ROTOR SETUP INFORMATION! Version 0.60a beta May 3, 1994 ----------------------------------- * Added preliminary support for the Kenwood TS-790 * Added preliminary support for the Icom IC-970 * YOU MUST USE THE KCTDRV.INI file that came with this driver for your radio to work correctly. Version 0.51a beta May 3, 1994 ----------------------------------- * Fixed a problem with the rotor positioning that caused any azimuth over 75 degress to subtract 180 degrees! This would result in the antenna pointing in the wrong direction for most of a pass! * Made SATELITE.DLL standalone. This means that if you don't have a KCT/T you can use SATELITE.DLL with WiSP and not generate error messages. You should not install the KCT/T driver. (i.e. no Radio= or Rotor= in SYSTEM.INI [Drivers] section). * Fixed the spelling of "Yeasu" to "Yaesu" in KCTDRV.INI. * Made the selection of "None" as the radio name not generate "Parser Errors". Version 0.50a beta Apr 27, 1994 ------------------------------------ * First Release for ZL2TPO only -END-