[Hamlib-developer] Orion questions

[Martin, A. <mar...@gm...>]

The Orion (tt565) doesn't behave very well on its serial port.  The
error rate is fairly high, depending on what else its uP is being
asked to do.  Also, its responses are not all fixed length. I now see
that the TenTec interaction is set up for fixed-length read
operations, and it times out if you ask for a higher byte count.  At
present, the Orion module seems to time out on all read operations! 
However, the responses are correct as far as I know.

To do better for the Orion (verification, error retry, etc.), I may
want to bring in much of the serial I/O into orion.c.  The question I
have is whether this is going to break anything significant --
especially, portability.  I don't claim to understand all the
subleties.  Any thoughts?  (Of course portability is not much help if
the code is broken...)

If I do this, I will be ignoring some parts of the rig capabilities
mechanism, like I/O delays.  How important is it to refer everything
to the official capabilities structure instead of building into Orion
backend?  Seems to me these are equivalent locations for logic of any
particular rig.  The main advantage may be that it helps the cross-rig
maintainers to find the peculiarities of each rig in one data object,
and it helps many backends to look the same.  That philosophy may
break down if one rig has too much "personality".

If there are other Ten-Tec developer/maintainers out there -- do the
other TT backends have similar problems?  I hesitate to program for
platforms I do not have in house.  (Not that that stops some folks
around here! :-)

I would appreciate some Group Think on these questions.

73
-- 
mar...@gm...
http://blog.aa6e.net