Monitoring Messages

Commander: Monitoring Messages

Commander provides a means of capturing the flow of messages between your PC and the radio connected to Commander's Primary CAT Port, and a means of capturing the flow of messages between your PC and the radio or application connected to Commander's Secondary CAT Port . To use this mechanism, click the Main window's Msgs button, which will display Commander's Messages window.

To enable the capture of Primary CAT Port messages, check the Capture and display Primary CAT Port Messages box; note that capturing messages may reduce program performance, resulting in poor tracking between the radio's frequency display and the program's frequency display.
To enable the capture of Secondary CAT Port messages, check the Capture and display Secondary CAT Port Messages box; note that capturing messages may reduce program performance, resulting in poor tracking between the radio's frequency display and the program's frequency display.
Captured messages are preceded by a P or S (for Primary or Secondary), a sequence number, and date; messages can be displayed in Decimal, Hexadecimal, or Ascii as specified by settings in the Message Display panel. When capturing messages from both the Primary and Secondary CAT Ports when these ports are configured for different CAT protocols, set the Message Display panel to Native; this will display messages in the the most natural representation for their protocol, e.g. Kenwood messages are displayed in Ascii, Icom messages are displayed in Hexadecimal, etc.
If the Configuration window's Continuous Frequency and Mode Interrogation box is checked, you should see the PC issuing "request frequency report" and "request mode report" messages, and your radio's responses; if not, check your radio's address, baud rate, and PC connections.
If the Configuration window's Continuous Frequency and Mode Interrogation box is not checked, you will only see messages when the radio's frequency, mode, or filter selection changes, or when Commander sends a directive to your radio.

The Freq? and Mode? buttons send messages to your radio requesting that it report its current frequency and mode respectively.

The Save button places all captured messages in a file, and the Clear button empties the store of captured messages.

The Note button records documentary text to be inserted into the message store; the note will not appear in the message store until the next message arrives