CW Skimmer; The CW keyer is a K1EL Winkeyer USB controlled solely by the N1MM logger. The routing of IQ signals from LP-PAN2 SDR is done through a MOTU 828 mk3 interface, simply to be able to split the signal so that both NAP3 and CW Skimmer can use it. CW Skimmer gets the IQ signal directly from the MOTU. CW Skimmer is a 'multi-channel CW decoder and analyzer.' Think of it as your PSK waterfall screen for CW. It’s not the first CW decoder out there on the market; WriteLog has had a CW decoder for as long as I remember having the program, pulling out callsigns from the ether through your receiver’s passband.
Skimmer Server
Skimmer Server is a multi-band CW decoder for Windows users. The program features: simultaneous decoding of all CW signals on up to 7 bands, up to 192 kHz coverage on each band, based on the same super-sensitive CW decoding algorithms as CW Skimmer, standard Telnet interface to the loggers and cluster monitors, and more.
- Publisher: Afreet Software, Inc.
- Home page:www.dxatlas.com
- Last updated: February 14th, 2016
CW Skimmer
CW Skimmer is a multi-channel CW decoder and analyzer based on Bayesian statistics algorithm. It features a a fast waterfall display, with a resolution sufficient for reading Morse Code dots and dashes visually. Simultaneous decoding of all the CW signals in the receiver passband, with up to 700 signals is possible.
- Publisher: Afreet Software, Inc.
- Home page:www.dxatlas.com
- Last updated: December 23rd, 2017
Virtual Serial Port Driver
VSPD allows easy management of physical and virtual serial ports. Create complex port bundles, join, split and merge COM ports with this app. Redirect serial data to physical or virtual COM ports on either side of the created complex bundle.
- Publisher: Eltima Software
- Home page:www.eltima.com
- Last updated: March 19th, 2021
GRITTY
GRITTY is an RTTY decoding program based on the technology developed for the RTTY Skimmer Server project. This is not a skimmer, it decodes a single signal in the 3-kHz audio coming from the transceiver via a soundcard, just like any other RTTY program.
- Publisher: Afreet Software, Inc.
- Home page:www.dxatlas.com
- Last updated: August 1st, 2016
Flamethrower Pack for Pocket Tanks Deluxe
Flamethrower: A huge spray of flaming napalm.Skimmer: On impact, two bullets fly out horizontally and ricochet off terrain.Volcano: Massive eruption that throws fire and debris everywhere.Pedestal: Puts the tank up on a high pedestal.Fire Storm: Multiple explosions with a sea of awesome bouncing fireballs.
Cw Skimmer 2.1 Serial Key
- Publisher: BlitWise Productions, LLC
- Last updated: March 15th, 2008
Serial/IP®
Guidelines for applications using Serial/IP to access serial devicesusing public/private networks and wireless data services.Use remote serial devices on TCP/IP networks throughSerial/IP virtual COM ports that work like local COM ports.Serial/IP virtual COM ports appear in the list. Selecting a port shows its current settings.
- Publisher: Tactical Software, LLC
- Home page:www.tacticalsoftware.com
- Last updated: July 19th, 2012
Serial Port Splitter
Serial Splitter allows you to manage virtual and real ports by creating various types of port bundles. You can split, redirect, join, and share serial ports. The programs can switch among the free ports sharing the same name.
- Publisher: Serial Port Software
- Home page:www.serialportsplitter.com
- Last updated: December 22nd, 2015
SUDT SerialNull
SUDT SerialNull is an advanced configuration utility, which purpose is to emulate RS232 serial ports connected via virtual null-modem cable using Virtual Serial Ports Driver, with SerialNull you can create any number of pure virtual serial ports in your system connected into pairs via virtual null-modem cable without having real serial ports occupied.
- Publisher: SUDT Studio
- Home page:www.sudt.com
- Last updated: April 19th, 2010
Serial Key Generator
Serial Key Generator is a program to help developers generate serial numbers for applications. You can generate serial keys using a custom number of columns and characters per column. The sequence of numbers/digits can be defined in the application. The output can be saved as CSV or TXT documents.
- Publisher: VCL Examples
- Home page:skgenerator.vclexamples.com
- Last updated: September 3rd, 2014
Serial Port Monitor
Serial Port Monitor is a professional application for RS232/422/485 COM ports monitoring. It monitors, displays, logs and analyzes all serial port activity in a system.
- Publisher: Eltima Software
- Home page:www.eltima.com
- Last updated: August 19th, 2020
HW Virtual Serial Port
HW Virtual Serial Port is a one-of-a-kind piece of software that allows you to emulate an unrestricted virtual serial port driver meant especially to be read and used by TCP/IP devices. This application is basically a driver that creates and adds a virtual serial port to the system.
- Publisher: HW group
- Home page:www.hw-group.com
- Last updated: May 2nd, 2010
Advanced Serial Port Monitor
This program allows you to check the flow of data through a computer's COM ports. As you can see from software name this application can work as serial port monitor. It supports full duplex mode, flexible adjusting of parameters, output received data to file, automatic and manual modes.
- Publisher: AGG Software
- Home page:www.aggsoft.com
- Last updated: August 2nd, 2021
Serial Key Maker
Serial Key Maker is a powerful program that enables you to create secure software license keys. You can create time-limited, demo and non-expiring keys, create multiple keys in one click, quickly encrypt strings using your own private key and lock a license key to a particular machine.
- Publisher: Puresoto Group
- Last updated: August 1st, 2012
Free Virtual Serial Ports
Though it's free, Free Virtual Serial Ports is also one of the best tools of its kind, as it's really reliable and accurate, allowing you to emulate a large variety of serial ports, all correctly registered and visible in Windows device manager under standard Ports (COM & LPT) device class, and all behaving exactly like real hardware serial ports, with full serial port functionality.
- Publisher: HHD Software, Ltd.
- Home page:freevirtualserialports.com
- Last updated: November 19th, 2015
Advanced Serial Port Terminal
This program is a tool for every developer and programmer. With this program you will be able to change serial port settings without the need to close and re-open the serial port, adjust baudrate, databits, parity, stop bits, flow control parameters; save all received bytes into a file for later analysis and lots more.
- Publisher: Eltima Software
- Home page:www.eltima.com
- Last updated: February 25th, 2011
Serial Port Utility
Serial Port Utility is a professional communication software for serial port. The program can boost the speed to design, development, debug and test applications and hardware devices, such as relay boards, Electronic Total Station, Global Positioning System, chemical and medical analysis instruments and DMX devices etc.
- Publisher: Darkwood Studio
- Home page:www.darkwood.biz
- Last updated: October 23rd, 2020
Virtual Serial Port Kit
Virtual Serial Port Kit creates virtual serial ports and connects each pair of them via a virtual null-modem cable. Serial Port Splitter allows getting access to a device connected to a COM port from several applications simultaneously. Virtual serial ports look and work exactly as real hardware serial ports.
- Publisher: FabulaTech, Inc.
- Home page:www.virtual-serial-port.com
- Last updated: April 17th, 2020
Virtual Serial Port ActiveX Control
With VSP ActiveX your application is capable of creating ports that will emulate real ones, so any application will communicate with a virtual COM port the same way as a serial device is communicating with a real serial port. Your application using VSP AX will be able to send data to a virtual COM port and other applications will receive it as from a real RS232 port.
- Publisher: ELTIMA Software GmbH
- Home page:www.eltima.com
- Last updated: May 22nd, 2020
In this article, we will investigate how various Contest programs (Win-Test, N1MM, and CW-Skimmer) communicate with the FT1000MP shortwave transceiver over the serial port. We will see what happens when multiple programs try to talk to the transceiver at the same time, what problems appear and how we can successfully monitor and debug them.
A couple of weeks ago I modified my Yaesu FT1000MP short wave transceiver to be able to use it with an external software defined radio (SDR). For decoding morse code (CW), Alex Shovkoplyas, VE3NEA wrote the neat software CW-Skimmer which can decode up to 700 CW stations in conjunction with a wideband receiver.
In the “old days” the transceiver was connected exclusively to logging software like Win-Test or N1MM. With the introduction of CW-Skimmer, another application announced access to the transceivers interface. Unfortunately, Windows allows natively only one application to use the serial (com)-port at any moment.
But nobody is wondering, that in the golden days of Computer Virtualization also virtual COM-Port drivers became available. Several companies offer a variety of virtual COM port/splitter/router applications. This is a list of the ones I found:
A Virtual Com-Port Splitter allows us to access the same physical Com-Port of a Computer multiple times simultaneously. My favorite one is Eterlogic’s VSPE. It’s intuitive, very reliable, and freeware!
This is how the configuration looks like now:
Now we have established the communication, we can start with the problems 😉
Virtual Serial Splitter allows us to use the same com port with several applications, however, they have no intelligence regarding packet routing. Let’s have a closer look at what I mean with packet routing.
The virtual splitter sends the data requests from both applications to the transceiver:
In this case, Win-Test has some trouble. With a polling ratio of 1:10 (Win-Test: 100ms and CW-Skimmer: 1000ms) the frequencies are displayed in both applications correctly. Unfortunately Win-Test’s Bandmap always toggles between the first and second VFO wrongly indicating “Split” Operation. During serious operations, this gets quite soon very annoying especially during crossband operation, when QSOs are accidentally logged on the wrong band.
See the following two screenshots when the band map is in the “normal” and “split” operation.
However, N1MM doesn’t show this behavior at all. It works smoothly in conjunction with CW-Skimmer on the same COM Port. So, what is the difference? Isn’t serial communication = serial communication? No, it isn’t!
Before we go into deeper analysis, we need to know what we are looking for. Therefore we should take a brief look at the FT1000MP communication protocol. I picked out the most important messages. Please note that the transceiver’s serial communication protocol is explained very well in the FT1000MP user manual (page 73 & 83). The manual can be downloaded from several websites.
For the FT1000MP we distinguish between “command (request) messages” and “answer messages”.
Command messages consist of 5 bytes (using hex representation).
The two most important commands are:
This is the description of status flag 1 (which is for our purpose the most important one, because it contains the “Split Mode” setting):
Now that we know what we have to expect we’ll start tracing the serial interface.
For tracing, monitoring, and debugging purpose I recommend the following tools:
- Portmon part of Microsoft’s Sysinternal Suite
** Let’s begin with the communication between N1MM and the FT1000MP:**
We can see that N1MM is requesting all data (two data requests) within a single package:
Request (HEX):
Answer (HEX):
** Let’s try Win-Test and the FT1000MP:**
We can see that Win-Test is requesting the data in two consecutive packages:
Request (HEX):
Answer (HEX):
Request (HEX):
Answer (HEX):
And now we will trace the communication between CW-Skimmer and the FT1000MP:
Cw Skimmer Serial Numbers
Well, and CW-Skimmer is, requesting quite a lot of additional information.
Request (HEX):
Answer (HEX):
Request (HEX):
Answer (HEX):
Request (HEX):
Answer (HEX):
Cw Skimmer Serial Killer
Request (HEX):
Answer (HEX):
Okay, honestly CW-Skimmer doesn’t need that much information. CW-Skimmer only needs the frequency of the VFOs. To reduce the possibility of message interferences on the com port it is advisable to reduce the traffic and length to the amount as little as necessary. Due to the fantastic flexible interface of VE3NEA’s Omnirig (that’s CW-Skimmers Transceiver Interface engine), I changed the communication/request pattern to “N1MM style”.
Well, so far we haven’t seen any conflict. Let’s analyze the serial port while CW-Skimmer and Win-Test are accessing it** simultaneously**. The configuration looks like this:
We can see that some of the messages are mixed up and other produce junk. In the case of the “status request” (00 00 00 00 FA) we can see that answers (or the bytes that win-test thinks to receives) alter in the first byte (remember the #1 Status byte). This would mean the one time the #1 status byte is set to HEX: 0x11 -> 1111 1111 and the other time to Hex: 0x0A -> 0000 1010. This would toggle bit 0 “Split Mode” flag.
Tracing the connection with N1MM and CW-Skimmer (modified communication pattern) shows better answers. At least there seem to be no more clashed packages. Please note that FT1000MP seems to respond by repeating twice the requested information. Luckily, both applications can handle this without any problem.
At this stage, we already have isolated the problem pretty well.
VFO Data and Status bytes should be requested in one “package”
If they are requested in two separated “packages” this can cause trouble and “misunderstanding”.
The aborted messages and package clashes cause Win-Test to misinterpret the first status byte (which contains the &“Split-Mode” flag).
To finally verify these theses we will simulate the FT1000MP by replacing it with the HEX-capable Terminal Program Realterm.
As mentioned, we connected logically through a virtual Com-Port (VSPE “Pair”) with our terminal program to the “other side”, where the FT1000MP should be. In Realterm we can see that Win-Test is trying to poll the FT1000MP. We will now feed the answers we traced earlier to find out if our theses are correct:
First Win-Test Request (HEX):
First Realterm Answer (HEX):
Second Win-Test Request (HEX):
Second Realterm Answer (HEX):
alternative second Realterm Answer (HEX):
And indeed, as soon as we feed the second message, Win-Test starts toggling the VFOs.
We have seen how it is possible to analyze and investigate a problem. In detail, we have investigated the behavior of various programs with a non-standard configuration by allowing these programs to talk simultaneously over the same serial port with an HF transceiver. By using serial analyzing software we found out that there is indeed a difference in how to obtain the same data from the transceiver. In the end, we finally verified how an optimum data request should look in a virtual com port environment.
I’ll contact now the producers of Win-Test and kindly ask them if it might be possible to change the pattern of the requesting command. Even better would be, if the Omni-Rig Engine would be directly supported by Win-Test.
During this investigation I used the following software versions:
- Windows XP: SP2 (Administrative rights)
- Win-Test: 3.21.0
- N1MM: 8.0.0
- CW-Skimmer: 1.2
- VSPE: 0.80.2.385
- Free Serial Port Monitor: 3.31
- Realterm: 2.0.0.57