8.11  Hamlib  --  rigctld  -  table meterhl

piWebCAT has an S meter on receive and five button-selected meter options on transmit.


The five Tx buttons are set up in the buttonshl table.

The meterhl table controls the subsequent repetitive meter reading.

The timing table sets the meter repetition interval

The link between the buttonshl table and the meterhl table is the btnno field values, 61 to 65.


The meterhl table is shown below for my FTdx101D


The are two S meter records (RxA and RXb) and eight Tx meter records (reflected power not available on FTdx101D)


The S meter code values SMTA and SMTB are fixed in code and so must be entered as these

so that the server will recognise them.  

The Tx meter code fields are copied to the client at startup and so you can use any code of your choice.

Five of the Tx meters have been assigned to the available five option buttons as shown below

   

In the meterhl table, these are the items with a non-zero btnno field  (ie: 61 to 65 )


Meter table field list:

  • rig                The current radio   - drop down selector (from radios table)
  • description        Descriptive text- no function
  •  caption        The caption to the left of the slider. Note that this only applies to the central
                   column of sliders with no adjacent on/off button with identifying caption.
  • btnno        The sliders's unique, fixed, numeric identifier as discussed earlier.
  • code        Specified once here. Used in message from client and recognised in server.
  • abx        If A or B, Client sends Vfo A or B to server.  abx allows server to read appropriate meter.
                   For Tx meters abx = X (not VFO-specific)
  • readmask          The character string used to read from the rig via rigctld.
  • setmask          The character string used to write to the rig via rigctld.  
                      Contains  #  which is substituted   on button action by the data from buttonshl.
  • answermask  This is used for commands not supported by rigctld where we use \send_cmd_rx.
                      It is the character pattern of the answer and has the same format as in the ASCII system.
                      See Command masks 
                      We use \send_cmd_rx  here because not all the metering levels are supported by rigctld.
  • mult        Multiplier (default = 1)
  • divide        Divisor (default = 1)     Meter CAT value is scaled by (CAT * mult) / divide
                   before being optionally modified by the metercal table data.
  • usecal        Y or N.  If Y, then the CAT value is processed by the calibration table.
                   ( 20 point calibration for each meter with linear interpolation between points)


Four of the records in the illustrated table use \send_cmd_rx.
These are explained in the next section :   Unsupported commands