The engine probe answered two questions on the air, and they point opposite
ways.
TxBufLen is the number of characters left to transmit. Seventeen characters
pushed, five decoded back, and it read 12, counting down to 0 as the message
went out. So the pump no longer counts character times off the clock: it asks
the engine, feeds while the answer is under Lead, and asks again. The baud rate
is now only the fallback for an engine that will not answer.
A backspace is not an edit. Pushed in as a character it made the count go up by
four and the text went out unchanged, so text the engine has been given cannot
be taken back, only aborted. EngineTypeAhead was built on the opposite belief
and is gone, along with the setting that chose it and the interface that existed
to switch between the two.
A count that stops going down means the engine is holding what it has: MMTTY set
to Word out keeps a word until the space after it. The pump feeds one character
per look while that lasts, so the space arrives and the word goes out rather
than the message sitting there.
The probe kept two bugs of its own that this run showed: it read the count a
millisecond after pushing, saw 0 and called the message finished, and it started
a step while the previous unkey was still in flight, so that step ran with the
engine down. It now needs two empty answers in a row and waits for the engine to
say it has stopped. It also asks what {RX} does to a word the engine is holding,
which decides whether a macro without a trailing space loses its last word.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01RtspmWmS7f8kUvcyaHpRWZ
MMTTY has a type-ahead buffer of its own: characters go into it, a backspace
takes back one it has not transmitted, and TxBufLen says how many are left. Used
that way it paces itself, so there is no gap between characters to tune and no
baud rate to keep in step with the engine.
EngineTypeAhead does that, and Config > Digital picks between it and the pump
that is there now. Off is still the default: three things it rests on have never
been seen with a real engine.
tools/Nonemm.EngineProbe asks the engine those three questions and writes the
answers to a file. It starts MMTTY through the bridge, pushes a message, polls
TxBufLen while it goes out, backspaces over text that has and has not been
transmitted, and logs what came back on the receive side and when.
The bridge learns one verb for it: `buffer` reads TxBufLen and answers with the
count, or -1 when the control will not say. A property the control does not know
is a log line rather than an error, since it stops nothing.
TypeAhead and EngineTypeAhead share the TransmitBuffer interface, which is what
the digital window now works through, so the window does not know which one it
has.
docs/unfinished.md states what each buffer assumes and how to run the probe.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01RtspmWmS7f8kUvcyaHpRWZ
The pump handed the engine one character and then waited a character time
before the next, on purpose, so it stayed behind the engine rather than ahead.
That leaves the engine with an empty buffer between every two characters of a
message, and an engine with an empty buffer transmits idle rather than waiting.
The idle is added to how long the message takes, which in a contest is time
paid for nothing.
The pump now keeps two characters in the engine: one being transmitted and one
behind it, so the engine never runs dry. The clock at the baud rate says when
the engine has room for the next one, and the engine reporting that it has
stopped transmitting sets the estimate back to an empty buffer.
The last two characters are now beyond reach rather than the last one. Everything
before them can still be rewritten, which is what the pane is for.
A message is finished when the buffer is empty and the engine is estimated to
have transmitted what it holds, so {END} and {RX} no longer run while the engine
still has the last characters of the message.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01RtspmWmS7f8kUvcyaHpRWZ
A digital engine takes a whole message and transmits it at 45.45 baud, which
takes several seconds. Once it has the message nothing can be changed, so an
operator who sees the wrong call going out has to stop the transmission and
start again.
TypeAhead keeps the message instead and feeds the engine one character at a
time. What has not gone out yet can be rewritten, added to or deleted. Cursor
is how much of it may go: the pump stops there and the engine idles on the air,
which is the diddle a RTTY engine sends between characters anyway.
The pump counts character times off the clock at the baud rate rather than
asking the engine what it has left, so it runs a little behind: a gap between
two characters is idle on the air and costs nothing, while feeding faster than
the engine transmits would put text out of reach again.
Every digital message goes through it — the function keys, ESM, the QTC window
and the digital window's own buttons — because they all send through
DigitalEngineSender. Finished is now raised when the buffer runs dry, which is
when the message has really gone, so what stands after {END} runs then and {RX}
drops the transmitter at the right moment. The transmitter dropping only counts
as the end when nothing is left to send: an engine that keys itself off what it
is given drops between two characters as well.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01RoGtneMQaz4M9w7Kk49AVD
MMTTY and 2Tone have no socket or pipe interface: N1MM hosts XMMT.ocx and
exchanges window messages with the engine. A Linux process cannot load that
control, so bridge/nonemm-mmtty-bridge.exe hosts it under Wine and passes
lines over its standard input and output. docs/digital-bridge.md states the
protocol and what the control needs.
The window is N1MM's: receive pane with coloured callsigns, grab list, call
stacking, twenty-four macro buttons and the engine controls. One left click
copies what is under it — a callsign to the callsign box, anything else to the
exchange box the contest keeps for that kind of value.
Config > Digital registers XMMT.ocx in the Wine prefix on its own, making the
prefix first if it is not there. The engine, the bridge and the control start
at the copies shipped beside the program.
The bridge reads the control's own events. OnTranslateMessage carries only the
messages the control has no event for, so nothing was ever decoded through it.
hamlib's data mode names read as digital modes now, and a mode typed into the
callsign box changes mode the way a frequency changes band, so a station with
no radio can reach RTTY at all.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01RoGtneMQaz4M9w7Kk49AVD
