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
