Nonemm/docs/unfinished.md

What is not finished, and what has not been tested

Two separate lists. A feature can be finished and untested, or half-built and exercised every day. Written 2026-08-27, updated 2026-08-31.

Never run against the real thing

Everything below is written from a published protocol or from N1MM's source and tested against a fake that speaks the same protocol. A fake agrees with whatever the person who wrote it believed, so these are the places where a wrong belief is still sitting there undiscovered.

What	Tested against	What has never happened
RigctldRadio	a stand-in for rigctld over a real socket	no real rigctld, no real radio. The extended answer format, the + prefix and the split commands are from the documented protocol. If the format is wrong, nothing works rather than something being subtly off — check this first.
OtrspBox	a MemoryStream, checking the bytes	no real SO2R box. Command forms are from N1MM's N1MMPort.cs.
ClusterClient	a node fake over a real socket, sending the telnet negotiation, the login prompt and spot lines	no live cluster node. Which nodes send bare CR, and which send option negotiation, is guessed from N1MM's code.
StationNetwork	the message format, round-tripped	no second station, and no N1MM on the same network.
CwDaemonSender	the UDP messages, and a fake daemon that answers the <ESC>h reply request	no cwdaemon, no radio keyed.
MmttyEngine and the Wine bridge	MMTTY 1.70 under Wine 10 on a machine with a sound card: started, keyed, a message transmitted and decoded back off the air, and stopped	no radio. No FSK through EXTFSK, no PTT on a serial port, and 2Tone has never been run. Keying was wrong until 2026-09-01: SetMmttyPTT stops a transmission and does not start one, which is why nothing ever went out before then. docs/digital-bridge.md
WinkeyerSender	the status-byte reader, on its own	no test of the serial side, and no WinKeyer. The host-mode open sequence is from the WinKeyer datasheet; the status bits are from N1MM's Winkey.cs.

The Cabrillo output has not been put in front of a contest sponsor's robot.

Half-built

The digital window: what N1MM has and this does not. The window is here — receive pane in both of N1MM's scroll modes, the Letters/Figs and MouseOver readouts, the pause bar, coloured callsigns with N1MM's validity routines, grab list, call stacking, hover mode, the message buttons, the engine controls, the text file in and out — and the function keys, ESM and the QTC window send through the engine on a digital mode. Left out: the waterfall, the spectrum and the XY scope, which the engine reports and nothing draws; more than one receive pane, which is MMVARI's multi-channel decoding rather than MMTTY's; N1MM's AutoTRXUpdate, which offsets the frequency the entry window and the log record rather than only the one in the title bar; and N1MM's Send All, which keys a whole QTC series at once. The other interfaces N1MM offers — fldigi, MMVARI, the hardware TNCs — are not here either, though DigitalEngine is the place to add them.

The receive pane has been driven with a stand-in bridge that prints prepared text, which is how the printing, the colouring, the Letters/Figs box and the type-ahead transmit pane were checked. Nothing has been decoded from a real signal and nothing has gone on the air: this machine has no sound card, and MMTTY does not start on it.

What paces the type-ahead pump. The text is held in TypeAhead and the engine is kept Lead characters ahead: one being transmitted and one behind it, so it never runs dry and never transmits idle in the middle of a message. Those two characters cannot be taken back; everything behind them can still be rewritten.

The pace comes from the clock at the baud rate in the digital settings. The engine's own count of what it has left is a check on that rather than the pace itself, for the reason in the table below: it is used as a cap, so the engine is never given more than Lead + Slack characters however fast the clock says to feed, and as the end of a message, together with the clock estimate. A count that neither goes down nor is being added to means the engine is holding what it has, and the pump feeds a character every HoldingPatience until it moves.

What the engine probe established, with MMTTY 1.70 under Wine on a machine with a sound card:

What	Answer
Does the control answer TxBufLen?	Yes, and a name it does not know fails with DISP_E_UNKNOWNNAME, so the two are distinguishable.
What does it count?	Characters left to transmit. Seventeen were pushed; a second later, with five decoded back off the air, it read 12, and it counted down to 0 as the message went out.
How current is that number?	It lags by 100 to 150 ms, about one character at 45.45 baud. Twenty-one characters pushed at 2496 ms read 0 at 2497, 2547 and 2597, then 26 at 2647. That is why the count cannot be the pace: a pump that fed on a fresh 0 would hand over a whole message in half a second and put all of it beyond reach.
What is it counting?	Baudot symbols, not the characters handed over. Twenty-one characters read as 26, and the message was CQ TEST DE OM5M OM5M : two digits, each needing a shift to figures and a shift back, plus one shift at the start. It also only moves once per symbol transmitted, so four readings 50 ms apart are the same number.
Does a backspace take back a character the engine has not transmitted?	No. Pushed in as a character it made the count go up by four, and the text went out unchanged. MMTTY's help describes its backspace key doing this in its own window; through PostMmttyMessage(4, 8) it is just another character. So text in the engine cannot be retracted, only aborted.
Way to send	This engine is set to Character out: ABCD with no space after it went out at once. MMTTY's help says Word out is the usual setting, which would hold that word, so the pump copes with both.
Does the count reaching 0 cut the end of a message off?	No. It reached 0 about 350 ms before the last character was decoded back, and the engine held the transmitter up for another 900 ms after that, so {RX} straight after the count empties does not truncate anything.

Counting symbols rather than characters is what makes the cap earn its place. A contest exchange is full of digits, so the engine has more to transmit than the pump's clock thinks: 599 001 is seven characters and eleven symbols. The clock would run ahead of the engine on every exchange; the cap is what stops it.

The report is worth reading for the receive side as well. With MMTTY's sound loopback off, its help says the receive window is fed from the transmit window, which would be a per-character report of what has gone out with no polling at all. With loopback on, which is how this station runs it, the decoded text arrives about 420 ms after the character goes out and matches what was sent.

./build.sh run --project tools/Nonemm.EngineProbe -- \
    --engine ~/mmtty/MMTTY.EXE --prefix ~/.wine-nonemm --out engine-probe.log

It transmits on the sound card for about twenty seconds and keys no serial port unless --ptt names one. EngineProbe states what each answer means.

Voice keying. MessageSender was written to cover a voice keyer playing a recording, and nothing implements it. Each operator's recordings folder is stored with the rest of his settings and waits on the same thing. No DVK support either, so the second radio of an SO2R station cannot call CQ by voice. Alternating CQ therefore works on CW only, though nothing in it is CW-specific: a voice keyer that reports when the recording has finished would drive it as it stands.

The QTC window transmits on CW only. The header, the lines, the QRV, the TU and the again messages go out through the keyer, with N1MM's messages and N1MM's defaults. Nothing goes out on SSB or RTTY: N1MM plays four recordings on SSB — QRV, Agn, Cfm and TU — and sends RTTY from its digital window, and this program has neither a voice keyer nor a digital window. N1MM's Send All, which keys a whole series at once, belongs to that RTTY window and is not here either.

Cut numbers are not sent. N1MM can key a serial number as letters — N for 9, T for 0 — and offers several styles. Nothing here does, in a QTC line or in any other message.

Two WAE numbers do not agree with N1MM, both from 2020 and 2021 logs. The disagreements are the country file of the day, not the rules: 4U1A counted as 4U1V then and as OE in today's wl_cty.dat, KP2BH counted as KP2 then and is listed as a US call now, and China was not split by call area yet. The 2022 to 2025 logs agree to the contact.

Telnet window: what N1MM has and this does not. Left out: the special-calls list, and saving received spots to a database — N1MM keeps those spots in its admin database, which is not the log file the two programs share, so there is nothing to be compatible with and nothing asks to read them back. The band plan tab is not repeated either, because Config ▸ Sub bands already edits the same numbers.

The node list is downloaded from the public NG3K page rather than from N1MM's own web service, which asks the operator to opt in to data collection and is N1MM's to run. A page that changes shape would stop the download working; the reading only needs telnet:// links in a table, and the old list stays in place when a download brings back something unreadable.

Not every action macro is acted on. The text macros and the action macros that this program can carry out are listed in the README. What is read and passed over: the {CAT…} and radio-hex families, the audio and rotator macros, {STEREOON} and {STEREOOFF}, {CONDJUMP}, {QSYCQ}, {FORCELOG}, {SwapContests}, the digital TNC macros ({ENTER}, {ESC}, {CTRL-A}…), and the wav-directory macros, which wait on voice keying. A message holding any of them still sends the right characters.

The CW keyer macros are not read either: < and > for speed, ~ for a half space, and the prosign characters ], [, + and =. They belong to the keyer rather than to the expander — cwdaemon and a WinKeyer each have their own way of saying them — and they go out as the characters they are.

The busted-spot check is one character wide. N1MM offers two. Every call one character away from the spotted one is looked up in the callsign database, which is a few hundred lookups per spot; two characters away is a few hundred thousand, which is too much work per spot for the little it would add.

Two BARTG contests share one set of rules. N1MM has a class each for the March HF RTTY contest, BARTGSRTTY, and the September sprint, BARTGRTTYS. This program has one contest, named BARTGRTTYS, holding the March rules — the ones the station's log needs — and both of N1MM's names open a log with it. A sprint log would be scored by the wrong rules, and a log started here writes BARTGRTTYS into the contest name, which N1MM would read as the sprint.

Digital modes. A contact can be logged as RTTY or another digital mode, and the contest rules score it, but there is no digital window: no decoding, no transmitting, no interface to fldigi, MMTTY or similar.

Contest coverage. Twenty-five families are built in, plus whatever .udc files are in the user-defined folder. N1MM ships well over a hundred. Opening a log from a contest that is in neither place fails with the contest name, which is the right answer but it is still a wall.

Most of what is missing does not need code. A contest whose exchange is a report and one value, scored by band, mode, continent or country, and counted by country, zone, section or prefix, is a .udc file, and the file published for N1MM is read as it is. Code is for the ones .udc has no words for: WAE needs QTC traffic, IOTA needs island references as multipliers, and CQ WW RTTY needed a third multiplier and its own points table because it shares a name with the CW and SSB running of the contest.

.udc settings that are still passed over. MultiplierBands and QsoErrorString, which are about the windows rather than the score. GenericPrintString, which is the layout of a printed log rather than a Cabrillo one.

MultWindowType is read as far as the score goes: it names the list a section multiplier is checked against. Four of N1MM's lists are held here — the ARRL sections, the US states, the Canadian provinces and the OK/OM districts — and a file naming any of the hundred-odd others falls back to counting any exchange that is not all digits.

CabrilloString and CabrilloVersion are read: a contest whose sponsor asks for its own columns gets them, in N1MM's shape — the operator's callsign in the first 13 columns, then every column padded to the width the file gives with one space after it, and a value longer than its column cut rather than pushed. The numbered CabrilloFormat layouts 2, 3, 4 and 5 — the NAQP, NA Sprint, Sweepstakes and section-and-serial lines — are read as well, in N1MM's columns. The exchange those layouts split into columns is built from the boxes the file defines, in the order it defines them; N1MM builds it from the section box alone, which writes only half of a two-box exchange. Layout 6, the ARRL RTTY Roundup line, is not read, and a file asking for it gets the default line; no published .udc file asks for it, because the Roundup has a contest class of its own. CabrilloFormat = 0 means the sponsor takes no Cabrillo log at all, and nothing here stops the operator writing one.

N1MM's .udc format has no way to say that the exchange itself differs by the other station's country. OK/OM DX is written in code for that reason — it asks a county from OK and OM stations and a serial number from everyone else — and Contest.SkipsField steps over the box that does not apply. REF, ARRL 10M, the Ukrainian DX contest and the Russian DX RTTY contest ask their exchange the same way, and are written in code for the same reason.

Every contest in the station's own logs can now be opened, and its 78 contest instances score contact for contact as N1MM did apart from the cases below.

What still differs, and why:

• The EU DX Contest is written from N1MM's own class. The station's logs were made with the EU_DXC.udc file instead, which scores a contact inside your own country 1 point where the class scores 2, and counts a district code once in the contest where the class counts it once per band.
• Field Day Region 1: every contact in that log holds 1 point and no multiplier, which is not what N1MM's own class works out, so the log looks like it was never scored. The rules here follow the class: 5 points for a portable station, 2 for one in Region 1 at home and 3 from outside it.
• SA 10 and OK/OM DX on SSB are not written in code at all: both are published as .udc files, and with those files in the user-defined contests folder the station's logs score to the contact. N1MM's OK/OM DX class is the CW running only and says so; the SSB running has different rules and its own pair of files, one for each side of the contest.
• Two OK/OM DX contacts whose district code was stored with a trailing space. N1MM checks the code against its list without trimming it, finds nothing and counts no multiplier; the code is trimmed here and counts. Both contacts are the same station in the 2026 log.

Known rough edges

The band plan covers 160M to 2M only. 60M and everything above 2M get no CW, digital or phone shading on the bandmap, because N1MM's own numbers for those bands contradict themselves — its CW top for 1.25M is below its phone start, and its 70CM CW top is above the band. Config ▸ Sub bands cannot add a band that has no default.

Available mults and Qs is only as good as the bandmap. It lists what is spotted, so a multiplier nobody has spotted is not there. N1MM's window also shows the mults a contest has and nobody has worked, which needs a list of every multiplier the contest counts. Only the section and state lists are held here, so the zone and country lists would have to come from the country file first.

Two entry windows and one keyer. The SO2R box is told which radio to key before each message, but nothing stops both radios sending at once if the operator asks them to.