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
13 KiB
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, started and stopped through XMMT.ocx |
no sound card, so nothing has been decoded or transmitted and no rx or tx line has come from a real signal. No FSK through EXTFSK, no PTT on a serial port, and 2Tone has never been run. 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 pump keeps two characters in the engine and counts character times off the clock at the baud rate in the digital settings to work out when the engine has room for the next one. Two characters is what stops the engine running dry between characters, which would make it transmit idle and add that idle to the time the message takes; the price is that the last two characters cannot be taken back. The estimate is corrected when the engine reports that it has stopped transmitting, which means its buffer is empty.
The engine can be asked instead of estimated: XMMT.ocx has a TxBufLen
property, and a probe against the control shows it answers, though what it
answers while a message is going out could not be measured here because the
engine will not start. Reporting it from the bridge would make the red text
exact and would take out the one error the estimate can still make: a baud rate
that does not match what the engine transmits at leaves a small gap between
characters near the end of a long message.
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.udcfile 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
.udcfiles, 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.