[chirp_devel] #551 Add support for iC-7000 banks

[Dean Gibson AE7Q]

Well, as I posted in the "issues" system, the CI-V testing tools were 
useful in figuring out how to access banks B-E (hexadecimal):

E0 70 1A 00 0x 00 yy

Where "x" is the bank number, and "yy" (packed decimal) is the memory 
location.

That's the good news.  The bad news is that I found a package called 
RumTool7000 (Windows, Linux, Mac) that works (and supports the five 
banks) seamlessly for me (has very good .CSV file import/export), so my 
need to spend significant development effort on this issue is near zero.

That having been said, just like with the my effort on the ID-51 (where 
I also had a good alternate software solution), I would be glad to 
assist in testing any work done on this issue.  It's just that there are 
Chirp architectural issues (support multiple banks with multiple tabs 
???) that need to be decided/coded by someone other than me.  Given that 
the existing Chirp code already supports one bank, I'd think the need 
for any further radio investigation would be near zero.

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By the way, I connect to the serial ports of all my radios (Icom and 
Yaesu) not via a serial cable from my PC, but via Ethernet to a remote 
Digi (www.digi.com) "PortServer TS4" 4-port Ethernet-to-serial converter 
(there are 1, 2, 4, and 8 port versions).  In my case the network 
connection is local, but there is no reason that the connection cannot 
be via the Internet.  Digi provides free software that works on 7 
variants of Windows (32 and 64 bit) and over 50 variants of Linux.

For Windows, it's a clean driver install and configuration;  for Linux, 
you build the daemon from the source.  I had trepidation about the 
latter, but it built and installed with just two "RPM" commands (I think 
it's five commands if you download the tarball package), and 
configuration was trivial.  Chirp, RumTool7000, HamRadioDeluxe, all the 
Icom software, and even the above CI-V testing tool works across the 
network.

This would be a very useful tool for you to have for remote testing.  I 
obtained two of them (plus a similar Digi Ethernet-to-USB converter) on 
eBay for about $50 each.  Mine are used regularly, and are not for loan.

So, while I don't think this project needs a remote developer to access 
my IC-7000, if necessary, I could "port-forward" such remote access to 
the PortServer if needed.  Actually, it would be an interesting thing to 
try.

Sincerely, Dean

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ps: Most of my access to my radios is on Windows 7 (64-bit), but for my 
Icom ID-880H radios at my home, I wanted several radio features that 
required GPS data to be sent to the radio:

 1. The radio's internal log of transmissions received, now get timestamps.
 2. The radio displays the time.
 3. The radio is able to transmit its "GPS" location to other D-Star
    radios, and they can capture my location and display the distance
    and direction to me.
 4. Similarly, my ID-880H radios can capture the GPS locations of other
    radios and display the distance and direction to them.

So, I wrote a 4-line bash script and an absolutely trivial NMEA checksum 
program, and a Linux CRON job sends NMEA data to the radios once a 
minute.  This low serial bandwidth overhead allows other programs on my 
Windows box to easily capture the serial port when needed.

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