[chirp_devel] receive-only channels?

[Dan Smith]

> Thanks, Dan. I will look at forcing the "off". (As a newbie Ham, it did not even occur to me that "duplex==off" must meand "TX disabled".)

It's not the best of names, obviously, but like everything else it came about because one driver wanted to support it and engineering/respecting a new boolean would have been a lot more work. In reality the duplex field is "What do I do when I transmit?"

> I will run the tests and see what happens, and patch the test code to make it work. I think you will want to review any changes I make to the test code very carefully before accepting them.

Thanks for being willing to try that. The test code needs a major overhaul, and I have plans to do that, but ... you know how that goes.

> With respect to the MARS/CAP mod: It appears that this basically turns the FT-4XR or FT-4 XE into the "Asian" version, which  in effect removes the regulatory restriction and lets you use the radio's entire UHF and VHF capability. A user could then select the "Asian" version if they mod the radio.

Do note that with other Yaesus, once you make that mod, they identify themselves on the serial line as a different model.

> That was going to be my next question. I propose to add two new radios: FT-4XE and FT-4(Asian).
> Since I don't understand the aliasing scheme, I intended to subclass the FT-4 class and modify only the frequencies (and the step size), so the number of lines of code is truly tiny. However, this will add these radio names to the list of Yaesu radios as full top-level peers, not aliases or something. Is this acceptable?

Aliases are purely a shortcut to make one driver show up under two names (like MANY of the chinese radios). If you want anything at all to be different (other than VENDOR and MODEL), you want a subclass.

--Dan