CI-V Scout - A Quick Tutorial

CI-V Scout - A Quick Tutorial

This article will give a very short tutorial on how to use the CI-V Scout command builder to send a command to a CI-V capable radio. The command I will use for this tutorial is the "set operating frequency" command since some variant of it is probably available in any CI-V capable radio. The radio I am using for this tutorial is an ICOM IC-7300. The frequency data format may be different for your radio.

The first thing you must do when you run CI-V Scout is to set the serial port parameters for connecting to your radio. This will depend on your particular hardware configuration. At a minimum you will need to select the port and baud rate. The COM port must be the serial port that your computer uses to communicate with your radio. The baud rate must match the baud rate set in your radio settings. Once you have entered all of the appropriate settings press the "Start" button to initiate serial communications with your radio. If your radio's CI-V communications have Transceive enabled, turning the main tuning knob should cause data to appear in the lower section of the CI-V Scout window.

Once you have confirmed that communications with the radio are working you can build the command to set the operating frequency. For the source address we will use the default address of E0. The destination address must be the CI-V address of your radio. In the case of the IC7300 the default address is 94, so I enter that for the destination address. If your radio is not an ICOM IC7300 the address will be different. You will need to check with the documentation for your radio or check the settings in the radio's menu to determine the correct address.

According to the documentation for the IC7300 the command to set the operating frequency has a value of 05, so I enter that value for the command. In this case there is no sub-command so that field must be left blank. The data field requires a bit more description.

The IC7300 documentation shows the format for operating frequency as follows:

IC7300 Operating Frequency Format

Byte 1		Byte 2		Byte 3		Byte 4		Byte 5
X	X	X	X	X	X	X	X	0	0
10 Hz digit	1 Hz digit	1 KHz digit	100 Hz digit	100 KHz digit	10 KHz digit	10 MHz digit	1 MHz digit	1000 MHz digit	100 MHz digit

Note: Your radio may use a different format for representing the frequency. Check the documentation for your radio model for more details.

If we want to set the frequency to 14.175 MHz, we would need to send the data sequence 00 50 17 14 00. You will need to enter those values in the data builder in that specific order for the radio to be able to process them. Once you have entered all of that your window should look like this:

Now press the send button. If everything is entered correctly and the radio and computer are communicating properly the operating frequency will change to 14.175 MHz.

Congratulations on building the command and have fun.