CI-V Scout KB3HHA - Seth Cohen

What is CI-V Scout

CI-V Scout was designed to allow you to build CI-V commands and send them to a CI-V capable device over a serial connection. The program displays the responses returned by the device. When the device has CI-V transceive mode enabled it will "broadcast" CI-V data on the serial port as you operate the front panel controls. CI-V Scout will display this data as well.

I created CI-V Scout for educational purposes and to learn more about sending and receiving CI-V data. It is not intended to be a fully functional rig control application but more of a tool to help understand and explore CI-V communications.

How do I use it?

When you run CI-V Scout it will display the main window, which looks like this:

All of CI-V Scout's functions are accessed on this main application window.

The window is divided into three sections. These sections are:

Serial port parameters
CI-V command builder
Received CI-V data

Serial Port Parameters section

The serial port parameters section is where you enter the communication parameters for the serial connection to the device. The settings are the standard serial port parameters that you have already seen many times in other applications. Once you have entered the parameters the Start button will initiate communications with the device. If the device has CI-V transceive mode enabled you should see data appear in the received CI-V data section of the main window when you change setting such as frequency or mode on the device. The Stop button will close the serial port connection to the device.

Command Builder section

The CI-V command builder was designed to assist you in building CI-V commands to send to the device. However it does require some degree of familiarity with the CI-V data format. All of the numeric values are displayed as hexadecimal to more closely match ICOM's documentation. The builder provides fields for the source and destination addresses. You can supply a value for the command and any optional subcommand. If the command requires data you can enter that as well. If you do not have a subcommand or data you can leave those parts of the builder empty and they will not be included in the resulting command.

To use the subcommand and data builders you enter a value and then press the right arrow to add it to the builder. You can reorder the values in the builder using the up and down arrows. The X button will delete the selected value in the builder. The builder displays the resulting command at the bottom of the builder section as you build it. Once you have completed building your command you can send it to the device using the "Send" button.

Received CI-V Data section

As data is received it will be displayed in the bottom portion of the main window. If echo is enabled in the device's internal settings you should also see the commands that you send to the device displayed in this part of the main window.

Tutorial

For a short tutorial on how to build a CI-V command using CI-V Scout, see my article titled CI-V Scout - A Quick Tutorial on my articles page

Important Note

It has come to my attention that other web sites are hosting copies of this software. I always recommend downloading software directly from the original publisher (this site). In order to ensure you are using an unmodified copy of this software I am posting a checksum of the most recent version. This will permit you to confirm that your copy of the software is unmodified from the original posted here.

To confirm the checksum you can use the Windows certutil command in either Windows CMD or PowerShell like this:

certUtil -hashfile <PATH_TO_FILE> SHA256

where PATH_TO_FILE is the path to "CI-VScoutSetup.msi"

The SHA256 checksum for the most recent version of "CI-VScoutSetup.msi" is b4ae81a6e2fdfdaa251ee519887d17d6d5f5ec0c3ade8dc0a8a51f33497d9c5d

Release Notes for 1.0.12.0 (Mar. 16, 2021)

Added macro editing window.

Download CI-V Scout

You can download CI-V Scout here.

Online Virus Scanner

I have submitted this application to an online virus scanner and will continue to do so for each new release. You can view the results of this scan using the link below.