CI-V Scout

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 and CI-V Parameters
• CI-V Command Builder and Macro Editor
• Output Window

Serial Port and CI-V Parameters section

The serial port and CI-V 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 probably already seen many times in other applications. The CI-V parameters control the period of time before a sent command times out (Time out), how many times a command will be retried before a failure is reported (Retries), and how long to wait between sending multiple commands (Pacing). Pacing mainly impacts sending multiple CI-V commands within a macro.

Once you have entered the parameters the Connect button will initiate communications with the device. If the device has CI-V transceive mode enabled you should see data appear in the output window when you change settings such as frequency or mode on the device. The Disconnect 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" toolbar button. The other option is to send the command you just built to the macro window using the Add To Macro toolbar button.

Macro Editor

The macro editor allow you to build a sequence of commands and send them all to the radio one after another one. You can use the command builder to create the commands, or can type them into the window directly. You can also include comments, which are preceeded by the '#' character. The program will validate the format of the macro commands prior to sending the commands to the CI-V device. You can also validate the commands at any time using the checkmark toolbar button.

Output Window

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. The toolbar has options to save the data to a file or the clipboard as either text or tab separated values. It also has filter buttons that let you determine which message types will be displayed in the output 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

certUtil -hashfile <PATH_TO_FILE> SHA256