FLRig quirks

I've had a busy morning, and the shed batteries have taken a hiding. They're now down under 12v and it's a miserable looking day so I doubt that'll improve much. 

I started out firmware upgrading the G90. It was a long way behind and I'd heard the current version allowed remote access to the ATU. 

I fought with the head separation cable for a while because it threw comms faults a few times, but eventually all worked as expected.

Then I had to fight again with how the G90 handles ALC. For FT8, you want it cranked to just under 100. On anything else, you don't want it at all. There was a bit of fiddling to get this to behave, and most of it was simply the volume control and something I hadn't discovered about the power output setting in FLRig. 

FLRig however still didn't enable the tuner function.

Eventually, I upgraded from 1.4.2 to 1.4.5. Success. I now see the Tune button. 

But then some new annoyances:

- When opening, it always defaults to 14.270MHz. Somewhere I don't want to be.

- It defaults to 1w power. 

- I can't get it to save and remember what I set it to. 

- The SWR meter is way off kilt. As I send FT8, you can see the power and SWR rising. The power goes up to the 10w I actually manually set it to, but the SWR doesn't reflect what the radio's meter is telling me. It should be around 1.3 at most, instead it's heading past 3.0

Huh?

That makes little sense. EDIT: This only seems to happen on 40m. 15m shows me what I expect.

The old version didn't seem to have this problem. 

That's quite frustrating. I've gone from possibly not having the tuner kick in after I change bands to being able to enable it to do its job, but not actually being able to ensure that it's doing its job.

A quick Google finds me someone who'd mentioned this in the -devel branch of the software in 2021.  There's no acknowledgement of it. 

I think I'm certainly closer to being able to get to complete remote control, but I'm not quite there yet. Still, if I can jump between 40m and 15m and have the tuner actually work, that'll be enough for that rig. 15m isn't so much a concern as it's quite resonant there, but 40m.. not enough.

Anyway, today is a bit of a real test for the power setup in that shed. I've had a radio and PC running all night on top of the cameras. I ran the heater and the inverter for a while this morning. The radio and PC will be on all day. It's miserable looking. I've probably had the radio keyed for a total of 30 minutes. 

It looks like the batteries are back over 12v, so that's a nice start. I won't get a lot of time to play today. Current load is 22.99w, which is fine and well within what I anticipate regular load to be like. 

On that note, I changed my monitoring yesterday. 

I was using the eBox-WIFI-01 box from EPever to interface my controller and it was becoming unreliable. 

I had it set to STA mode so it connected to my Wifi and from there I was running an application to connect to it and create a virtual comm port. I started getting periods where it went offline. 

Given that the device was in a shed a few metres from the access point, I thought that perhaps there might be certain atmospheric things causing the shed to become more like a Faraday cage, which is what prompted me to run CAT5 to the shed and bring in the access point to test the theory. 

Complicating things - the wireless bridge I had running with an old router stopped working around the same time, so the idea seemed to have merit. 

Then of course, moving the access point had limited impact. The wireless bridge didn't work properly again, resulting in my hooking up a switch linked off the access point's secondary port, allowing me to get the cameras back on the air for the time being. 

The Solar WIFI interface however went from working for a couple of days to straight out refusing to connect. 

It's a problematic issue from that point - in STA mode, there's no direct way to see what it's doing if it won't connect. I reset it a few times and get it back to its default "Access Point" mode, that requires connecting to it locally then configuring it through a web interface. No matter how many times I reconfigured it, it wouldn't reconnect to my WIFI network. 

I wound up ordering an EPever-WIFI-2.4G-RJ45-A box, which once setup allowed me to hook it directly into EPever's cloud monitoring service. Connectivity through their website seems to fail, but their app works. It's slow at times, but it's better than nothing. 

I've since discovered that they also have a TCP server option that allows direct cable connectivity. I suspect this might be a future option if it starts to get flaky.