I recently had an enquiry from Nick N8SDR asking if it was possible to offer a modified version of our popular Digimode-4 interface which would work alongside the excellent CSN Technologies S.A.T. antenna tracker.

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Nick was using the Icom IC-9100 transceiver which has the legacy Icom CI-V port, built in USB sound card and additional USB UART for CAT control. The radios USB functionality is provided via a USB Type-B socket on the rear of the radio.

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The problem that Nick was having was that the SAT tracker required a dedicated connection to his IC-9100's
legacy CI-V port to walk the frequency of the radio during satellite passes and he was not happy with the performance of the PTT keying features via the IC-9100s USB COM port and its built-in sound card.

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So his enquiry was, could we provide an interface with a higher performance sound card than the one built into the radio and had the ability to PTT key the radio via the accessory port PTT line rather than the USB COM port.

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But its use alongside the CSN SAT Tracker was not the only requirement. Nick enquired if the interface would be compatible with SoundModem by UZ7HO.

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But this got me thinking.

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If the Icom can select the CAT control from either the legacy CI-V port which the CSN SAT unit was using or via the built-in USB UART (via the IC-9100 menus) then one of our current interfaces would give added flexibility to Icom users.

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