This week, I turned again to FLDIGI, a great piece of software for what are, these days, sadly underused but very capable weak signal 'ragchew' digital modes.
For modes like HELL, OLIVIA, DOMINO and so on, the choice of software is very limited - you can choose FLDIGI, fairly easy to understand, MULTI-PSK, which very much isn't, and HRD's Digital Master-780, which I've never really found very intuitive, either.
So, the aim was to get proper CAT control under FLDIGI. This is important for challenges and contests, so that the frequency is recorded accurately in the log. It also speeds things up.
Now, you can of course use FLDIGI without CAT control, as I did for very many years with OLIVIA.
But you have to load an associated piece of software - FLRIG - in order to achieve CAT control.
When I read about this - which was not very well highlighted anywhere - the advice was to make FLRIG - the CAT program - run automatically when FLRIG was started, which is simply done by checking a box in the configuration settings of FLDIGI.
On first doing this, everything worked just fine.
Then I switched off, only to find it wouldn't work the next time I switched on!
After lots of changing things around, I had to ask the FLDIGI user group, which is actually very helpful and quick to respond to problems.
So, here's what I eventually learned:
(1) FLDIGI works with proper CAT control when you manually start FLRIG first, and then start FLDIGI. VFO changes are properly reflected in software and rig in both directions.
(2) If you select 'autorun' for FLRIG under FLDIGI's configuration, then CAT will generally not work. I have no idea why, but it's not really important, because (1) works fine every time.
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