[Elecraft] K3 Remote VFO tuning control

[Iain Kelly]

All,

I only caught this thread partway through, and the recent Digest emails 
have been quite lengthy so I don't even know who was asking originally. 
However I do have my own solution to this problem.

I originally wanted something to be able to fire off the DVR without 
using a contest logger, currently Win-Test and the LUA scripts 
available. Sadly for the local RSGB VHF contests I use another program 
that doesn't have rig control. I found a program called K-Keys by KE3C 
which allows up to 10 macros to be defined and assigned to keyboard 
short-cuts.

I then found KTune by G4ILO and that got me thinking about an off-board 
controller for tuning and custom macros. I came across the ShuttlePROv2 
which is a video-editing tool and has a jog wheel, fast-fwd and rev 
control and a number of buttons. These actions can all be assigned to 
keystrokes in the driver application. However, I found that although 
KTune worked well with this, K-Keys wasn't able to pick up the keystrokes.

The ShuttlePRO is definitely generating the correct keys, so I had a 
problem after having spent £70 on the controller. A friend of mine 
suggested I ought to write something myself using AutoIt - a windows 
scripting tool. Based on an example file and a DLL someone had written 
for it I managed to cobble together an application that sits in the 
background and controls the K3 nicely through LP_Bridge.

I've implemented most of the macros I want to do, mode switching, amp 
control and message memories as well as variable rate tuning and jog 
wheel for VFO A and stepped tuning of VFOB and automatic 2kHz CW split. 
I am planning on making the SSB mode change smart by reading the 
frequency from the rig and setting LSB and USB depending on the answer. 
I also want to make the 'split' intelligent for CW and SSB as well. I'm 
also thinking about adding in a GUI to configure the macros and com port 
settings, but I'm not able to promise I can do that any time soon as the 
program is working for me as it stands.

I'm not a software engineer, the settings etc are all hard coded, but I 
was able to generate an executable that I have in my start-up folder. I 
only wrote it on Sunday 6th Jan so it's not finished but certainly 
working in I guess an alpha test.

If anyone would like a look at the script I can send it to them, I've 
not had chance to get it onto my website yet (www.m0pcb.co.uk) but 
hoping to do that today. I am not really willing to release it as a 
working program yet as it's very much a prototype at the moment.

If anyone is interested it might be best to talk off-line as I often 
don't get chance to read through the daily digest emails in much detail 
and I may miss things.

73, Iain M0PCB