[Premium-Rx] RF-590H remote control

[Eugene Hertz]

Hello everyone.

I am starting a project to try to remotely control my harris rf-590H. So I began going through lots of literature on the subject. I discovered that the "H" has a different remote control assembly (a17) than the non-H version and the jumpers and dip switch positions are different.  A few interesting things I found.

1. The "standard" config as stated by the manual (and corroborated by my H's configuration) is for the data out (TX out) is set to RS232. However, the data in (RX in) is defaulted to RS-422?!  Does anyone understand that rationale behind making Tx rs232 and Rx rs422? Not knowing if the 422 on the Rx was backward compatible to RS232, I decided to change the Rx jumper to also be rs232 in the hopes that my experimentation might be easier! 

2. The default "standard" baud rate is 4800.  If one were to try to look up the dip switches for the baud rate using the standard non-H manual, it will look like 300 baud!

3. As many of you know, all the harris line can be control with a "binary" sort of message format.  This format includes CRCs and other things that will be fun (sic) to program.  This format requires HDCP "packets" (to borrow a phrase) with HRRCP payloads that contain the actual command or response. Both of these are binary format messages.

Later harris equipment also supported a pure ascii command set.  According to the ascii command manual, it requires U5 on the A14 (control board) to have firmware version 208C or above.  Unfortunately, my radio has 202C.  The ASCII manual says that if an earlier version than 208C is present in U5, that it can simply be replaced with 208C or above.  

In my harris, there are three proms, U19, U6 and U5 all of which have version 202C on them.  So some questions to the group:

1. The ascii command manual says only U5 must be 208C or greater, it does not mention the other proms. Does anyone have any reason to believe that all 3 must be the same version?

2. Does anyone have a U5 (pn 10151-8001) that is version 208C or greater that they can spare? And does anyone have any reason to believe that this would not work on the "H" version? Also, does anyone forsee that any damage could be done by trying to put a 208C into U5 on a 590H?

3. Does anyone know what the functions of U19, U5 and U6 are? Perhaps for example, if U5 is only concerned with remote communication, than there might be little risk of causing problems. However, if someone knew that U5 was communication and *say* synthesiser control, then maybe it is not such a good idea. 

I would be very interested in any information or experimental results already acheived. I should mention that this is as far as I have gotten on my project which is not far at all! I really don't (yet) know more than this--although I have a pretty good understanding of both the ascii command structure and the HDCP/HRRCP protocols and hope my programming skills are up to the task, Hi!

In any case, I thought the group might be interested in this or might have some information.

thanks!
Eugene