ACOM® USERS

by James Michener K9JM

June 1, 2015

Many amateurs have experienced problems with the Acom® when connected to ICOM® CI-V interface. There are two problems:

1. The Acom® electrical interface supplies too much pull up current, so that other devices cannot properly drive the CI-V bus. For details read detailed description on ICOM® CI-V electrical interface.

2. The Acom® controller uses an ICOM® address of 0xE0, and sends commands to the radio, including polling of frequency, as well as changing mode and placing the radio into transmit. These message can cause collisions on the CI-V bus, as well as causing PC control programs, that all use the ICOM® address of 0xE0 to get confused.

To aid with these problems, the K9JM CI-V router provides

1. The ability to sink ten times the nominal current to electrically drive the ICOM CI-V interface.

2. The ability to do ICOM® address translation, so as long as there are not two ICOM® devices with the same address on each port, the router will do an address translation as route messages to correct ICOM® address and port.

Note: ICOM® address translation feature was added in software version 1.11 in June of 2015

The ACOM CI-V only runs at a baud rate of 19200.  You will need to change the CI-V baudrate in your configuration, and make sure that the radio and PW-1 are synced at the new baud rate.