I spent quite a long while working with Kenwood UK
fighting for
working KISS mode. I bought a Mk I D7E and TX didn't
work at all
in KISS mode (it would transmit utter garbage). I
complained to
Kenwood UK that one of their authorised dealers told
me that
KISS mode would work and it didn't. Kenwood told me
that sales
were down across Europe as many Europeans use DAMA
from KISS
mode so they were working on a Mk II where it would be
fixed.
Beta 1 of the MkII rig arrived at my house for testing. I
found
a bug straght away (sending a KISS frame down the
serial port to
it while it was uploading one to the PC locked it up, quite
obviously a silly interrupt handling bug). Sent back with
a note
and about 3 weeks later a garbled message came back
from KW-UK
saying that KW-JP agreed but it hadn't shown up with
light
1200bps use (I was hammering it on 9600 IP).
Beta 2 arrived with garbled verbal instructions KW-UK
that
KW-JP told them it "couldn't do binary in KISS mode".
Huh?
But surely the point is....
So I tested it. Sure enough plaintext AX.25 connections
worked
in KISS mode but IP packets with certain
characters/sequences
in broke the TNC and locked it up. I complained that
this was
no good. After some more toing and froing through KW-
UK to
KW-JP I got a kind of garbled message that it was the
best
that they could do, and that the TNC firmware couldn't be
fixed anymore due to code size (apparently the
firmware on
the D7 is in 1 ROM and the D700 uses 2 ROMS so has
full
functionality).
KW released the MKII to Europe and the KISS is still
broken.
Worse still, to fit in the broken KISS code they've
REMOVED
TRANSparent mode so now you can't even do binary
xfer when
not in KISS mode!!!
A year after purchase and after a lot of messing around
Kenwood finall upgraded my firmware to MKII (required
them to
solder on a new masked PROM! Duh! Can't believe it's
not
flash!), and I then sold mine a few weeks later.
Summary: D7E can't and will never do KISS properly.
During all my dealings with KW, I got a sneak preview of
the D700 and they asked me to test KISS on that to
stop the
same thing happening. I can say that the D700 worked
faultlessly in KISS mode.
73 de Jason
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Wed May 23 2001 - 17:46:39 EEST