Amplifiers and Switches

Amplifiers and Switches

Amplifiers

Settings → Amplifier is a list: configure several amps (e.g. two SPEs run in parallel), each with its own name and connection. Brands:

• SPE Expert (1.3K / 1.5K / 2K) — USB serial or an RS232-to-Ethernet bridge. OPERATE/STANDBY, ON/OFF, Low/Mid/High power level, live status. Switching the amplifier on and off uses the remote-on control lines, so it needs the USB (or RS-232) connection, not a network bridge — the ON button works even while the amplifier is off and reporting nothing.
• ACOM (500S / 600S / 700S / 1200S / 2020S) — serial or bridge. OPERATE/STANDBY/OFF, live power / SWR / PA temperature / band / fan. Power-ON works over serial when the cable wires the DTR/RTS pins.
• PowerGenius XL (4O3A) — direct TCP. Operate/Standby, fault display, and a fan-mode selector (Standard / Contest / Broadcast).

Where the controls appear:

• An amplifier card in the FlexRadio panel and in Station Control: OPERATE/STANDBY, ON/OFF, power level, output-power bar and live FWD / drain-current / temperature meters. Several amps → one card each.
• A status chip per amp in the bottom bar: green ON AIR = OPERATE, orange = STANDBY, red = offline. Clicking it toggles OPERATE/STANDBY.
• A docked widget (flame icon, next to the keyers): Operate, power ON/OFF, the SPE power level and live watts / SWR / temperature, in the narrow column format of the Tuner Genius widget. With several amplifiers configured, a dropdown on the icon picks which one it shows — or All.

Two amplifiers on one combiner

Tick the ones that share a combiner, and ON, OFF and OPERATE act on all of them at once. That is the point: one left in STANDBY would be feeding power into a single input of the combiner. An amplifier left unticked keeps its own buttons, and every amplifier keeps its own meters either way.

Reaching a PowerGenius XL remotely

The password field is PowerGenius XL only, and only needed from outside the local network: the amplifier then announces AUTH and rejects every command with Unauthorized until you log in. Leave it blank on the LAN.

Band-follow (amp on a second COM port)

An ACOM or SPE that normally polls the radio for its frequency can follow OpsLog instead: OpsLog answers the amp's polls as a Kenwood rig on a second COM port (Settings → Amplifier → frequency port). Useful when the real radio's CAT port is already taken by OpsLog itself.

Set the amplifier to the Kenwood command set (set 5 on an ACOM) at the same baud rate, and put it in OPERATE — in standby it acknowledges but does not change band.

• An amplifier that polls (ACOM) needs nothing more.
• One that only listens to the radio's CAT line hears nothing unless you also switch on the unprompted send.

An Elecraft KPA instead takes the band number on the link already open, with no second serial port at all. Turn that off if the amplifier is wired straight to the radio and takes its band from there.

Powering an amplifier on through a network bridge

Switching on drives the amplifier's remote-on input. Over a serial-to-network bridge, OpsLog drops and redials the connection, which takes the bridge's RTS/DTR lines down and back up — so it works if the bridge drives those lines from the TCP connection, as ser2net does by default. The log says whether the amplifier answered.

Tuner Genius XL (4O3A)

Settings → Tuner Genius (IP only; port fixed at 9010). Live SWR and forward power with peak-hold, Tune / Bypass / Operate-Standby, and the two channels A/B (source, frequency, antenna) shown and click-selectable. Available as a docked widget, a card in the FlexRadio panel and a card in Station Control. Direct TCP — uses one of the box's connection slots.

Antenna Genius (4O3A) antenna switch

Over TCP / GSCP — a docked A/B antenna-switch widget:

• One row per configured antenna, with a Port A and Port B button.
• Colours: green = selected on port A, blue = selected on port B, red (pulsing) = that port is transmitting. Clicking a selected port deselects it (→ None).
• Band filter (funnel icon): shows only the antennas configured for the current band. Antennas with an unknown band mask are always shown.

Configure the host / password in Settings → Antenna Genius.

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Relay boards (Station Control)

Relay boards for antenna/accessory switching, with named buttons in Station Control:

• WebSwitch 1216H (5 relays, LAN) and KMTronic 8-relay WEB (LAN, with optional HTTP authentication).
• Dingtian IOT relay (2 to 32 relays, LAN or WiFi), driven over its HTTP CGI. Give its IP address and pick the relay count; the relay password and session ID fields are only needed if you enabled them on the board's own web page — a factory board needs neither.
• Denkovi USB (4/8 relays, FT245). Driven over FTDI bit-bang, not the COM port — so you pick the board's serial number (e.g. DAE0006K), not a port, and the FTDI D2XX driver has to be installed. It will show a COM port anyway; that port is not the way in.
• Generic CH340 / LCUS USB-serial boards, using the A0 command protocol. If yours does not switch, send the model and its command set.
• HTTP relay (home-made / generic) — see below.

Reaching a board from outside the house

For a LAN board, Host is just its IP. To reach it from elsewhere, put a full URL there instead — https://relay.yourdomain.com — pointing at a reverse proxy (Nginx Proxy Manager or similar) that fronts the board's HTTP port.

That changes what the "accept an unverifiable certificate" option is for:

• A board on your own network signs its own certificate, which nothing can verify — so the option has to be on for it to work at all.
• A board reached over the internet through a proxy has a real certificate, and checking it is exactly what protects the link. Leave the option off there.

HTTP relay (home-made / generic)

For any box that switches on a plain HTTP GET: an ESP8266 with a web page, a Shelly, a Sonoff on third-party firmware, a qro.cz board, a home-brew switch. Pick the relay count, name the relays, and give the addresses.

There is no Host field and no connection test. This device type has no address of its own — each relay carries its own full URL, and they need not even be on the same box. Nothing is read back either: OpsLog remembers what it commanded, so after a restart each managed relay is re-commanded once.

Two ways to give the addresses, and you can mix them.

A — one URL per relay. The reason this type exists: a hand-made switch often has addresses with nothing in common between channels.

Relay	ON URL	OFF URL
1	http://192.168.1.9/FF0101	http://192.168.1.9/FF0100
2	http://192.168.1.9/relay2/on	http://192.168.1.9/relay2/off

B — one pattern for the whole board, with the relay number filled in:

ON  pattern:  http://192.168.1.9/relay?n={relay}&state=on
OFF pattern:  http://192.168.1.9/relay?n={relay}&state=off

Substitutions

In a URL or a pattern	Becomes
{relay}	the relay number, 1-based
{relay-1}	the relay number counting from zero — for boards whose channels are 0, 1, 2…
{value}	that relay's label, from the Relay labels row below

http may be left off — it is assumed. https works and is used as typed.

{value} is for a switch addressed by antenna name rather than by channel number. Name relay 1 Ant1, and:

Per-relay ON URL for relay 1:   http://10.10.10.100/relay?on={value}
Sent:                           http://10.10.10.100/relay?on=Ant1

Rename the antenna and the address follows it — the name on the button and the name on the wire cannot drift apart, because they are the same text. A label with a space or an accent is percent-encoded automatically. A relay whose URL uses {value} must have a label; the editor warns you while you type.

A per-relay URL always wins over the pattern, so you can write a pattern for the seven ordinary channels and one full URL for the odd one out.

Manual switching

Every relay is a button in Station Control — click to toggle. The generic HTTP board is never greyed out (there is no connection to wait for); the other types are enabled once the board answers.

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Relay automatic control

Settings → Relay automatic control turns relays by frequency or band, the equivalent of PstRotator's automatic control. Each relay of each configured board gets a rule:

Mode	Meaning
Off	OpsLog never touches this relay.
Band	ON while the current band is one of the bands you tick.
Frequency	ON while the frequency is inside a kHz range you type.

Example — a three-way antenna switch on a KMTronic board:

Relay	Label	Mode	Setting
1	Beam 20-10	Band	20m, 17m, 15m, 12m, 10m
2	40 m dipole	Band	40m
3	80 m inverted-V	Band	80m, 160m
4	6 m preamp	Frequency	50000 – 54000 kHz

Rules to know:

• A relay is only switched when it is not already in the wanted position. On the first evaluation after launch OpsLog reads the boards' live state, so a relay already correct is left alone rather than clunking.
• An unknown frequency or band changes nothing. When CAT disconnects the frequency reads zero, and treating that as "out of range" would switch every relay off.
• The rules follow your radio. Changing band in the QSO entry strip drives the rig, the rig reports back, and the relays follow. Without a CAT connection the Band selector itself is the band change, and the relays follow that instead — unless the band or frequency 🔒 is on, which means the entry is deliberately decoupled from the rig (logging an old contact) and no hardware should move.

For a switch driven by a URL or a UDP message rather than by a relay board, see Connections.

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Bench power supply

Settings → Power supply. A programmable supply on a serial port speaking Modbus RTU — BSIDE, Wanptek and the other supplies that use function codes 03 and 06.

Give the COM port. The other two fields are the factory settings and only need changing if you changed them on the supply: 9600 baud, Modbus address 1 (8 data bits, no parity, 1 stop bit).

A card appears in Station Control: an Output on/off button, the measured volts / amps / watts, and — in small type — the voltage and current the supply is set to. That pairing is the useful part: 13.80 V set beside 0.020 A says at a glance that the supply is on and the radio is drawing nothing.

OpsLog only ever writes the output on/off. The supply's register map also exposes the voltage and current set points and the three protection trip levels, and none of them belong to a logbook — a wrong value there is 30 V where a radio expected 13.8. They are read and displayed, never changed. Set them on the supply's own front panel.

If the protection has tripped, the card says so with the supply's status word.

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Station Control

The Station Control tab is a dashboard of fixed-width panels that wrap to fill the window — amplifier(s), tuner, relays, rotator, power supply, Ultrabeam… Drag a panel by the grip on its left edge to reorder; the order is remembered. A column-count selector (Auto / 1–6) caps how many sit side by side.