I had been having some issues with SATPC32 and my iCOM IC-9700.  Whenever I was running SATPC32 and RS-44 was active, for some reason if I used the rig’s VFO knob to tune around the passband, it would sometimes caused the Doppler adjustments to stop working.  All the other satellites were just fine.

I went back to the recommended settings from the SATPC32 documentation and discovered I was twice their recommended baud rate.  So I lowered things to 57600 baud.  On my first test, that seemed to fix the problem with RS-44.

However, I also use that radio with WinLink and VARA FM.  I knew that I was using CAT for PTT, so I needed to drop the baud rate down on that as well.  Imagine my surprise at finding that 57600 baud didn’t exist as a valid value.

The fix was simple; change from PTT CAT control to COM control.  I used the same COM port as I had used for CAT control (COM4 in my case), and selected the PTT pin as RTS.  That worked just fine.

I run a WinLink VHF Gateway using VARA FM (WB4SON-10 on 145.050).  It is incredibly stable, except when Windows forces an update (even though I have Auto Updates disabled, apparently some updates are so critical they overrides that setting).  Sometimes that will take down the gateway until I complete the update.  The last time that happened, I took an opportunity to update VARA FM as well, and that resulted in a system that would no longer connect.  It turns out the latest version of VARA FM (4.3.5) decided to uncheck the TCP settings box.  That was pretty obvious, and within a couple of minutes the gateway was back up and running.

I hadn’t run my WinLink HF setup since January, and figured I would make sure everything was updated as well, bringing VARA HF up to version 4.8.5.  Sure enough, there was a problem with this update as well – my rig was no longer going into transmit, and both the input and output soundcard settings had changed.  The soundcard was easy to fix, but the lack of transmit wasn’t so obvious (I had set it up years ago and it just worked every time).  It turned out that I had to add a value to the PTT Port (Optional) Selection, which I did.  That restored everything to proper operation.

Bottom line, a simple software update can sure mess stuff up.  Always test after updating!