Quantar 101:
Introduction to Wildcard programming.
If you are going to attempt to utilize Quantar wildcard functions you
must first arm yourself with the necessary manuals. A good starting
point is the Station Instruction Manual, 6881095E05. There are two
sections in this manual that are of particular interest.
In the section behind the Station Backplane tab you will find the
pinouts of the connectors. Connector 14 [6809/MRTI - 25 pin] can be
used for many things such as a phone patch, link radio, or external
controller.
Connector 17 is the big one, 50 pins, and has duplicates of the wire
line connections [RX and TX audio] as well as the I/O's. Wildcard
I/O's are part of the I/O's on this connector and include transistor
buffered inputs and outputs, opto-isolated inputs and relay contact
outputs. The circuitry for these wildcard I/O's exists on the
wireline interface board, hence you must have a wireline board in the
station if you want to use wildcard functions.
The 4-wire wireline contains enough I/O's to support the Basic
wildcard functionality. The 8-wire board supports more I/O's and
the Enhanced wildcard functionality. It should be noted that very
early station firmware [e.g. circa 1995] does not support wildcard.
Some of the I/O's are dedicated; most are 'soft' - their functions
being determined by station programming.
Some of the programmable I/O's are assigned predetermined functions
such as RD Stat [essentially COR] and external PTT in the default
station codeplug [default = as shipped for conventional operation]
These default functions are described in the System Applications
section of the instruction manual. You should study this section
thoroughly as a starting point to understanding how to use the
station's I/O and wildcard capabilities. This section also gives some
examples of how to make changes to the wildcard programming.
Beyond that you will need the Quantar RSS User's Guide, 6881085E35.
This is where you will find an explanation of how to set up the
wildcard programming. Wildcard programming involves the creation
of State / Action Tables
States can be driven by input pins. There are also many internal
station states such as CUR CHN, RX PL DETECT, or MCS USER.
Likewise, Actions can control an output or they can be such station
controls as CHN, MUTE TX, or REPEATER KNOCKDOWN
Essentially the Quantar wildcard programming is a sort of internal
computer language capable of Boolean operations. Very powerful. If
you understand computer programming even a little, it's easy to make
the Quantar stand up and do tricks. If not - well the whole wildcard
thing will be very confusing.
The state / action tables are where the functions of the inputs and
outputs are detemined. For example, the default EXT PTT table
configures a certain input pin. The action for the active state of
that pin is defined as key from WL and the inaction is defined
as dekey from WL
Input and output pins can be configured individually or in groups
[where pins are assigned binary weighted bits]. Event flags can be
set and reset to allow passing status from one table to another, etc.
What you can accomplish with the Quantar wildcard programming is
pretty much limited only by your immagination
--- In Repeater-Builder@yahoogroups.com, Brian [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Which connector is used?
Do you have a list of pin functions?
Thanx!
Brian
