Troubleshooting
Failure to connect to radio
When you start KComm and click Connect, nothing happens and the status bar shows "Connecting...". The program does not connect to your radio. It is not frozen and may be closed in the normal way using the Close (X) button.
Failure to connect may be caused by one of the following reasons:
- The wrong Port has been selected in the Radio Control settings.
- The Port is correct, but it is already being used by another program. (In this case, you will normally see a "Cannot open serial port" message.)
- The wrong Speed (baud rate) has been selected in the Radio Control settings. Confirm that it matches the selection made in the K3 Configuration menu. (K2s can only communicate at 4800 baud.)
- Data corruption is occurring and the program is not receiving the responses it expects from the radio.
Troubleshooting communication
KComm has a debug option that lets you see the messages that are sent to and from the radio. If you suspect that data is being corrupted, check the Debug Window option in the Radio Control settings and then click Connect. The Communications Trace window will open.
If you are using a K3 and communication is working normally, you should see the following:
KComm sends a "PS;" command to the radio when it first connects, and expects to receive "PS1;" in acknowledgement. When this is received, the status bar changes to "Connected". If the "PS1;" is not received then no further communication is attempted.
You can also try to test communication by typing commands such as "PS;" or "FA;" to see if a response occurs. Changing the frequency using the tuning knob, or changing band or mode should produce an "IF...;" reply.
Note: To make it easier to see the responses to specific commands, KComm disables polling by default when the trace window is opened. Therefore the S meter is not updated and certain other status conditions are not reported in the user interface unless you deselect the "Disable polling" option.
Tip: If you experience a communications failure, correct a configuration error, and KComm and your radio still won't talk, turn off the radio, reboot the computer and turn the radio back on again. It appears that some communications errors can put the serial port or radio in state where it won't respond even after the configuration has been corrected. Restarting everything will resolve that.
KComm fails with "Access denied" after installation
One user found that KComm failed to start, giving an "Access denied" error message. It was found that a file named kcomm was present in the \Documents and Settings\<user>\Application Data folder, which was causing an error when KComm tried to create its own application data folder of this name. We have no idea how this file came to be created, but if it should occur again, the solution is to delete the file and then manually create a folder named \Documents and Settings\<user>\Application Data\KComm.
Some text captions are truncated
KComm was designed using Windows XP theme, standard fonts. In some other Windows themes (including Vista), and some Linux configurations the standard fonts are larger and may not fit the space available. One solution would have been to make the whole application larger, but I do not have a big enough screen. Therefore the solution I adopted was to provide an option to change the font under Settings, Misc. By picking a smaller or narrower font you should be able to get all the captions to fit.
Unable to decode Morse using the built-in decoder
The built-in sound card Morse decoder is quite fussy about the sound card level, and also requires the Morse signal to be tuned in exactly on the red line in the waterfall. Currently the K3 text decoder works much better, as does Fldigi.