This page contains some tools I've built for controlling the xcat board. An xcat board is a serially controllable replacement memory module for the Syntor X. The xcat speaks CI-V, Doug Hall and Palomar control protocols. Installing an xcat not only makes it easier to load code plugs, but makes your Syntor X radio into a frequency-agile machine. The xcat board was developed by Skip, WB6YMH, and Lee, K7KAJ.

Xcatctl is a unix style control package for the xcat board. It provides a command line interface to the CI-V support in the xcat. The package includes the control program proper, as well as code plug loader and saver tools which use the control program to transfer hex code plugs into or out of the xcat. Code plugs could be generated using my syntorxgen package, for example, or could be saved from one xcat and loaded into several others as a form of cloning. Additionally, the package contains a monitor program which listens for messages from the xcat indicating change of state of the radio's COS. The monitor provides a way to pass commands through to the xcat while it is running.

Xcatctl is intended to be reasonably portable. The program is developed on Debian Linux machines, and has also built on FreeBSD. Other ports will likely occur in the future. It is built using standard GNU tools, and I have attempted to use POSIX interfaces as much as possible.

Note that trying to use cosmon on Windows is a crapshoot; newer versions of the OS may provide better support for things like the select() call on serial devices, and ptys. Or not. YMMV.

This is not well-tested code. There were serious problems with cosmon in v0.9 which I believe were fixed in v0.91.

Note that these binary packages do include both documentation and binaries, unlike the way I've been packaging syntorxgen.

The current source code (v0.93) is available.

A Linux binary package in .tar.gz format (v0.93) is available. This was built on Debian Linux (sid), but will hopefully run on other variants without major problems.

A FreeBSD binary package in .tar.gz format (v0.93) is available. This was built on FreeBSD 7.2.

A Mac OS X binary package in .tar.gz format (v0.93) is available. This was built on OS X 10.3.9.

A Windows binary package in .zip format (v0.93) is available. This was built using Cygwin.

Oops! The needed cygwin1.dll file is missing from the Windows version. Download it from here and place it in the directory with the other xcatctl files.

The documentation for xcatctl, loadplug, saveplug, and cosmon is available.

• For more information on the xcat board, see the xcat yahoo group.

• For other Syntor X related material by KB8ZQZ, including my syntorxgen package, see my Syntor X miscellany page.