Reaction tuning? Huh?

[Sojourn]

Been playing around with the "reaction tune" feature that the ICOM R20 has when paired with the Optoelectronics Scout. It works through the headphone jack, and so far it does fine with the tuning. Whenever the Scout picks up a new freq, the r20 goes right to it.

Except something's plugged into the headphone jack. So there's no sound.

Now, this would make marginally more sense if it could drop that new frequency into a memory channel (so that you could at least have a reference of what you picked up, while using the recording feature to capture the audio), but it doesn't appear to do that. And one could fashion a splitter that would let you attach a earpiece to the radio, or, alternately, keep the main speaker running by jumpering the gap that putting the plug in creates, but both of those have major tradeoffs, obviously. So, basically, without a great amount of sacrifice, it seems like you have a radio that you can watch while it tunes. And that's interesting for about five seconds.

Am I missing something, anyone?

Thanks.

 

[SCPD]

It works through the headphone jack, and so far it does fine with the tuning.

I don't have an R20 so I don't really know but I thought the CI/V port (for computer control) was separate from the headphone jack.

 

[Sojourn]

Unfortunately, no. They are the same port. And this is more than distanced speculation on this problem, too. I've seen firsthand that it really does kill the speaker.

Using one port maybe makes sense if you're, say, cloning the radio and so won't need its radio functions at the time. Saves space. But it's a definitely problem here.

 

[SCPD]

Unfortunately, no. They are the same port.

Y cable adapter perhaps? Is this a two-wire or three wire (eg. stereo) plug inside the radio?

If not, this sounds ripe for a custom mod to split the two.

 

[mancow]

There was a diagram floating around on the web that dealt with this. I think it was on a site created by a guy that is an Icom fan. he showed how he made a custom cable that routed both the audio and control out of the radio simultaneously. I'll see if I can find it.


This is the page I was thinking of: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/tony.ling/radio/ic-r20/R20um22.htm

 

[Sojourn]

It's doable: three wire mini going into the icom has the audio on the tip, the data receive on the center ring, and the ground on the outside. I had to fab a cross-wired cable to a two wire micro that is what the sniffer uses. So, like you said, that could be replaced with a Y cable (or simply a splitter module placed in between). I've looked into that, but that's still a sacrifice of an ear opening if it ever gets used. I'm putting this together for a friend, and he'd like to be able to have the audio out in the open if he wants.

I suppose what I might have to do is get him a battery powered speaker that he attaches to the output. It's annoying, but I suppose it will work.

Here's another website about building the cables:

http://www.dk3hv.com/Scanner/IC-R20/ic-r20.html

But more importantly. Does anyone know whether I can configure the reaction tuning to drop a channel into memory whenever it tunes? See, with that, at least, I could make it work by keeping the record feature on the icom on vox, and then corss referencing it with the channels.