Product specifications

UT-4500-A Series Upconverters Revision 0
Appendix A MN-UT4500A
A–5
A.5.6 Bus Inactivity Requirement
Comtech EF Data recommends that a minimum of 50 milliseconds bus inactivity be provided by
the user between the receipt of a response from an addressed converter and issuing the next
command on the serial bus.
A.6 Message Structure
The structure of a Command, Response, or Error Message is as follows:
! Start Character
! Device Address
! Command or Response
! End of Message String
A.6.1 Start Character
The Start Character begins each message:
Example: < Start of a user Command.
> Start of a converter response.
A.6.2 Device Address
The Device Address consists of a Physical Address or a Physical Address and an appended
Virtual Address. For this document DEV is used for the generic case examples.
Example: <3V12
A.6.3 Command
A Command is a variable length character string beginning with a forward slash “/”’ and
containing either an instruction or an instruction and data for a converter to act upon. If data is
passed by command it is appended to the instruction by an underscore “_”. If data is retrieved by
command underscore follows the instruction flagging the converter to supply data in a response.
Note: In this appendix, “/COM” is used for the generic case examples.
Example: <DEV/COM_xxx'cr' (Sends data to a converter.)
Example: <DEV/COM_'cr' (Requests information from a converter.)