Talk to 3dr/Sik radio via ftdi port and terminal?

I bought some 915 telemetry modules for Pixhawk from an rcgroups user. I don’t yet have a pixhawk to test them with but figured I should be able to at least talk to them with an FTDI cable on the MAC or over usb to serial terminal.

What I have found is that I can’t seem to get any output from them until I first go into APM Planner 2.0 and under 3dr radio do a “load”. I can then quit APM go over to the terminal, open the port and talk like shown below. If I power them down I again can’t talk to them until going back into APM first. Basically, what is APM doing to initialize these things into a command mode? I saw something about +++ but tried than and did nothing. Ultimately I’d like to test these with an Arduino sending out a count and the receiver hooked up to simple program on the mac receiving. Not sure if I can do that without disabling the mavlink frame stuff but thinking I should. Anyways, any help you can give me to help me understand what these things are doing when they come up would be very much appreciated. Need to go find more docs and read them I guess.

Here is the output from ATI5 for example after having “initialized” so to speak the receiver in APM Planner:

SiK 1.9 on HM-TRP
ATI5
S0:FORMAT=25
S1:SERIAL_SPEED=57
S2:AIR_SPEED=64
S3:NETID=25
S4:TXPOWER=20
S5:ECC=1
S6:MAVLINK=1
S7:OPPRESEND=1
S8:MIN_FREQ=915000
S9:MAX_FREQ=928000
S10:NUM_CHANNELS=50
S11:DUTY_CYCLE=100
S12:LBT_RSSI=0
S13:MANCHESTER=0
S14:RTSCTS=0
S15:MAX_WINDOW=131

Doh! Never mind. Guess you have to hit “+++” and then wait a second before doing anything else to get into command mode. Guess that works. Now to go play. :slight_smile: Cool.