To create a new device driver, the first step is to give the driver a name. The device drivers supplied by SatService GmbH all follow a 2 part naming scheme: VendorName-ModelDescription. A SatService ACU2 antenna control unit appears as SatService-ACU2 in the device driver list. This makes it easy for the person who configures the equipment setup of a MNC system to select the appropriate device drivers.
The name of the device driver appears at several places:
info.type. The online help function and the device preset directory selection of the user interface depend on this definition. Chapter Info variables gives more information about this.The COMMENT statement
The text following the COMMENT statement is free field and principally may contain any information. The device drivers coming with the sat-nms software all follow a convention which defines the comment string as
Driver-name X.YY YYMMDD
where X is the major version number of the driver, YY the minor version number and YYMMDD the release date of this driver version. It is recommended that customer defined device driver follow this scheme, too.
The comment statement in fact creates a hidden info-variable definition. This variable with the name info.driver is initialized with the comment text. At the Info-page of the device oriented user interface you can view the comment text or the driver name /version / date respectively.
Example
COMMENT "NDSatCom-KuBand-Upconverter 1.03 010809"This example, taken from NDSatCom-KuBand-Upconverter device driver, identifies this driver as version 1.03, released at August, 9th, 2001.