This document will quickly get you up and running with IDM. If you haven't already, please download and install the IDM on your system.
When you first launch the IDM, you will see the Start Page. This page contains links to documentation (including this page) and other resources. It is occasionally updated with new release information.
We can open a file of logged messages via File->Open Log File and load the logs/mixed.dat file. This file holds a handful of messages from the various access technologies supported.
The format of the log file is nothing special. It's just a text file with one hex ASCII message per line. You can also copy and paste these ASCII hex messages into the IDM.
If you inspect the messages carefully, you will see there is some extra data in the begining of each message. This is a special header, or Out-of-Band data. It must be prepended to your messages in order for the IDM to decode them properly.
The header contains information such as the technology, channel, etc. It also may contain optional information such as the message timestamp.
A detailed description of this header format is described in our online Interface Control Document.
By default, this Out-of-Band data is not shown in the mesage decode. But you can turn it on as well as make other customizations via the View->Preferences dialogue:
Getting the IDM to display your protocol messages is simply a matter of preceding them with the correct out-of-band data.
The next thing we want do is get your data to the IDM. Open up the connection dialog via the Connection/Preferences... menu item.
The default behavior is for the IDM to listen on port 50,000 for UDP packets. When a packet arrives, the IDM treats the contents as one message to be decoded. The contents may be interpreted as binary or ASCII hex.
You may also configure the IDM to monitor a file. In this case, you can append messages to a file and the IDM will read them as they appear.
Pressing the space bar or clicking the connection tool bar button
will start a session.
This will be indicated by a time stamp appearing in the left pane, the
Session window. This will cause the IDM to start listening to the port you
configured above. If you press the space bar again, you will stop the
session, and the IDM will stop listening.
Now its up to you to send messages to the IDM, one message per packet, as we configured above. The xmit tool comes in handy for this purpose. It is a tool included in the distribution that transmits messages from the command line or from a file to the IDM an a specific port.
Once you are sending message to the IDM, you will see them appear in the sessions.
