OK ... not sure where to start here, but it's all tied up with the same problem
I think.

hex2bin produces a binary character string, but I'm not sure that it can be
stored into a character field in php driver as that seems to baulk at a '00'
character, while PHP doesn't? What I would like to be able to do is simply store
the 8 byte string as a BIGINT but I'm not sure how to handle that.

Moving on from that, with the BLOB fields set at sub_type 1 the same problem
seems to apply. The application has a built in compress option using gzcompress,
but the PHP driver can't handle it. SO in that case should I switch to using
sub_type 0 and how does that affect just putting normal text in the same field?
Of cause what may also be getting in the way here is that the database is set
for UTF8 text strings and compressed data is not going to be valid :)

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Lester Caine - G8HFL
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