Amateur radio geekery
I was fairly good this weekend, did lots of little chores. I was going to work on that Linux installation puzzle for work, but I didn't. Too bad. Today I finally got around to trying to bring up the various ham radio tools I use on the DEC Alpha. I installed it under the radio desk over a year ago with that intention, so I could get rid of the cables running from my desktop machine over to it, and free up the serial and sound ports on the desktop.
I expected to encounter all sorts of obstacles. After all, even though I'm running Debian on the Alpha, it's a very different CPU with totally different machine language. To my surprise, almost all the programs I normally use for ham radio on Linux were available already packaged for the Alpha and in the Debian archives.
The two toughest ones, fldigi and echolinux, are not there though. I now have fldigi up and running. It wasn't hard, I just had to install all the dependencies myself and then compile the software from source. No glitches, it compiled without error or warning, and seems to be running normally. This is a newer version than what I had, so there are new features and modes, even.
Alas, I'm not sure the same will be true of echolinux. While fldigi is a user interface for keyboard modes ranging from old fashioned RTTY (radioteletype) to some of the newest such as Olivia, and uses the sound card to send and receive encoded signals through a standard SSB transmitter, the echolinux program is a VoIP application (similar to Skype, for those of you who aren't hams) that transmits digital voice over the internet and the radio spectrum. Like the authors of fldigi, the programmers who created echolinux make no claims that their code will work other than on an IBM-Intel architecture. If they've written it all in C and other high level languages, there's a chance, though. I haven't looked at the source yet, so I don't know myself.
Cut to spare the uninterested. I have now installed and tried out the following. All are working.
I expected to encounter all sorts of obstacles. After all, even though I'm running Debian on the Alpha, it's a very different CPU with totally different machine language. To my surprise, almost all the programs I normally use for ham radio on Linux were available already packaged for the Alpha and in the Debian archives.
The two toughest ones, fldigi and echolinux, are not there though. I now have fldigi up and running. It wasn't hard, I just had to install all the dependencies myself and then compile the software from source. No glitches, it compiled without error or warning, and seems to be running normally. This is a newer version than what I had, so there are new features and modes, even.
Alas, I'm not sure the same will be true of echolinux. While fldigi is a user interface for keyboard modes ranging from old fashioned RTTY (radioteletype) to some of the newest such as Olivia, and uses the sound card to send and receive encoded signals through a standard SSB transmitter, the echolinux program is a VoIP application (similar to Skype, for those of you who aren't hams) that transmits digital voice over the internet and the radio spectrum. Like the authors of fldigi, the programmers who created echolinux make no claims that their code will work other than on an IBM-Intel architecture. If they've written it all in C and other high level languages, there's a chance, though. I haven't looked at the source yet, so I don't know myself.
Cut to spare the uninterested. I have now installed and tried out the following. All are working.
- libhamlib - library of routines used by many ham programs
- grig - desktop controller for amateur radio transceivers
- rigctl - another similar control program, called by some other programs
- gpsk31 - Program specifically designed for PSK31 mode
- xdx - DX Cluster logging program, good as any for windows
- colordx - another DX cluster program, works in text mode
- fldigi - Single interface for dozens of digital modes, RTTY and CW up to the latest Olivia
- xlog - logging program, similar to logger for windoze