KB6NU's Ham Radio Blog

KB6NU's Ham Radio Blog

Not1MM

Not1MM now working on my Linux box!

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Not1MM logoA year ago, I reported that I had converted my shack computer to Linux and that I had gotten most of the software I wanted running on it. The one thorn in my side, if you will, was the not1mm contest logging program.

The problem was that the process did not support a critical feature that the Qt build that the not1mm developer, Mike, K6TGE, used. Mike tried his best to help, but it didn’t look like there was a solution.

A couple months ago, Mike reopened the discusssion. He wrote:

Hello @kb6nu. I don’t know if this a completely dead issue for you or not but…

I’ve built a flatpak of the program, and there’s a very very small chance that the Qt libraries in the flatpak’s runtime may be compiled with different optimizations which may possibly have a minuscule chance of working with your older processor.

Well, guess what? It actually did work. When I first installed the flatpak, I got an error message that I did have the right KDE platform or some such installed (sorry, I didn’t copy the exact error message). After a little searching, though, I discovered how to install the correct version. Once I did that, the app ran just fine.

Of course, that was only part of the challenge. The next part was getting the program to talk to the radio. I had managed to get QLog to talk to my IC-7610, but that was months ago, and I didn’t remember how I’d done it. I fooled around with the configuration settings, but couldn’t get them communicating.

Fortunately, for me, the solution was in the very next discussion on the not1mm github: “not1MM, CW and IC-7300: newb #698.” In that discussion, the poster asked:

I would really love to use not1mm on my Linux system for CW contests only, rather than dual boot into Win10 for N1MM. The logging aspect works just fine. However, I find the documnetation to get CW working confusing as well as rig control to change bands ( I do not have a winkeyer). I can see the ports just fine in /dev but that’s as far as I have got.

To which, Mike replied:

Use rigctld for CAT control. After configuring rigctld to connect to your 7300, have not1mm to connect to the rigctld daemon for CAT control. Once CAT control is working, change the CW configurations keying method to CAT. And you should be good to go.

I hadn’t read the fine manual, and being a Linux newbie—especially with ham radio software—I didn’t think about configuring and running rigctld. So, it was back to the internet to figure out how to do that. I found a webpage that included a command for connecting an IC-7300 to rigctld (which I can’t seem to find now that I’m writing about it). As Linux commands tend to be, this was a multiple line command:

/usr/bin/rigctld -m 1028 -r /dev/ttyUSB0 -t 4532 -s 38400 –set-conf=data_bits=8,stop_bits=1,serial_parity=None,serial_handshake=None,dtr_state=OFF,rts_state=ON -vvvvv

I tried that, but failed to get a connection. So, I figured that I had to play around with the options and called up the rigctld man page.

-m sets the model number, and 1028 is the number for the IC-7300. Fortunately, rigctld has a command that will list the other radios it supports, so I was able to easily figure out that the number for the IC-7610 was 3078. I guess that 38400 was the baud rate and set that to 115200, which is the speed that I have my radio set to. That made the command:

rigctld -m 3078 -r /dev/ttyUSB0 -t 4532 -s 115200 –set-conf=data_bits=8,stop_bits=1,serial_parity=None,serial_handshake=None,dtr_state=OFF,rts_state=ON -vvvvv

That worked! Not only does not1mm now get information from the radio, such as frequency and mode, but I can also send CW from the program.

As a test, I used it last night when operating as W1AW/8. It took a bit of getting used to some of the controls (such as the auto CQ repeat timer), but I’m very happy now that I have a good Linux contest logger up and running. Thanks again, Mike!

 

 

Converting the shack computer to Linux, Part 3: Not1MM, WFView, and FLdigi

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This is the third installment of my adventure converting my shack computer to Linux. Click below to read the other installments:

Not1MM is a no-go

Yesterday, the first program that I attempted to install on my Linux Mint computer was Not1MM. As reported in the comments section of Part 2, Not1MM doesn’t seem to want to run on this computer. It installs just fine, but when I try to run it, I get the error message, “Incompatible processor. The Qt build requires the following features: sse4.2 popcnt.”

I swapped some email and toots on Mastodon with K6TGE, Not1MM’s author, but it looks like I’m just out of luck. As Mike, VE9KK, wrote:

Unfortunately there is no software fix for SSE4.2 (streaming SIMD ext 4.2) or POPCNT (population count instruction). From my research is seems your CPU is to old and Not1MM will run on it. I have read that you can look for older versions of Not1MM and see if they will run but then you are limited to that version. If you want to upgrade the PC then you should be good to go. From online searching it seems Intel i5/i7 4th gen or AMD 3/5 or 7 series.

Oh well….This computer was a refurb when I bought it five or six years ago. Perhaps it is time to upgrade the hardware. And getting something with a solid-state drive (SSD) should make everything run much faster as well.

wfview, Fldigi

Last night, I installed two new programs—WFView and FLdigi. I installed both with Linux Mint’s Software Manager. The installation process was easy-peezy, as you might expect.

Screen shot of WFView controlling an IC-7610
WFView provides a very nice set of controls for the IC-7610. You can do pretty much everything with this screen that you can do on the radio.iew 

wfview is free and open source software that allows you to control modern Icom and Kenwood ham radios. The operating screen, shown above, allows you to do pretty much anything that you can do via the IC-7610’s front panel. One feature that I really like is the drop-down menu for the bandscope span. On the radio, you have to keep pressing the SPAN button until you get the span you want. With wfview, you just select it from the drop-down menu.

The bandscope doesn’t look as good as it does on the radio, but that’s OK. And, you can tell that there’s some lag between the display on the radio and on the computer. I would guess that if I did upgrade the hardware, the display would be a little less laggy.

Fldigi is software that allows you to operate a number of digital modes, including  DominoEX, MFSK16, PSK31, and RTTY. I didn’t have a chance to configure and play with Fldigi, but I’d expect it to work OK.

One odd thing that I noticed after installing wfview and Fldigi is that QLog stopped talking to the radio. “Here we go again,” I thought. The first thing that I did was to quit and restart QLog. QLog would fetch the correct frequency and mode from the IC-7610 when it started up, but then seemed to disconnect from the radio.

Next, I tried rebooting the operating system and got the same results. After the reboot, QLog would fetch the correct frequency and mode from the IC-7610, but then disconnect from the radio.

Finally, I decided to run “sudo apt update.” This command updated some things and then said something like, “There are some packages which can be upgraded.” I ran “sudo apt upgrade,” and the computer upgraded some stuff. After that, QLog stayed connected to the radio, so I was happy about that. And, the updates and upgrades didn’t seem to affect either wfview or Fldigi.