KB6NU's Ham Radio Blog

KB6NU's Ham Radio Blog

wfview

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.

Playing around with wfview

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Back when I had an IC-7300, one of the things I lamented is that the display wasn’t bigger. I had heard about wfview, which is open-source software designed to control modern Icom radios, but I never did get around to installing it.

Screenshot of the wfview window. Click to see a larger version.

Then, I purchased a Flex 6400. As far as computer display and control, the Flex is wonderful. You can make the display as big as you want, and all the most commonly-used controls are readily available.

I missed having real knobs and buttons, though, so a couple of months ago, I got a good deal on an Icom IC-7610. I’m an Icom fanboy from way back, but there are some things about computer control that I miss, so I decided to finally download and install wfview.

The download and application install went swimmingly. Getting the program settings correct wasn’t quite so easy, however. For some reason, I just couldn’t seem to get wfview to talk to my radio over the LAN connection. I think that there were a couple reasons for this:

  • wfview was originally written to control IC-7300s over the USB port.
  • The document could be a little more explicit.
  • Operator error (namely me)

Let me give you an example. On the Getting Started page, it says to “Enter the [6] username as set on the radio,” where [6] is a text box labelled “Username.” What the documentation doesn’t say is that what you should type into this box is the value that’s entered as “Network User1 Name” on the radio.

What really tripped me up is figuring out the IP address of the radio. In the wfview forum topic IC-7610 Connect Over LAN, I was asked what my radio’s IP address was and if I could ping it from my computer. To make a long story short, the radio’s IP address is found on the radio under Settings -> Network -> DHCP. I suppose that this is a logical assumption, but it just didn’t occur to me.

So anyway, after fiddling with it for a couple of hours probably, and enlisting the help of a friend of mine who knows more about networking than I do, I finally got it running. I do like being able to make the display bigger than the display on the radio. I also like the ability to set some parameters by just clicking. For example, it’s nice to be able to select the displayed frequency span by just selecting from a drop-down menu, rather than cycling through the options by pressing a button on the front panel. For the most part, though, I’m not sure that it offers users much, if you’re going to run it on the shack computer.

Where I do think it will come in handy is on my MacBook laptop. I installed it on the laptop, and was easily able to access the computer via WiFi. Now, I can operate the radio from my deck on a nice summer day.

Unfortunately, I can’t seem to operate CW, though. One of wfview’s features is what they call the CW sender. Unfortunately, the CW sender isn’t quite as finished as the rest of the software, and this limits its usefulness. Apparently, it’s prone to crashing. I did get it to send QRL?, but then it wouldn’t send CQ for me. I’m looking forward to the next release, which is supposed to fix these bugs and add some cool CW operating features.