Self Introduction: Iain R. Learmonth

Leif Asbrink leif at sm5bsz.com
Sun Apr 5 22:58:07 EDT 2015


Hello Iain,

Packages for radio amateurs - or maybe for radio enthusiasts like
shortwave listeners, NDB-hunters, FM-DXers, ... is a natural
part of Linux since these groups have a reasonable number of
people interested in experimenting with new things.

I am the developer of Linrad, a multi-OS package (originally 
Linux only) that provides a SDR (software defined radio) that
can be used with a large number of hardware. I do not know
what might be required for a software to be acceptable to become
a package in Fedora (or Debian) and my feeling is that Linrad
might not be acceptable today. I am however working on making it
independent of other packages by having libraries loaded at run-time.
This means that Linrad would always work, but if the user asks 
for some particular hardware, there would be an error message 
telling what package to install to get access to the hardware.
Many such packages have to be installed from source, but some of
them are in the repos of the main Linux distros.

Linrad has a reputation of being difficult to install, which is
utterly false! Using it properly is non-trivial however since the user 
needs some knowledge of radio although many seem to think they need
computing skils.

At the moment I am working on the transmit side. The Linrad speech
processor runs with a delay of about 50ms from microphone to
antenna and then there is about 20 ms from antenna to loudspeaker.
The total is less than 100 ms which makes it possible to use single 
frequency duplex, "listen between words" in ssb mode.

Another line of development is by Jürgen Kahrs who is developing
software to move FFT computations to OpenCL to use GPUs for
faster processing.

You can read about linrad here (and find a link to videos)
http://www.sm5bsz.com/linuxdsp/linrad.htm

There is a repo. Download like this:
svn checkout https://svn.code.sf.net/p/linrad/code/trunk linrad

In case you think Linrad could qualify for a Fedora package,
please tell me what might be necessary to change. Today
Linrad comes in several flavours: linrad, xlinrad, flinrad,
linrad64, xlinrad64, flinrad64 and clinrad. This will be changed.
In a longer time-scale there is no need to support 32 bit code 
on 64 bit platforms. The three different flavours for each 
platform will be merged to a single program with a user option
to select what kind of screen he wants (x11, svgalib or fbdev)
to the extent they are available. This means there would be just one
executable - although different on different platforms like
clinrad which currently works with X11 only on the platform where
it was compiled with cmake.

Dear Iain, if you find the Linrad project interesting and if you
or someone you know is interested in helping to make it fit to
become a Fedora (or Debian or whatever) package, please have
a look at the repo and tell me what would have to be done.

leif




 



> Hi,
> 
> I understand that as a prospective package maintainer for Fedora I'm
> encouraged to send an email to introduce myself to devel. As I plan to be
> working on amateur radio software, I've copied the fedora-hams mailing list
> too.
> 
> I've been contributing to Debian as a packager, amongst other things, since
> January 2014. I am involved in the Debian Hamradio Maintainers team and you
> can see a list of the packages I've worked on here:
> 
>   https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=irl%40fsfe.org
> 
> I am also working on a Debian Hamradio Blend. Blends in Debian are based
> entirely on packages that exist in Debian and aim to provide easy methods of
> getting the right software, and configuring it, to perform certain tasks.
> This concept seems similar to the Fedora Spins concept. More information
> about the Debian Hamradio Blend can be found here:
> 
>   http://blends.debian.org/hamradio/
> 
> While there are a couple of packages I have plans to package for Fedora, I
> think my main contribution to Fedora will be through collaboration the the
> Fedora Amateur Radio SIG, sharing information about bugs and patches,
> discovering new software to package and working to resolve upstream issues.
> 
> I have packaged pyqso, a logging tool for radio amateurs, and have submitted
> this for review. If you have some time, I would appreciate it if you could
> take a look.
> 
>   https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1209054
> 
> I am in #fedora-hams on Freenode (nick is irl) if you would like to contact
> me. You can also email me at irl at fsfe.org (0xE9846C49).
> 
> Thanks,
> Iain.
> 
> -- 
> e: irl at fsfe.org            w: iain.learmonth.me
> x: irl at jabber.fsfe.org     t: EPVPN 2105
> c: 2M0STB                  g: IO87we
> p: 1F72 607C 5FF2 CCD5 3F01 600D 56FF 9EA4 E984 6C49



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