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@fsfe.org (0xE9846C49).
Thanks, Iain.
-- e: irl@fsfe.org w: iain.learmonth.me x: irl@jabber.fsfe.org t: EPVPN 2105 c: 2M0STB g: IO87we p: 1F72 607C 5FF2 CCD5 3F01 600D 56FF 9EA4 E984 6C49