Announce: experimental CAT/DAX clients for Linux

Andrew Rodland

Hi all,

I'd like to announce the creation of some early-stage, "works for me" implementations of CAT and DAX for Linux (and potentially other systems, including BSD, OSX, and even Windows, but I have no intention of competing with the existing apps on OSX and Windows). They're written in Go, and tentatively the apps are called nCAT and nDAX, and the library is simply "flexclient". nCAT supports the hamlib network protocol (rigctl model 2), and nDAX interfaces with PulseAudio. That works for the majority of Linux ham apps. Only SmartSDR v3 protocol is supported and I have no intention to go back and support the older versions.

This is some pretty early-stage stuff — I've been working on them for just over a week, since I got my 6400 — but I've made QSOs with it using wsjtx, fldigi, and qsstv, as well as using the CAT support during WPX weekend so that my logger (tlf) knew which band/frequency I was on, and it's worked through all of that.

CAT caveats:

• No discovery yet — you'd better know your radio's IP address.
• No SmartLink yet, only local network.
• If you power down your radio or the network drops, the app will crash and you'll have to re-launch it.
• Only about 5-10% of the hamlib protocol is implemented so far (set/get frequency, set/get mode, set/get PTT, TUNER, and RFPOWER. TUNER maps to the TUNE button, not the ATU button; I haven't figured out how I want to support both within the hamlib protocol yet, and my Flex doesn't have an ATU
• Only a single hamlib VFO is supported so far — no split mode, and no mapping different slices to VFOA and VFOB.
• Like the official CAT, it connects to an existing SmartSDR/Maestro/M GUI session and controls that session's slices. In the future I would like to make a "headless" mode that uses up one of the radio's GUI slots and allows doing digi stuff without the need for a GUI client, but I'm not there yet.

Most of this should improve in the future, it's just a lot of work!

DAX caveats:

• No discovery yet.
• No SmartLink yet.
• It will crash if you power down the radio or the network drops.
• Only a single slice is supported so far (you can run multiple instances for multiple slices, though).
• It doesn't create the PulseAudio devices by itself yet (you need to know what "pacmd load-module module-null-sink" means).
• It will always be streaming audio both ways regardless of whether any clients have the audio devices open.
• Right now it's opening a pipe to "pacat" instead of using a proper Go PulseAudio client... you will need that installed on your system and findable in PATH.
• I'm not *completely* sure what's going on with levels and the correct range of the float32 samples. Most of the time, passing things through unmodified to PulseAudio seems correct, but then sometimes qsstv's transmit levels are incredibly low. Is anyone aware of any documentation from FlexRadio that says what to expect when it comes to DAX audio?

All that said... it works for me, and I thought it was time to share, to let the adventurous start playing with it, and to welcome any contributions, suggestions, or fixes.

nCAT: https://github.com/arodland/nCAT
nDAX: https://github.com/arodland/nDAX
flexclient library: https://github.com/arodland/flexclient

- Andrew KC2G

N0AW - Jeremy

Yes!

- N0AW

Mark_WS7M

Go get 'em JT

HB9EDM - Marco

Andrew! thks for your work! I will follow your progress with interest.

Best 73
HB9EDMarco

Andrew Rodland

Updates since 3 weeks ago:

• nCAT and nDAX both support LAN discovery now. You can simply connect to the first radio found (fine for most people who only have one Flex on their network!) or specify it by nickname or serial number or whatever.
• nCAT got one new command (the "RF" level controls AGC-T), and several bugfixes that improve compatibility with various clients. The command handling has been thoroughly refactored to make adding new stuff a bit more straightforward.
• nCAT "headless mode" exists in a basic form. No Maestro? No SmartSDR? Run with "-headless" and you will get a single slice that can be controlled with CAT and used with nDAX. I've made an FT8 QSO this way.
• nDAX can now create the pulseaudio loopback devices it needs on startup, and give them nice names and icons. No more doing it yourself.
• nDAX now uses a native-Go PulseAudio client to send/receive audio and to create the devices; no external commands or libraries are required for basic functionality. The "pacmd" command is still needed to give the devices their names and icons, though — the PulseAudio devs left that out of the native protocol. Oh well.
• nDAX now does a bit of resampling to avoid periodically overrunning/underrunning the audio buffer if the Flex's sample rate disagrees with the PC clock. This is still under a fair bit of tweaking. For best results, make sure your PC is running a good NTP client (I recommend Chrony).
• I'm using GitHub Actions to automatically build and upload nCAX and nDAX for linux-amd64 (PC) and linux-arm (Raspberry Pi). Other build targets are theoretically possible — ask!

A big focus here has been on the "out of the box" experience. We're still a bit cutting-edge here, but you should now be able to go to the GitHub release page, download pre-built binaries, and run them without any particular setup or knowledge, and end up with something that works.

Testing and feedback are welcome; devs who want to contribute are even more welcome.

Thanks!

juan garcia

ANIMO POR FIN LINUX DIOS

Chris_WX7V

I got this working tonight - impressive!

arodland

> @cdub89 said:
> I got this working tonight - impressive!

Thanks :) Hope you're enjoying, and please do comment with any impressions or suggestions for improvements, either here or on the GitHub project.

Lou KI5FTY

Looks great - is this still an active project for you? And thank you for supporting linux!

arodland

Yes it is, Lou. I'm a bit busy right now (I'm moving house this very week) so development pace is slowed down, but I absolutely intend to keep improving, and the more feedback I get from users, the more likely that is :)

For release updates I recommend using the "Watch" button on the GitHub repos; you will find out more quickly than watching the thread here.

Chris_WX7V

@arodland a few suggestions - its difficult figuring out what port to set up - not sure in nCAT on nDAX would be the right place to log it. Also- a clear option to set the slice on the Flex radio into DAX as primary transmit mode (versus having to set it up from SmartSDR). Finally a quick end to end how to configure with WSJTX would be nice, I’ve been proceeding with trial and error!

Mark_WS7M

I wanted to share a few things I've found.

I own a Flex6600, a Maestro, and a Flex 6300. Over the summer I won a raffle and the prize was an Icom 7300. About a month after winning the raffle my friend at the club that had held the raffle called me up to see if I was interested in swapping the 7300 for a 7610. Their club bought a 7610 and decided they really wanted the 7300 for their comm van. So I swapped the 7300 + some cash for the 7610.

Why if I have these flex radios did I want the 7610. Well part of my interest in this hobby is learning to integrate and talk to the radios through software. Since the 7610 is so popular I decided I'd try to see what kind of effort would be required to automate it.

First impressions:

The 7610 is instant on. If you just want to operate, you hit a button and 1 second later you have audio and you are virtually ready to operate. The flex radios take at least a minute to get going unless you leave them on all the time.

For a single "slice" the 7610 is quick and fast. You can get anywhere you want very quickly. However using the second receiver is surprisingly hard. You have to swap main/sub, dial in your frequency then swap main/sub back and hit dual watch. Adding a second slice or pan to a flex is one click. Perhaps on the Maestro it is a little harder.

7610 is two "slices" max. My 6600 does four. This makes the 6600 the go to radio for looking at a lot of bands. But the 7610 you can just push band buttons to take a look so it's not impossible. But I can with the 6600 monitor 4 bands of FT8 at the same time. I've only been successful doing a single FT8 instance so far with the 7610.

Icom has not released the ethernet protocol for talking to the 7610 over the LAN (or WAN) so you are limited to the CI-V interface which looks like a virtual serial port. The CI-V command set is cryptic in places but there seems to be a lot there. If I wanted a network controllable radio the Flex is the best choice.

On my simple little 80m loop antenna, the receivers appear identical. However the Flex allows you to control the vertical scale so you can take a quiet day on the band and zoom in to see low signals. The icom seems not to offer this. I've yet to be able to change the vertical scale.

My flex pan adapter at times can look really messy. Noise and neighbor devices cause humps in the pan. The icom display seems to make these less noticeable. On one day on 20m that was particularly nasty looking with some neighbor obviously running some various noisy device, my Flex pan looked a little like a camel with two noise humps. Moving the slice over the **** produced that nasty hash buzz noise. Switching to the icom the **** were way list obvious. In the waterfall I could see there was some noise there but the signal line did not show the humps as much. I tried different averaging and speeds but it was not as visible. The hash buzz audio was the same on either radio.

The icom noise reduction and blanker are very good. I don't have much noise here but I tried them on the camel humps above and you can **** the buzz very well. I think it is a common complaint that the Flex NR is just not as good and it is not in a direct side-by-side comparison.

Flex slices are much much more flexible than the 7610. You can completely customize your filter width, AGC etc. The 7610 offers 3 filters and they have their twin PBT control which takes getting used to but is the same generally as what you can do with a Flex slice.

The sub menus and menus on the Icom 7610 can be confusing. There is a lot there. But if I want to change the AGC time for example it is not very easy to get to.

The 7610 display is very fast, faster than the flex. If you like a display that updates very quickly in waterfall and signal line the 7610 give you that.

The 7610 offers a DVI output. Strange they picked an older technology and didn't supply HDMI. The display is simply a mirror of what is on the main display of the radio. Flex displays using a computer are much more flexible in what you can place and where. The 7610 max external resolution is 800x600. I hooked it up but honestly I don't use it.

While the 7610 has a nice built in display it too becomes small as you try to fit more data in place. The ads always show the needle meters which are beautiful in how they look and operate but they take up space. I went to the bar meters so I could see more stuff. Interestingly when I switched bar meters and bigger pan/waterfall the dual times the radio supports chop off one of the times! I had set up the radio to have both local and GMT time as the second time. But in the display mode I like the GMT time is gone. So I configured the primary time to be GMT.

I've received good CW reports and very good audio reports using just the supplied 7610 mic. Out of the box it is ready to work and sounds really good. But the Flex offers many more audio input options. You can use USB mics, Balance studio mics, and others. If I want a different mic for the Icom I have to make up a mic with a cable that fits there connector. Their may be a way to pipe audio from a USB mic into the 7610. I've not tried. It does have USB ports on the front but I believe those are for keyboard and mouse. You might be able to feed audio in from a USB mic via computer by setting the audio source to be the same source normally used for digital to/from the computer but I have not tried. Anyway it would be more complex to setup and get working than the Flex.

Keyboard mouse - Ok so the 7610 has USB ports to plug in a keyboard and mouse. The keyboard is nice to enter call signs, perhaps edit CW messages or to use the built in PSK/Rtty mode. The mouse I find almost useless because they have limited it to just the pan! You cannot move the mouse outside of the signal display area to click on things like the mode, filters, frequency etc. So all the mouse can help you with is to click on a signal. I find that odd.

Fan noise. I have my Flex 6600 mounted in another room. I never hear a thing from it and I talk to it completely over the LAN. The 7610 by design sites on the table right there. The fan in back comes on about every 10 minutes. Its not very loud but I do hear it. Luckily the radio uses silent CW keying. There is NO relay sound. The 7300 does make relay sounds as it keys. While I'm not nutz about no noise, the fan in the 7610 is a little annoying it makes more noise spooling up and down than it does when its running. If I were doing the firmware I might run it full time but at much less speed and only increase the speed when the radio needs it which seems to be never.

Stability - So far the icom is very stable. It never crashes. My flex stuff due to dependencies on LAN and computer are less stable. I've had my flex reboot during a contest. I worked 12 hours of field day on the 7300 and it never needed a restart.

So here is my summary:

Flex: Best remote, Best if you want your radio in another room. Easy to talk to if you are developer. Best for mulitiple bands and slices. Only real con: Takes a minute or two to startup.

7610 Instant on, great display, very intuitive to use except for more hidden things like AGC time. Great audio, great CW. Cons: some what louder fan, no real LAN support for developers. CI-V over serial works but you need to get crafty to use that over the LAN.

I will probably keep the 7610 as my quick go to radio for checking something out. I don't have to fire up the computer or Maestro to listen or even be on the air.

While digital with one frequency is easy on the 7610 the Flex is by far the easier solution allowing it to work seamlessly over the LAN even to a laptop or ipad and if you get crafty it is easy to have, in my case, 4 FT8 slices all monitoring different bands.

I will likely enjoy trying to get the 7610 to be controllable over the LAN.

Any direct questions let me know.

Mark - WS7M

Mark_WS7M

I wanted to share a few things I've found.

I own a Flex6600, a Maestro, and a Flex 6300. Over the summer I won a raffle and the prize was an Icom 7300. About a month after winning the raffle my friend at the club that had held the raffle called me up to see if I was interested in swapping the 7300 for a 7610. Their club bought a 7610 and decided they really wanted the 7300 for their comm van.

First impressions:

The 7610 is instant on. If you just want to operate, you hit a button and 1 second later you have audio and you are virtually ready to operate. The flex radios take at least a minute to get going unless you leave them on all the time.

For a single "slice" the 7610 is quick and fast. You can get anywhere you want very quickly. However using the second receiver is surprisingly hard. You have to swap main/sub, dial in your frequency then swap main/sub back and hit dual watch. Adding a second slice or pan to a flex is one click. Perhaps on the Maestro it is a little harder.

7610 is two "slices" max. My 6600 does four. This makes the 6600 the go to radio for looking at a lot of bands. But the 7610 you can just push band buttons to take a look so it's not impossible. But I can with the 6600 monitor 4 bands of FT8 at the same time. I've only been successful doing a single FT8 instance so far with the 7610.

Icom has not released the ethernet protocol for talking to the 7610 over the LAN (or WAN) so you are limited to the CI-V interface which looks like a virtual serial port. The CI-V command set is cryptic in places but there seems to be a lot there. If I wanted a network controllable radio the Flex is the best choice. But from a software developer standpoint I prefer the Flex API over the CI-V and I would have to do more work on the CI-V to make it work over the LAN. This might change if Icom ever opens up the ethernet port.

On my simple little 80m loop antenna, the receivers appear identical. However the Flex allows you to control the vertical scale so you can take a quiet day on the band and zoom in to see low signals. The icom seems not to offer this. I've yet to be able to change the vertical scale.

My flex pan adapter at times can look really messy. Noise and neighbor devices cause humps in the pan. The icom display seems to make these less noticeable. On one day on 20m that was particularly nasty looking with some neighbor obviously running some various noisy device, my Flex pan looked a little like a camel with two noise humps. Moving the slice over the **** produced that nasty hash buzz noise. Switching to the icom the **** were way list obvious. In the waterfall I could see there was some noise there but the signal line did not show the humps as much. I tried different averaging and speeds but it was not as visible. The hash buzz audio was the same on either radio.

The icom noise reduction and blanker are very good. I don't have much noise here but I tried them on the camel humps above and you can **** the buzz very well. I think it is a common complaint that the Flex NR is just not as good and it is not in a direct side-by-side comparison.

Flex slices are much much more flexible than the 7610. You can completely customize your filter width, AGC etc. The 7610 offers 3 filters and they have their twin PBT control which takes getting used to but is the same generally as what you can do with a Flex slice.

RIT on both flex and 7610 are easy to use. However the API in the flex, I'm sure there is a CI-V to do the same makes it very simple for me to have software control for splits.

The sub menus and menus on the Icom 7610 can be confusing. There is a lot there. But if I want to change the AGC time for example it is not very easy to get to.

The 7610 display is very fast, faster than the flex. If you like a display that updates very quickly in waterfall and signal line the 7610 give you that.

The 7610 offers a DVI output. Strange they picked an older technology and didn't supply HDMI. The display is simply a mirror of what is on the main display of the radio. Flex displays using a computer are much more flexible in what you can place and where. The 7610 max external resolution is 800x600. I hooked it up but honestly I don't use it.

While the 7610 has a nice built in display it too becomes small as you try to fit more data in place. The ads always show the needle meters which are beautiful in how they look and operate but they take up space. I went to the bar meters so I could see more stuff. Interestingly when I switched bar meters and bigger pan/waterfall the dual times the radio supports chop off one of the times! I had set up the radio to have both local and GMT time as the second time. But in the display mode I like the GMT time is gone. So I configured the primary time to be GMT.

I've received good CW reports and very good audio reports using just the supplied 7610 mic. Out of the box it is ready to work and sounds really good. But the Flex offers many more audio input options. You can use USB mics, Balance studio mics, and others. If I want a different mic for the Icom I have to make up a mic with a cable that fits there connector. Their may be a way to pipe audio from a USB mic into the 7610. I've not tried.

Keyboard mouse - Ok so the 7610 has USB ports to plug in a keyboard and mouse. The keyboard is nice to enter call signs, perhaps edit CW messages or to use the built in PSK/Rtty mode. The mouse I find almost useless because they have limited it to just the pan! You cannot move the mouse outside of the signal display area to click on things like the mode, filters, frequency etc. So all the mouse can help you with is to click on a signal. I find that odd.

Fan noise. I have my Flex 6600 mounted in another room. I never hear a thing from it and I talk to it completely over the LAN. The 7610 by design sites on the table right there. The fan in back comes on about every 10 minutes. Its not very loud but I do hear it. Luckily the radio uses silent CW keying. There is NO relay sound. The 7300 does make relay sounds as it keys. While I'm not nutz about no noise, the fan in the 7610 is a little annoying it makes more noise spooling up and down than it does when its running. If I were doing the firmware I might run it full time but at much less speed and only increase the speed when the radio needs it which seems to be never. The radio has a heat display and even keydown at 100 watts for well over 5 minutes I could not get the display to even begin to approach "hot".

Stability - So far the icom is very stable. It never crashes. My flex stuff due to dependencies on LAN and computer are less stable. I've had my flex reboot during a contest. I worked 12 hours of field day on the 7300 and it never needed a restart.

So here is my summary:

Flex: Best remote, Best if you want your radio in another room. Easy to talk to if you are developer. Best for mulitiple bands and slices. Only real con: Takes a minute or two to startup.

7610 Instant on, great display, very intuitive to use except for more hidden things like AGC time. Great audio, great CW. Cons: some what louder fan, no real LAN support for developers. CI-V over serial works but you need to get crafty to use that over the LAN.

I will probably keep the 7610 as my quick go to radio for checking something out. I don't have to fire up the computer or Maestro to listen or even be on the air.

While digital with one frequency is easy on the 7610 the Flex is by far the easier solution allowing it to work seamlessly over the LAN even to a laptop or ipad and if you get crafty it is easy to have, in my case, 4 FT8 slices all monitoring different bands.

I will likely enjoy trying to get the 7610 to be controllable over the LAN.

Any direct questions let me know.

Mark - WS7M

Jeremy Gilbert KC1JZE

@arodland Very very nice work! Thank you so much for doing this.

My goal is to be have a one-press setup for PSK reporting FT8 contacts and to be able to run WSPR listener unattended as well when I'm not using my regular station, and this fills in many of the missing pieces. I'm aiming to set up a private website on a ZeroTier VPN that will set everything up automatically so I can get propagation information for my station during idle time.

I'm using a headless raspberry pi 4 with a minimal starting package.

For those looking for setup details, here is what I did to get everything running

curl -L https://github.com/kc2g-flex-tools/nCAT/releases/download/v0.0-20200623.0/nCAT-linux-arm -O
curl -L -O https://github.com/kc2g-flex-tools/nDAX/releases/download/v0.0-20200817.0/nDAX-linux-arm
chmod +x ./nCAT-linux-arm
chmod +x ./nDAX-linux-arm
sudo apt-get install pulseaudio
pulseaudio &
./nDax-linux-arm &
./nCat-linux-arm &

I'm using VNC and fluxbox window manager to keep everything tidy and minimal

inside WSXTJ, you set the radio as hamlib, and the server as localhost:4532. Everything seems to work from there..

you can also install pavuacontrol and use that to adjust DAX levels and whatnot.

Was able to make a contact on FT8 on 20m just a few minutes ago.

A couple of things not done or I can't figure out:

• How to build nCAT and nDAX from source (can't figure out how to make go install dependencies. probably some web searching and reading would solve this)
• Why I can't run nCAT and nDAX from inside a docker container
• Getting the whole slice, Dax etc setting automated so the the whole flex setup can be headless
• Making WSXTJ fully headless

Jeremy Gilbert KC1JZE

Hacked on this a bit more today, and realized that the nCAT and nDAX clients appear to silently fail if they cannot bind to port 4992/udp for the flexradio discovery protocol. The following worked to get nCAT working inside docker:

Dockerfile:
   EXPOSE 5900 4532/tcp 4991/tcp 4991/udp 4992/udp 4992/tcp

Shell:
   sudo docker run -p 5900:5900 -p 4532:4532 -p 4991:4991/udp -p 4992:4992/udp --name bb raspi-vnc:1.0

Lou KI5FTY

@Jeremy Gilbert KC1JZE great work! Do you have the rest of the dockerfile you can share?

Jeremy Gilbert KC1JZE

Hi @Lou KI5FTY -

I don't have it all assembled yet into a fully working Dockerfile. I've been starting with one I found here https://registry.hub.docker.com/r/psharkey/rpi-novnc, which sets up a VNC server. I modified it to make it work with the RPi4 and latest Debian but it still has cruft. From there I've manually added packages to get WSXTJ working. So consider this a work in progress that I'll eventually upgrade to include a bunch of the related ham software.

[email protected]:~/docker-exp $ more Dockerfile
FROM balenalib/rpi-raspbian:stretch

# Setup demo environment variables
ENV HOME=/root \
	DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive \
	LANG=en_US.UTF-8 \
	LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8 \
	LC_ALL=C.UTF-8 \
	DISPLAY=:0.0 \
	DISPLAY_WIDTH=1024 \
	DISPLAY_HEIGHT=768

# Install git, supervisor, VNC, & X11 packages
RUN apt-get update && apt-get install -y \
	bash \
	fluxbox \
	git \
	net-tools \
	openssh-client \
	socat \
	strace \
	telnet \
	supervisor \
	x11vnc \
	xterm \
	xvfb \
  --no-install-recommends && \
  rm -rf /var/lib/apt/lists/*



COPY supervisord.conf /etc/supervisor/conf.d/supervisord.conf

EXPOSE 5900 4532/tcp 4991/tcp 4991/udp 4992/udp 4992/tcp

CMD ["/usr/bin/supervisord", "-c", "/etc/supervisor/conf.d/supervisord.conf"]

Good luck!

Jeremy

arodland

Thrilled to see some more interest! Thought I'd leave a project update. I moved house a month ago, so there hasn't been any development going on, but I finally got a desk set up in the new house and I've started to spread my radio equipment across it, so in a few more days I'll have a Flex to play with again :)

In the meantime, suggestions, documentation PRs, and whatever else are welcome!

K6HN

Thanks for the work on this and for sharing. I will be installing both and trying them out soon.

Gary

K6HN

Chris_WX7V

@arodland I've used nCAT and nDAX daily (UBUNTU 20.04 LTS) and don't know why Flex doesn't host or sponsor these little utilities on your behalf. I've made nearly 200 QSOs on WSJTX thanks to your support!

I appreciate you making these available as I don't like running virtualbox to emulate windows.

arodland

Thanks! That's fantastic to hear. To be honest I haven't asked Flex to support my work in any way (other than providing the public API, which they've been good enough to do). Maybe if I was creating a full-on SmartSDR type app they would be interested, but I've never been all that great when it comes to developing GUI apps. I've thought about bringing it to their attention but I've never been quite sure what to say. In any case I'm happy enough with the current situation.

As for the apps themselves, rest assured that I'm not dead. I've been doing some work that will, with a little luck, result in a more stable nDAX without the "[INTERNAL]" halves of the loopback pairs. It's not quite ready yet, but I should be able to push a beta release soonish.

As always, usage reports are welcome, comments and suggestions are welcome, and if any devs want to lend a hand that would be nice too. Some possible places where an interested party could help out:

• Implement the metering protocol in the flexclient library, and hook up "l RFPOWER_METER", "l SWR", etc. in nCAT (useful for people who like JTDX's output power gauge, or want to use some kind of app like grig and get meters.
• Write an "nSPOT" that connects to a cluster and posts spots to the Flex using the "spot add" API command (this is a pretty easy job for someone who understands the cluster protocol, which I don't. I'll get around to it someday if no one else does).
• Come up with a sensible proposal for how to map multiple slices to hamlib VFOs in nCAT for split operation.

Alan

arodland

I have watched your posts with interest and want to give nDAX and nCAT a try.

What are some examples of functionality gained by using nDAX and nCAT on a Raspberry Pi? I see where we can also run WSJT-X on Linux. Are there others that need Flex CAT and DAX?

Could you publish a "Guide for Novice" Linux persons (like me) to install, configure and run nDAX/nCAT. Here is a link to the guide to install, confiture and use FRStack on a Linux (Raspberry Pi). This example shows the type and level of instructions that we Novices can understand.

http://www.mkcmsoftware.com/download/FRStackWebApiReadme.html

Alan

WA9WUD

Ted VE3TRQ

Just a comment on why DAX and CAT on Linux are useful to me personally. My shack computer is an Intel NUC running Ubuntu Linux, and my radio is a Flex6600M, right next to the computer. I normally only run the K3 with my shack computer, but with the addition of Dax and Cat for Linux, I can now operate digital modes on myFlex in the shack, instead of going to my Mac elsewhere in the house. (Edit: As an aside, I do not run Windows unless it is unavoidable.)

Alan

Ted

Questions

What do you mean "K3"?

Do you use something like VNC viewer on the Mac to view the Linux NUC Desktop?

Alan

Ted VE3TRQ

“K3” - my other HF radio :-) I have two radios in the shack, an Elecraft and a Flex. So far I have been unable to use the shack Linux computer with the 6600M, only the Elecraft K3 with a SignaLink USB. I could use VNC or another remote tool to get to the Mac, but that does not do multi-monitor well.

arodland

A new release of nDAX is out: existing users please read the release notes at GitHub (https://github.com/kc2g-flex-tools/nDAX/releases/tag/0.1-20201115.0) as some configuration options have changed. Overall this should be a better release with fewer things to go wrong.

Alan

Arodlane

Could you do a user manual for installation and for configuration?

Alan. WA9WUD

arodland

No installation required, and there are instructions in the README. For the most part, just download and run.

Alan

arodland.....you assume a level of knowledge, perhaps, I do not have. I need a little "hand holding" to get the hang of this.

I tried following the read me and here are my results. I could use some help.

Am I creating a hidden text file on the home directory named nDAX? It did not work. I also tried it with "sudo" I need help please. Here are the screenshots.

Command failed:

Next:

I downloaded the file using "sudo wget" command. Is this the correct file? What is a "binary"?:

"and ran the "chmod +x nDAX. Looks good, right??

Please help me up to this point. What am I doing wrong?

Then, could you provide some explanation on how to use these setups?

Alan

WA9WUD

Pierre_VE3KTB

Alan,

Speaking from a purely linux point of view, (I know nothing of this software as yet) you do not have a program named nDax in that directory. You are trying to execute "nDax" when you issue ./nDax

The nDax-linux-arm might be a package that contains the nDax executable, or it might be the executable itself, but with that different name. You could try ./nDax-linux-arm in place of nDax and see if that works.
If it does, using the mv command as follows: mv nDax-linux-arm nDax would rename it. Or likely you could right click on the name in the file manager and change it there.

73,
Pierre VE3KTB

Alan

Pierre, Thanks.

I am still "lost". Hoping arodland is willing to help, otherwise, I may not be able to use this great app.

Alan. WA9WUD