Early Preview: ProtoSDR – a Client for Linux

This week I focused on incorporating the v4.1.3 changes and adding UI components to the client application. In the video, you can see I click the Tune button and the RF Power Meter is working. Then I demonstrate the various menus.

This is running on Ubuntu with Gnome, which I figured was a pretty popular distro to test with. I'm writing code that will compile on Linux x86, Windows and Raspberry Pi (Arm). I've run it on all platforms - Windows and Linux are fine, but it seemed like there was an audio lag on an Rpi4. Perhaps an RPi5 would do better - but Linux x86 is my main focus.

You don't realize just how many UI components there are and how they interact until you start to have to replicate them all. For the most part, I'm creating a UI where most controls are in the same place as SmartSDR for Windows.

While I thought I had the Panadapter and Slice Flag side-to-side scrolling working correctly, a close comparison with SmartSDR behavior revealed I needed to rework it. I think I've got it working identically now.

Thank you to the many people who have offered to be a tester. I'm not at that point yet, but will keep the offers in mind.

As you can see there's still a lot more UI work remaining.

A Linux version of SmartSDR continues to move forward. Here's a video of an FT8 QSO on Ubuntu:

I made good progress over the holiday break on some of the more difficult tasks: getting the Slice Tuning Flag behaving correctly and getting Transmit Audio to work.

Here's a video showing the current state of the UI and the Slice Tuning Flag functionality.

Hi Martin, it's not available yet.

While all the major functionality is working, I need to match more of SmartSDR's behavior before this will be ready. SmartSDR has dozens of other controls and options, many of which interact with one another in unexpected ways. It's quite complicated figuring them all out.

The panadapter and waterfall were actually some of the easiest parts to get working correctly. I found getting the Slice Tuning Flag behavior correct was more complicated.

Some of the major features are working very reliably. multiFLEX is working well and about 99% complete. SmartLink is working well, but I haven't yet implemented signup, register and unregister.

To give you an example of some of the complex behavior - the Mic Level meter is a good example - it needs to respond to the stream from the radio mic when 'Mic' is selected, but respond directly to the PC mic when 'PC' is selected, revert back to the radio stream when DAX is clicked. Then there is the possibility that the radio Mic is unplugged, or there is no PC sound card. There is a lot of this sort of complexity in SmartSDR.