Ham radio on Linux

The following software works great (on Arch Linux):

  • General logging: qlog which can be found from both AUR and Flatpak
  • Digital modes: WSJT-X_improved from AUR
  • Contesting: not1mm. I recommend using cwdaemon for generating CW rather than CAT with rigctld. The latter is buggy and can crash frequently. Install using the uv system (python).

The new tower works great!

145′ Rotating Rohn 55 tower (tower hardware & installation KC1XX

Antennas:

Improve timing of cwdaemon on Linux

If one starts cwdaemon directly on Linux, it produces rather choppy and poor CW. So, I experimented a bit and it seems that the following will produce nice and consistent CW:

# echo 1 > /sys/bus/usb-serial/devices/ttyUSB1/latency_timer
# chrt -f 99 /usr/bin/cwdaemon -d /dev/ttyUSB1 -o key=DTR -o ptt=none -x n

This reduces the rs232 port latency (1st line; 1 ms latency), runs cwdaemon with real time priority (chrt command) and disables audio output on the computer (-x n). In my case above /dev/ttyUSB1 is the RS232 port for the radio, which uses DTR signal for keying.

Once can put the above in a bash script so cwdaemon can be started easily.