Sunday, November 27, 2011

Back on WSPR on 20m but not on Windows

I have an MSI U-200 netbook that dual-boots Windows XP and Linux. For a long time I used Ubuntu but when I upgraded to 11.04 wireless networking wouldn't work and being unable to figure out the magic incantation decided to try Fedora.

There's no built WSPR for Fedora that I could find so I've been running it under Windows XP. Lots of people were spotting me (running under 5W from an ft-817) but I got no decodes of other stations at all. This morning I checked out the WSPR source and built it. All of a sudden I'm receiving lots of stations.


Ubuntu has been good to me but I found the switch to Unity a little premature and, quite frankly, Gnome 3 has all the good bits as far as I can tell and seems a lot more complete. It's weird that a desktop could ship without a simple way for a user to add a launcher to the dock (or whatever it's called).

Can't explain why I get no decodes on Windows. Perhaps the sound card is not right?

2 comments:

PE4BAS, Bas said...

Hello Peter, never heard of Fedora. But do now,have to test it. Trying Ubuntu and Linux Mint now. Do I understand you made a WSPR application for Fedora? It looks like the one in Win. Does it also work in Ubuntu, since I understand Fedora is also Linux based. 73, Bas

Peter Marks said...

Hi Bas,

Fedora is a version of Red Hat linux. You can get it here.

I think there is a binary version of WSPR for Debian based distributions, including Ubuntu, from this page.

To install on Fedora I basically followed the instructions on the development page. Now, the trick is that the pre-requisite package names are a little different so you need to do a 'yum search' to find out what each one is called.

I'm sorry it's not trivial to make a binary distribution due to the required libraries.

You'll need to be at least a little familiar with building programs on linux using configure and make to go down this path, but let me know if I can help.

Peter