Wednesday, July 11, 2012

Softrock Ensemble RXTX with Quisk on Ubuntu

I recently purchased the nice box for the Ensemble RXTX from the KM5H store and it does make it into a very professional looking little software defined radio.



The audio labels are ambiguous, "line in" means "this connection goes to your line in". There is an amazing bit of python/C software called Quisk that can be used to control the Ensemble.



Here it is receiving a station from Kuwait (I'm in Sydney by the way).




To get this working on Ubuntu 12.04, I did try using the install from the Ubuntu software centre but I couldn't get it to talk to USB so I ended up simply downloading the software, doing a 'make', and running it from the command line.

Quisk comes with a config file preset for the Ensemble RXTX at quisk-3.6.2/softrock/conf_rx_tx_ensemble.py which I copied to ~/.quisk_conf.py and edited to point the audio to my creative USB external sound device.

3 comments:

  1. Ah... this is what you get up to?? Well done I like it. Amazing stuff.
    73
    Patrick VK2PN

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  2. Anonymous1:57 AM

    Well, it seems so simple.
    I dowloaded the zip
    unzipped in Home
    edited the conf
    placed it in ~/.
    run the make
    and then quisk:
    jon@jon-Dell-inspiron:~/quisk-3.6.2$ quisk
    Traceback (most recent call last):
    File "/usr/bin/quisk", line 6, in
    import quisk.quisk as quisk
    File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/quisk/quisk.py", line 22, in
    import wx, wx.html, wx.lib.buttons, wx.lib.stattext, wx.lib.colourdb
    ImportError: No module named wxnot giving up though.
    73 Jon LA3JJ

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  3. Sorry you ran in to trouble there. The problem is that you don't have wxPython installed on your machine - I must have had it from some other software dependency.

    Try:

    sudo apt-get install python-wxgtk2.8

    Peter

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