On Saturday, April 23, I attended a rally by ABC Friends Victoria at which Shadow Attorney General, Mark Dreyfus spoke. I've long been a supporter of shortwave broadcasting from Australia both for the inland but also the Pacific and was disappointed when it was shut down. It was a bit of a surprise when Mark Dreyfus mentioned shortwave in part of his speech.
No policy announcements but interesting that he mentioned shortwave.
Once again it was my pleasure to be a guest on the ABC RN program "Download This Show". You can hear it here.
Marc Fennell is away making a TV show so the fabulous Rae Johnston was guest host. The other panelist was Manal al-Sharif who makes the Tech4Evil podcast.
This episode was recorded remotely. I'm at my rural antenna farm connected via NBN fixed wireless and it all worked rather well.
I upgraded a machine to Ubuntu 22.04 and found that wsjt-x couldn't see the serial port any more.
lsusb shows the device:
Bus 001 Device 005: ID 10c4:ea60 Silicon Labs CP210x UART Bridge
It seems that Ubuntu has added a bunch of Braille devices, one of which conflicts with the serial device in the Icom radio.
The trick is to edit the file:
sudo nano /usr/lib/udev/rules.d/85-brltty.rules
and search for "10c4:ea60"
Then comment out the line starting with ENV{PRODUCT}:
# Device: 10C4:EA60
# Generic Identifier
# Vendor: Cygnal Integrated Products, Inc.
# Product: CP210x UART Bridge / myAVR mySmartUSB light
# BrailleMemo [Pocket]
# Seika [Braille Display]
#ENV{PRODUCT}=="10c4/ea60/*", ATTRS{manufacturer}=="Silicon Labs", ENV{BRLTTY_B>
The Icom IC-705 has network features that IC-7300 owners can only dream about. Happily for us macOS users, there are two software programs that do a good job of remote controlling the radio.
The first is a commercial program SDR Control by the guy that does the iOS software for Flex Radio SDRs. It looks like this in operation:
The window can be made smaller (but not as small as I'd like) for casual listening while doing other stuff on the computer. Here's a bit of the VK2WI broadcast monitored here on 30m. The station is about 800km from me and comes in very well.
A new version, for iPadOS has just been released. It's not cheap but works well. As a software developer I can imagine the work that has gone in to this app.
The other option is free and open source. WFView (Waterfall View) is available for Linux, Windows and here I use it on macOS:
Both work well. SDR Control has additional features including built-in digital mode clients but WFView works perfectly well.
I hope that one day Icom releases an update to the IC-7300 with network capabilities like the IC-705.
WFView can connect to the USB port on the IC-7300 and make it available on the network but it ties up a computer. WFView source code is here.
