Building wsjt-x 1.8rc1 on Fedora 26

The available binaries of wsjt-x don't run on Fedora 26. There's no problem building but it took a while to figure out the dependencies so this post is a note for myself that might help someone else.

From a fresh Fedora 26, here's the dependencies I needed to add before building.

sudo dnf install autoconf automake libtool libusb libusb-devel fftw-libs-single fftw-devel texinfo qt5 cmake asciidoc gcc-gfortran gcc-c++ qwt5-qt4 qwt qwt-qt5-devel qwt-qt5 qt5-qtmultimedia qt5-qtmultimedia-devel asciidoctor qt5-qtserialport qt5-qtserialport-devel

I stumbled around a bit figuring out what the missing thing was called in Fedora so there's undoubtedly things in that list that aren't actually needed.

At the end of the build I got an error linking -ludev so needed to do this to let ld find the library.

sudo ln -s /usr/lib64/libudev.so.1 /usr/lib64/libudev.so

(Let me know if there's a correct way to do this, I couldn't find a -devel package that should normally do this).

I basically follow the instructions directly from the excellent INSTALL document but I'm substituting the 1.8rc1 tag so I get the latest FT8 stuff.

cd ~

mkdir wsjtx-prefix

cd wsjtx-prefix

Download a snapshot from:

https://sourceforge.net/p/wsjt/wsjt/HEAD/tree/tags/wsjtx-1.8.0-rc1/

Unzip then rename:

mv wsjt-wsjt-8028-tags-wsjtx-1.8.0-rc1 src

From the file src/INSTALL, follow the instructions to download, build and install hamlib.

# As per the instructions in INSTALL

cd ~/wsjtx-prefix

mkdir build

cd build

cmake -D CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=~/hamlib-prefix ../src

cmake --build .

sudo cmake --build . --target install

wsjtx 

Building is a good way to exercise your CPU.

Binaries?

I notice this site hopes to have binaries available but the builds seem to be failing. Does anyone know what I need to do to build wsjt-x as a static binary for easy distribution?

Charging a laptop from 12V

Keen on portable QRP operation, I'd like to use digital modes which might require a laptop. While battery life is excellent with some models, I'd also like to be able to charge a laptop from my solar powered shed.

Recently I purchased some voltage buck modules which can step up a voltage to a settable output controlled with a multi-turn potentiometer.

There's lots of variations of these on ebay. This one takes an input of 3-35V DC and turns it in to an output of 2.2-30V DC with an output current of up to 1.5A.

I'm charging a little HP laptop which takes 19.5V so the converter is set to that and all boxed up nicely. (Except that I drilled the holes in the wrong places).

HP laptop chargers have three wires in the lead, positive, earth and ID. The ID wire (I learned thanks to commenter Brian G8OSN) needs to be pulled high for the laptop to charge the battery. I connected the middle ID wire to positive 19.5V via a 100K resister and that seems to do the trick.

On a related topic, I'm becoming a fan of 18650 Lithium Iron batteries, not just for super bright torches and Tecsun radios, but also for powering QRP gear if powered from a set of three 3.7V cells in a little case available for under $2.

These cells can be harvested from old laptop battery packs. Often when they die it's because one cell has gone bad and the others can be re-used. They don't make it easy to get them out though.

This pack from an old Asus netbook has three rows of two cells in parallel. These cells have a huge capacity compared to an AA rechargeable which might be 1,200mAHr, they are often 5,000mAHr or more. Here they are in the fancy new charger that's just arrived.

I see that this month's Silicon Chip has an article about these cells.

Meetup with Peter VK3YE

Peter, VK3YE, was in Sydney briefly and a few of us had the pleasure of meeting up before he braved the enhanced airport security. Stephen, VK2BLQ, brought along his beautiful valve regenerative radio.

John, VK2ASU, made the journey from Maitland and brought a few interesting projects for inspection including a Tuna Tin radio.

After Peter left we had a duel between John's regenerative 80 receiver and a Tecsun PL-880.

Thanks Peter for popping by. Catch you on the air by the bay or the harbour!

After lunch, John and I walked around Chatswood inspecting cameras, telescopes, 3d printers and torches. After becoming familiar with the prices out of China on Banggood and AliExpress it's hard to take the retail prices of many of these products.

Lubuntu Linux for low power, low memory computers

I like the little HP Stream 11 laptop but Ubuntu is a bit slow on it so I've recently installed Lubuntu Linux. Based on Ubuntu but with a lighter weight desktop and windowing environment it runs well and does not use the 2GB of RAM available in this machine.

Even with the Chromium browser running there is free memory available.

To find out more detail about where your battery power is going, there's a utility that can be installed with apt, called powertop.

Amazing to see an Intel laptop consuming 3.55W.

There are a bunch of tunable settings that can be adjusted in Linux to get better battery life, mainly turning on some power management settings, I've turned on each of these and so far so good.

While Lubuntu is fine, I do miss a few things from full Ubuntu such as the ability to search for an app to run it, also the window edges are very narrow and rather hard to grab with the mouse.

I've noticed that some operations, such as 'apt update' hang for 120 seconds before starting. At first I thought this was a DNS issue but it turns out that disabling ipv6 fixes this for me. (Obviously, I would prefer to use ipv6 but perhaps my ISP or home network isn't quite up to it).

All in all, worth a try on a low end laptop.

Tecsun PL-880 mini review

There was a time when Sony ruled my portable short wave listening world. In recent years Tecsun has brought out a series of decent radios suitable for packing on trips.

This week I popped in to Av-Comm nearby in Brookvale, local distributor of Tecsun and purchased a PL-880 from them. (They're not really set up for walk-in customers but very friendly none the less).

The PL-880 is powered by a single high capacity Lithium 18650 battery which is charged inside the radio using a mini-USB socket on the side. Av-Comm supplies a suitable cable and plug pack but it's likely you already have one lying around.

These 18650 cells are turning up everywhere these days, in high brightness torches, even in home made power walls, and they seem like a worthy successor to the ubiquitous AA cells. Being 3.7V they can power lots of devices with just one cell.

The radio comes in a very nice faux leather zip around case that includes a log book. There's a large world map poster with ham radio prefixes marked on the countries and Av-Comm includes a guide to short wave listening.

Audio is excellent, probably the best I've heard in a portable radio. AM and FM sound terrific. There is a "bass" or "treble" switch that I've left in treble position but there's still a warm sound there.

On shortwave, sensitivity seems excellent. Here's a bit of Radio New Zealand International using just the whip antenna inside the house.

During this video I switch the DSP bandwidth a few times but I think this is a pretty narrow transmission.

The radio also has proper upper and lower sideband. Here's a recording of a 40m LSB conversation again just using the whip antenna.

You can hear that the tuning, although digital, is silky smooth. This is where this radio shines, previous models from Tecsun and others have not tuned well - making a chop chop sound - but this radio slides smoothly and the separate course and fine tuning knobs work well particularly if you're interested in sideband.

There's a switch for the display light that if you turn it on keeps the display lit even when the radio is turned off. Normal mode is to light up when you touch a control and then turn off again after a few seconds.

I found that the radio shows some signs of being overloaded when on the most sensitive position, various spurious signals can be heard that go away with the attenuator switched to the first position.

In all a great radio with controls familiar to you if you've ever had a previous Tecsun radio. My favourite feature is the sleep timer that turns it off after a settable period of time at night. High sensitivity, lovely smooth tuning, passable sideband and big clean sound that can fill the room. Recommended. AU$249.

Amazon Lightsail doesn't have virtual memory

My cloud hosting needs are modest. A couple of Wordpress blogs, an OpenVPN server, and a Tiny tiny RSS server. I use Amazon’s AWS services for S3 storage for miscellaneous files and backups using ARQ. When Amazon launched Lightsail with a VPS starting at just $5 a month (for 512MB RAM and 20GB SSD), I moved over from Linode where I was paying double that.

All seemed good at first, Amazon’s infrastructure gave me better ping times than others, but I noticed that mysql was going away from time to time. Tailing the system log I could see kernel out of memory messages and that it was killing mysqld. You see entries saying "OOM". The kernel kills the process that's using the most memory which tends to be mysqld.

My first thought was to increase the RAM but there’s no simple way to do this on Lightsail, you must take a snapshot (backup), make a new instance with the new memory and build it from the snapshot. When all is up the external static address is simply re-pointed to the new instance and the old instance can be stopped. This isn’t at all difficult but it seems like something computer software should do.

After upgrading the RAM it dawned on me why Linux was running out of RAM - Lightsail instances have no virtual memory! It turns out there’s no easy way to add a swap partition and they actually warn that if you did it would be too slow.

Paying $10 a month for a Lightsail instance with zero virtual memory becomes uncompetitive with my old favourite Linode who offer 1GB RAM and 30GB SSD including VM for the same price.

So, I’m back on Linode and frankly happy to be there. Amazon is a gorilla in the hosting game but their offering is incredibly complex and, it turns out, has some little gaps.

I realise my home use is at the very low end but, as the song says, “from little things, big things grow”.

Not having any virtual memory is a major problem for any real server.

Update: another low cost VPS provider: Vultr

Vultr is a new provider of virtual machines that starts (at the time of writing) at US$2.50 per month for 1CPU, 512MB memory, 20GB SSD and 500GB of bandwidth.

A suggestion from John.

Bandwidth is charged at the maximum of incoming and outgoing. Excess bandwidth is charged at 1 to 5 cents per GB (depending on where). You continue to be charged for a stopped instance - you must "destroy" it to stop being billed.

OS options are CentOS, CoreOS, Debian, Fedora, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Ubuntu, Windows or upload your own.

They claim to be faster than competition from AWS and Rackspace and given that I'm in Sydney and they have a location here, I'm going to give them a shot.

Accounts must be topped up before use, so I guess this is pre-pay, but once a first payment has been made they take Bitcoin which is handy.

Hmm, bait and switch eh? It turns out that once you pay them some money, the US$2.50 server size is "sold out" in Sydney... not impressed. By default the Ubuntu image has no swap, like Lightsail, but they have a guide to manually adding a swap file.

New weak signal mode FT8

Although it sounds disturbingly like a new rig from Yaesu, FT8 is actually a weak signal QSO mode from K1JT, Joe Taylor, and the folks who gave us WSPR and other modes. The mode is Franke-Taylor design, 8-FSK modulation.

I've just had my first contact with Steve VK6IR who is located right across this wide brown land.

I saw his CQ, received at -4dB, double clicked the line and the rest of the QSO, including signal reports each way, was automated.

Unlike WSPR where each over takes two minutes, the cycle time in FT8 is just 15 seconds so it feels a lot more like you're actually having some sort of conversation.

This new mode is in the latest builds of WSJT-X, version 1.8.0-rc1 in my case.

The release notes describe FT8 as follows:

"New mode called FT8: sensitivity down to -20 dB on the AWGN channel; QSOs 4 times faster than JT65 or JT9; auto-sequencing includes an option to respond automatically to first decoded reply to your CQ."

AWGN is Additive white Gaussian noise, obviously.

I kind of wish this was all a little bit more manual and that I could have a few more characters to personalise the QSO. Maybe we need a Twitter like digital mode?

Participating in GovHack

It's GovHack time again! This year it will be held over the weekend from Friday 28th to Sunday 30th July 2017. Back in 2015 I joined a team called "Hackasaurus Rex" with daughter Cat and her boss Ben and we participated at the Canberra location.

Ben brought graphic design skills, Cat did data analysis and transformation (in python) and I did iOS development.

On Friday night we looked at the amazing array of data available and came up with the idea of making an app that lets you check a place to live to see how... "liveable" it is.

The effort involved grabbing data from a variety of sources, normalising that data into scores that indicated the "goodness" of a location. Some data sets used postcodes and others used suburb names so there was some work required to map these.

While it was freezing cold in Canberra, the atmosphere in the room was warm and focussed.

I think having a small team worked well for us and the fact that our skills were all different and yet complementary meant there wasn't much overlap. Our entry suited the iterative development style that a hackathon invites in that we had something working pretty early on Saturday and were then able to add more data until we figured it was time to write up what we'd done and make the video you need to enter:

Making the video does take time and our approach was to make a recording of the mobile device screen first and then record a description which was added as the audio track later. Some teams did things as simple as making a slide show and exporting it as a movie while others made full on documentaries about their entry.

GovHack is a wonderful event, it encourages diverse teams to come together to work with fantastic data from enlightened government departments. The sponsors that get behind it are to be applauded and the organisers do a great job. This year I'm a volunteer and will be hanging out at the Sydney event.

If you're reading this before 28th July, get over to govhack.org to find out more and register. I look forward to seeing you there!

Lo-Key features QRP by the harbour

Thanks Lo-Key for featuring QRP by the harbour on the cover and in a feature article. It's a great newsletter of general interest beyond just CW operators. More info at http://www.vkqrpclub.org

Thanks to editor Terry, VK2KTJ, for promoting the event and giving us this coverage in such an auspicious journal. I encourage readers to subscribe via this page.

Future of Radio Australia Shortwave broadcasting - Senate Committee Hearings begin

Last Friday the Senate Committee hearings into a bill by Senator Xenophon to compel the ABC to resume short wave broadcasting began.

The SWLing Post reports that former RA transmission manager Nigel Holmes appeared. He jovially described being "grilled like a breakfast kipper" but I'm confident his encyclopaedic knowledge would have served the committee well.

I think it's important that there is a discussion about the value of short wave broadcasting at this time,  there have been many interesting submissions, in my submission I argue that it's not the archaic technology as it has been presented and in times of conflict or natural disaster it's the only thing that gets through.

Geoff Heriot has written that abandoning shortwave is just one more step in the winding down of Australia's engagement in the Pacific. Graeme Dobell describes the end of our shortwave service as "technical bastardly".

The inquiry has been granted an extension of time and will report on 9th August 2017.

Switched to the NBN - seems good

We've been receiving letters for months from ISPs offering to be the ones to connect us to the NBN which has just arrived in our area.

As we were already on Telstra cable we decided to switch with them. I chose to self install the modem and a router arrived a week ago. It was puzzling because it didn't have a cable connection on the back.

Today the missing piece, the black box shown at right, appeared and it connects to the cable and to the router.

The router is a white box titled "F@st 5355TLS" made by Sagemcom Broadband SAS, not a company I was previously aware of. It seems like a competent device with 2.4GHz and 5GHz radios, two ethernet ports (not counting the WAN port), USB file sharing, and a telephone line port which we don't plan to use.

In the past I had put the Netgear modem into bridge mode and used a TP-Link wireless router which served us well and I may well switch to that again if the Sagemcom box proves unreliable. So far all seems good and the measured speed is more than I was expecting (I'm paying for 50Mbps down and 20Mbps up).

Ping time is better than reported there, normally around 10-12ms. I'm not clear if the Sagemcom box is actually needed given that I have other routers here I'm happy with.

I had a few problems getting ethernet connected devices going, in the end connecting them one by one did the trick, there was some sort of network storm going on possibly triggered by the change in IP address range.

It's weird that when switching to the NBN you are compelled to get a landline phone - something we have not had for some years. Here's the bit of the signup form that forces you to get a phone:

I tried putting my mobile phone in there but it wouldn't let me. (Probably a bad idea anyhow). A few more tests tonight:

Update - first problems

Tonight I started to see high ping losses. This is from the router:

 Pinging 8.8.8.8 with 64 bytes of data:

 Reply from 8.8.8.8:  bytes=64  time=7  TTL=59  seq=1
 Reply from 8.8.8.8:  bytes=64  time=9  TTL=59  seq=2
 Reply from 8.8.8.8:  bytes=64  time=8  TTL=59  seq=3
 Reply from 8.8.8.8:  bytes=64  time=7  TTL=59  seq=4
 Request timed out.
 Reply from 8.8.8.8:  bytes=64  time=7  TTL=59  seq=6
 Reply from 8.8.8.8:  bytes=64  time=8  TTL=59  seq=7
 Reply from 8.8.8.8:  bytes=64  time=9  TTL=59  seq=8
 Request timed out.
 Reply from 8.8.8.8:  bytes=64  time=8  TTL=59  seq=10

 Ping statistics for 8.8.8.8
  Packets: Sent = 10, Received = 8, Lost = 2 (20% loss),
 Approximate round trip times in milliseconds:
  Minimum = 7, Maximum = 9, Average = 7

Telstra's service status shows no known issues, but I'm not sure if that is relevant any more.  Rebooted the router, no change. Rebooted the NBN cable interface box fixed it.

Now ping from my computer on the network looks pretty good:

Good value laptop for linux - not what you might expect

There are very low cost laptops around but they're often unsatisfying in the end. The family is down one Mac laptop at the moment due to a fault in the keyboard and I had a look at what's available second hand.

Generally Apple gear holds its price very well, which is great if you want to sell to upgrade but not so good of you want to get a cheap Mac.

There is a regular trickle of Mid 2012 MacBook Pros appearing on eBay. This model is the last one before they went retina.

With a 2.5GHz i5 CPU, they are built like a tank but are very easy to open and work on. Some people even say "The 2012 Non-Retina MacBook Pro Is Still the Best Laptop Apple Sells" and while that's not really the case if you value a high resolution screen and light weight, they are attractive at the right price.

I was pretty lucky and got one for AU$415. The battery wasn't great, a few key caps had been substituted, it had 4GB of ram and a slow spinning 500GB disk. Otherwise it's fine.

A few standard cross head screws aside and you're in and able to upgrade the machine.

As it came, and as they were at the time, the machine felt pretty slow. I added the following enhancements:

• 120GB SSD
• Extra 4GB RAM to take it to the maximum of 8GB
• New battery

The SSD makes a huge difference and if you are still running a spinning disk I can't recommend this upgrade enough. Four or five bounces to launch Safari is now just one.

These machines will run the latest edition of macOS, Sierra, and support AirDrop and Handoff.

A non-retina screen is a shock after getting used to it on every other device I look at. Apple's switch to the San Francisco font actually makes a non-retina screen look worse. There is a utility to switch the system font back but I found the font metrics are so wrong that you see lots of glitches running like that so I don't recommend it.

Linux

It turns out that dual booting Linux on a Mac does not require Boot Camp or any of those fancy EFI boot tricks.

To install boot into the recovery system by holding Command-R during power on and use Disk Utility to resize the main partition down to leave free space for Linux. Hold option during power up to boot from a Linux USB install drive.

Fedora Linux was installed into the free space on the disk. To choose which OS to boot into you simply hold the Option key down during power on and you get this nice menu.

Wifi doesn't immediately work after a clean linux install due to proprietary drivers but happily this machine has an ethernet port and I simply followed this recipe to get the driver installed and now Wifi works well. 

Everything else just works including volume, screen brightness keys and sleep on close.

It makes a very respectable Linux laptop. One thing to note that after the install you should boot into macOS and set the startup disk in System Settings so that by default it will boot into macOS (if that's what you want).

YouKits SK-1A QRP 40m transceiver review

YouKits is getting a good reputation for low cost amateur radio gear. Their antenna analyser is well regarded. When I saw a new mono-band 40m SSB / CW transceiver for US$189 including postage I couldn't resist. It's called an SK-1A.

It arrived very quickly and was easy to figure out even without reading the user manual.

While it comes with a Yaesu branded speaker / microphone, it's not wired to use the speaker in it so you must use headphones or an external speaker. Note that this transceiver does not have a built-in speaker which probably isn't a bad thing given the small size of the case.

I've had two contacts so far, one local and another VK2 to VK3. Both reported good audio from me and I found reception at my end pretty good. Disconnecting the antenna shows that the receiver is sensitive enough to hear band noise which is all you need on 40m.

The display is clear and the backlight is bright. The manual includes instructions for adjusting the display but it's not brightness or contrast, it lets you switch the backlight on, off, or auto.

Internally, construction seems good with lots of surface mount components used throughout. There's no circuit diagram in the manual, which is a pity, but you can see that the 6 crystal IF is on 4.9152Mhz and there are a few SA602A balanced mixers in there along with an LM386 audio amplifier.

The VFO board behind the front panel is compact and the software works well although I find the way pushes on the knob change between going up and down in step size a little weird. The soldering on the PIC microprocessor looks a little rough on my unit but all seems to work reliably.

The final is an IRF510 and I get about 4W peak output. I like the way they use shielded coils.

Main board soldering is good but clearly done by hand rather than machine.

Internally there's a socket for the 18650 Lithium battery pack which they supply with a charger but it looks like you'd need to open the case to charge the battery.

This radio is lower sideband only (along with CW), which is perfectly fine for voice contacts but I was rather hoping to use it for digital modes which normally need USB.

While a traditional SA602 based design, this radio works well enough and is more compact than even an FT-817. 40m is a good choice for a mono band QRP radio. There's no deafening thump during receive / transmit switching like I get on some other designs and audio output is more than enough for headphones but a little low for an external speaker.

Radio Australia's Shepparton broadcasting site for sale

For the ham who has everything... a lovely 500 acre vacant site at Shepparton, Victoria, Australia complete with short wave antennas (I assume).

More details here.

They say it's a significant "land banking" opportunity, whatever that is.

Close to a highly regarded school and just "moments" from the Shepparton Town centre.

But seriously, the site is up for sale while there is a pending bill before the senate calling for the restoring of shortwave radio.

There have been 40 submissions received (including one from your humble blogger). The inquiry is due to report on 9th August 2017.

Lovely cabinet work on site:

I'm advised that the property will be sold with buildings only, antennas and feed lines above ground will be removed.

The local Shepparton News is reporting that not everyone is happy with the shut down of the shortwave service.

rtl-sdr direct sampling on linux

There's a nicely put together rtf-sdr receiver box available on Ebay from China for about AU$45 with the direct sampling modification for HF already done for you and separate inputs for HF and VHF+.

There are several sellers so shop around.

You can see it on the right here and the box above it. (Click to enlarge)

Internally, it's an RTL2832U.

On my recent weekend visit to Kevin, VK2KB, I helped to get it going under Windows using SDR# software and this prompted me to get mine going at home under Fedora linux.

One mistake I've made before is that some USB cables seem to come wired only for charging and don't wire up the other USB connections. I wasn't seeing the device in lsusb and when I tailed the log (which, incidentally, has changed under Fedora since I last looked, to be sudo journalctl -f), there was no chatter as the device was plugged in. Trying alternate cables fixed this.

It turns out that GQRX finds the device just fine. To switch on direct sampling from the Q input, you set it like this:

CubicSDR saw the device but couldn't receive until I blacklisted the built-in TV reception driver by creating a file /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf and entering blacklist dab_usb_rtl28xxu in it. Then I rebooted.

After that, the CubicSDR device config looks like this:

And it receives 40m SSB like this:

(There's not much on at this time of day).

Update

To answer Carlo's comment below. Here's the wiring from dongle to board (marked in red).

Google reader alternative - tt-rss review

I still miss Google Reader which went away in 2013. It was an efficient way to catch up on all the RSS/Atom news feeds I subscribe to in a web browser.

The key feature I need is that whatever I use remembers what I've read and can be accessed from multiple devices that stay in sync.

When Reader went away I subscribed to FeedWrangler which works well but lacks a decent web interface so must be accessed from a macOS or iOS app such as Reeder.

Recently I've installed Tiny Tiny RSS, also known as tt-rss on a Fedora linux computer in my home network. The installation guide is good but I ran into a few things that were not right on Fedora 25.

I chose to use mariaDB (mysql clone) as the database although they recommend Postgresql.

From memory, the issues I encountered were:

• PHP couldn't connect to the database due to secure linux. 
• httpd couldn't write to the tt-rss web directory for config and cache writing. Needed # setsebool -P httpd_unified on
• The name of the mysql driver for php is different, I needed # dnf install php-mysqlnd
• # dnf install php-pdo php-gd php-mbstring php-common php-apc

To get my feeds imported, I exported the OPML file from FeedWrangler and imported it into tt-rss by going to Actions, Preferences, Feeds tab and there's a long horizontal panel called OPML that's a button for choosing the file to import.

The user interface is nice and clean and I particularly like how it responds to up and down arrow keys to roll through the stories in the scrolling panel.

Updating feeds

The authors suggest leaving a process running to do the updates (it sleeps periodically) but I prefer a cron job as follows:

*/30 * * * * /usr/bin/php /var/www/html/tt-rss/update.php --feeds --quiet

Anyway, so far I like it a lot and my plan is to eventually move it to a virtual server in the cloud. It looks like you can aggregate all of your unread items into a new feed and presumably read that from an app while out - this could possibly replace the commercial service I'm using at the moment.

QRPver pocket sized transceiver review

The QRPver is a US$80 1W QRP transceiver that is perfect for running digital modes such as PSK31. It connects to a computer via analog audio cables and has internal VOX so there's no need for an interface box or serial rig control.

It's about the size of a pack of cards as you can see in the photo on the right. 

I'm using it with Fldigi running on Fedora with a generic USB audio dongle. I did need to use the Sound application to increase the audio level a bit to get the VOX to trigger when I transmitted.

Note that the audio sockets are stereo sockets with left and right tied together so you do need to use stereo leads or you'll short audio to ground.

I ordered my QRPver for 14.070 (there are a range of bands and frequencies to choose from). 20m PSK31 was very lively a few years ago but at the moment seems rather abandoned for some reason, perhaps everyone's running JT65?

First contact was pre-arranged with Stephen, VK2BLQ who is pretty near by. Today VK5WOW popped up being operated by Grant, VK5GR who made a few comments about the signal not being all that clean and also it drifted about 20-50Hz during a longer over.

The QRPver draws just 20mA on receive and 650mA or so on transmit so it would be great for portable digital operation. The receiver seems sensitive enough and while not a perfect signal on transmit - something that might be because I need to tweak the level a bit or possibly there's some RF getting in to the audio - I think it's a great gadget for the travelling ham.

Switching from Ubuntu to Fedora Linux

Ubuntu has been great for me over about the last ten years. Prior to that I was a RedHat/Fedora user but when I joined a company that was all Debian based I made the switch and learned the joy of apt.

Recently I've run in to some hitches with Ubuntu. It throws up crash handlers from time to time. The ham radio applications offered in the official archives are often very old and recently I found that gnuradio installed with apt runs but crashes in use. (Building from source fixed this).

The announcement that Ubuntu is abandoning the Unity desktop and switching to Gnome prompted me to give Fedora another go (it's already on Gnome).

Things are smoother since last time I looked. On macOS the installer is downloaded in the form of a "media writer" application that downloads the image you need and creates a bootable USB key - much nicer that the dd business I've been doing.

Gnome is very slick these days and on the three machines I've tried so far everything mostly worked out of the box. On an HP laptop it didn't include the Broadcom wireless driver but that was fairly easily fixed. While not much is installed by default, I quickly wanted the nano editor. Amazingly hackrf was built in.

I'm quickly up and running with fldigi, wsjt-x, gnuradio, gqrx, and all the normal unix goodness. The work done by Ubuntu has raised the standard of all desktop linux distributions (not to mention the whole cloud and virtualisation world) and I'll miss Ubuntu for sure.

Fedora notes for an Ubuntu user

Instead of apt (or apt-cache and apt-get) there's something called "dnf" that replaces "yum". For some reason I find it hard to remember "dnf" and sometimes have to type yum so it will remind me.

sudo dnf update
sudo dnf search xxx
sudo dnf install xxx

I've eventually figured out that DNF stands for "Dandified Yum" but that fact is missing from the man pages. Under the hood it's Linux and all the tricks I've learned are the same regardless of the distribution.