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:

patrickvk2pn@gmail.com said...

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

Anonymous said...

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

Peter Marks said...

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