NM5DV Softrock SDR Blog

Wow what a mouthfull of a topic.

Ok whacked away at alot of problems last night

For some reason I kept pulling up old links for dttsp. I found the correct place to download the latest version here: http://ewpereira.info/sdr-shell/

This file inparticular was the greatest help: http://ewpereira.info/sdr-shell/sdr.20060825.tar.gz There is a readme in there. Although its a bit confusing it covers getting the latest dttsp and compiling the sdr-core.

Having said that Ill go off for a bit on what confused me. There is a .deb package that I was trying to use. One of the dependencies is xmms-jack.

I was able to compile it and install it as normal but when I would try to install the package apt / dpkg was looking for an installed package of xmms-jack. It was also doing this for xmms. Now personally I love xmms and xmms-jack, and I cannot understand why ubuntu decided to remove it. I wish they would make it a bit easier to get it back on the system.

I worked my way around by using two techniques, for xmms I compiled it as normal and then insted of “sudo make install” I did “sudo checkinstall”. This entered it as a package into apt and it was hapilly there. I”ll document this more later.

Unfortunately that didnt work for xmms-jack so I had to use equivs. This makes a fake package and you install that and makes apt think its installed while you sneak around its back and compile the source.

Ill post details and files of both of these in a seperate post as this info could be usefull for other people not related to sdr. I am happy to have my xmms back on ubuntu 8.04 hardy.

Well after I knocked out that problem the package from http://www.nitehawk.com/w3sz/start.htm was installed and the backend actually worked. None of the frontends worked though and something just didnt seem right.

So I ended up uninstalling it.

Here is where I am at now:

download this file http://ewpereira.info/sdr-shell/sdr.20060825.tar.gz

tar -xvf ./sdr.20060825.tar.gz

cd sdr

nano ./README

Thank you pu1jte n1vtn

List of dependencies (youll note xmm-jack there so I didn’t completely waste my time even though just compiling it should satisfy the compile dep)

The README is pretty good there is a problem with some of the scripts not copying into the new /bin directory after a new download and compile of dttsp. Off the top of my head (it was 3am and I didn’t Document it that well) setup_env was not in there copy it from the original /bin file. Also a chmod +x * in the /usr/local/sdr/dttsp wont hurt.

I’m sure there is something else but I can’t remember it right now.

ok now you can type:

sudo . /usr/local/sdr/dttsp/bin/setup_env
sudo /usr/local/sdr/dttsp/bin/sdr.sh start

and as happend to me my speakers miracoulosly spit out the sweet sound of static.

And now :

. /usr/local/sdr/dttsp/bin/setup_env
/usr/local/sdr/sdr-shell/bin/sdr-shell

This should start the gui frontend sdr-shell.
Continued:

Just wanted to get some additiona information for people that might be having a problem.

You have to start dttsp as root. because it writes the fifos (kind of like raw output written to a file and then read by the front end :sdr-shell) to an area /dev/shm/ .This is an area that only root should be allowed to write.

On the /dev/shm note theres three fifos in there :

• SDRcommands
• SDRmeter
• SDRspectrum

Not too sure about whats in there but we can make a good guess at the meter and spectrum.

Ok also a note on ubuntu and root. If you feel confident in your linux abilitys you can su root.

This will make you root for a while. The trick is … (in ubuntu) to first do a sudo passwd then type your new root password.

Also note that /usr/local/sdr/ is a root only area. So if you want to edit copy compile or move anything in there you need root priveldges

I think I think I had a problem with some bad fifos in the /dev/shm directory  so I sudo rm -rf ‘d them. The sdr.sh script will make new ones.

and just a quick recap of whats in my directory

yggdrasil@Sasha:/usr/local/sdr/dttsp/bin$ ls -l -a  /usr/local/sdr/dttsp/bin
total 168
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root   4096 2009-01-23 10:43 .
drwxr-xr-x 7 root root   4096 2009-01-23 01:28 ..
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root    219 2009-01-23 01:17 cmdr
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root    865 2009-01-23 01:17 duplex-conn
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root    786 2009-01-23 01:17 duplex-startup
-rw-r–r– 1 root root      0 2009-01-23 10:45 .replay
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root    169 2009-01-23 01:17 sdr-conn
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 106526 2009-01-23 01:19 sdr-core
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root     35 2009-01-23 01:17 sdr-run
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root   4332 2009-01-23 10:22 sdr.sh
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root    372 2009-01-23 01:31 setup_env
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root    279 2009-01-23 01:17 setup-ipc
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root    710 2009-01-23 01:17 simplex-cw-conn
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root    465 2009-01-23 01:17 simplex-cw-startup
drwxr-xr-x 6 root root   4096 2009-01-23 01:17 .svn

Good luck. If you are having a hard time with anything feel free to drop me a line.

Once you get this part up fldigi just needs a few sound card adjustments but ill cover more on this in another post.

73’s. de nm5dv