Hello - I have a server usage question prior to owning any Icom radio.
I have experience with a remote setup using a Yaesu radio with USB audio and FLRig for remote control. To remote to my radio I run a connection over NoMachine to a dedicated RPi that is attached to the radio USB.
I chose NoMachine for the screen sharing (FLRig control) and integrated bi-directional audio piping. The CPU % used for nomachine is a bit high, but it’s really audio that has been challenging - first just finding a solution and then using it reliably as the internet UL at the cabin is limited to a cruddy 1.5Mbps DSL.
I’m wondering if …
I can set my radio up to say a repeater I like to to monitor via FLRig (my current setup) and then use wfview (without any rig control) to stream the USB audio in and out of the RPi?
I would love to try this before purchasing an Icom radio - my hope is for more control on compression and BW such that I have a more reliable audio link. If audio link configuration is more successful, I will buy an Icom 7300 and go all in!
Heading up to cabin this weekend - if you have ideas I’d like to try and setup things up while I’m there. Thanks so much!
wfview server : RPi built , installed and starts without errors even though no Icom radio is present ; I set it it up to be a server on my local network with audio in/out using the local USB Codec
wfview client : MacOS build
If I manually set the radio to an active frequency I am able to connect the Mac client to the RPI server over my home network and stream audio (only trying RX so far)
I cannot run FlRig to control the radio as wfview and flrig conflict. I saw the rigctld option and explored that but it doesn’t help my situation because it can’t connect to the radio, only allows another application to connect to same radio wfview is already connected to (if I understand it correctly)
I don’t think wfview has an option to connect to an external rig control application so I may have hit the end of my experiment as once wfview is running it takes over the USB connections.
Open to any ideas anybody might have that I can try while I’m physically at the radio QTH
You should really read the manual carefully. There are several ways of sharing control with wfview, including methods that work with fldigi and flrig. We’ve put a lot of work into this. We began with tools like “socat” and have progressed quite a lot since then.
I am so impressed by the SW I whole heartedly agree with your comment and have tried to do the reading myself - including that chapter - which is why I thought I might be able to do it.
The SW is awesome piece of kit - and the documentation you folks produce is way beyomnd what most community SW packages release. I have read most everything you publish and commend you on those efforts.
Reading through it however what I understand is that the implementation requires wfview to control the rig and is then able to share access to that rig to an external program. Makes sense for all the common use cases.
What I need for this experiment (without a Icom radio) is for another program (flrig) to control the radio USB connection and share access with wfview. I don’t see anywhere in wfview documentation how you can use an external application for the rig control - it all seems built in.
Please correct me if I’m not understanding the implementation, I’m still trying to wrap my brain around the features and options here. Some day in the future I’d like to be able to use the whole system as intended.
I did manage to get RX audio to stream over the wfview server to client. I managed to keep flrig from conflicting with it too - I just tune a station with flrig and the audio comes through wfview - I can close the VNC connection to save BW and just have audio over the link - seemed to work pretty well with the 8 bit options even over cellular network. wfview says (no tx) in the audio section - presumably becuase I can’t set up an actual radio so can’t comment on that but based on RX working nice and stable I’d say the prospect look good!