Wfview works great on Odroid C4

1

I had some Odroid boards laying around so I figured I’d see how Wfview ran on them. Originally I installed on an Odroid C2 and it worked fine for local control but remote audio had a crazy amount of dropouts and clicks. The C2 is an older board with a not so new kernel so that was a toss up. I then installed on a C4 which is the newest offering and things worked great. I also have the Icom rs-ba1 software but I like the fact I can have a small low powered sbc connected to the radio.

2

Hi,

That’s great, glad to hear it! What radio are you connected to, and what kernel and os-version are you using?

uname -r
lsb_release -a
or
cat /etc/lsb-release

Thanks,

–E
de W6EL

3

The Odroid C2 seemed like it was up to the task, HTOP showed only 25-50% processor usage but remote audio had a bunch of clicks and drops regardless of any buffer settings. It probably has more to do with the kernel than the cpu.

Odroid C2 OS & Kernel
Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS (GNU/Linux 3.16.85-65 aarch64)

4

Hi Elliot, the radio is an Icom 7300

Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS (GNU/Linux 4.9.277-78 aarch64)

Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description: Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS
Release: 20.04
Codename: focal

73’s
Eric
de KB2FZG

5

Hi Eric,

Are you running the Odroid as the server, and some other computer as the client?

–E
de W6EL

6

Hi Elliott,

Yes the Odroid is the server and I have the client on my Surface Pro 3 and my main desktop. The main desktop has a 1 gig ethernet connection and the Surface runs over WiFi. Rxlatency on the Surface is around ~80ms with 2ms rtt. I’d have to check the desktop to get those stats. I do have a monitor, keyboard and mouse connected to the Odroid so I can interact with it while I’m in the shack.

de KB2FZG

7

Hi Eric,

You can try the Opus codec for about a 4x reduction in bandwidth. Select Opus as the TX and RX codec on the client, Save Settings, and then close and re-launch wfview.

Otherwise, every little bit of extra performance will help with real-time UDP. Try and stop windows from doing anything in the background such as Cortana, scanning for wifi access points, or checking for updates.

–E
de W6EL

8

I’ll give that a try and see how things work out. Interesting enough I took the Surface upstairs which caused me to roam from one access point to another and now latency is ~20ms with rtt still at 2. Another test I need to do is to see how this works over vpn.

de KB2FZG

9

Hi Eric,

Be aware that some VPNs mangle UDP packets. You may need to play with the sample size and/or codec.

–E
de W6EL

11

Thanks Elliott

 I'll play around with the3 codecs and see which one works the best over vpn.  I see that Opus uses much less bandwidth than the others.  Another thing I noticed but haven't looked into further is that changing codecs on the client causes just the server part of wfview to hang.  From the local wfview I can still control the radio over usb but remote connections fail.  I have to shut down the server side app which usually hangs when I try to shut it down but after restarting everything works great until the next codec change.
12

Ok I’m not sure why my other reply looks like that.