I'm really out of my league here, but feel your pain trying to understand sound devices under Linux with my own QDX, QMX, and X6100 radios and vanilla Debian.

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It's probably, first of all, an environment thing.? Cron jobs run under their own limited environment that comes and goes with the job.? Apparently the display environment is available to the job or else you wouldn't even have the JS8/WSJT-X GUI show up.? I'm guessing that you're logged in as a user with a graphical environment when the cron job launches, otherwise there would be no display environment, either.

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Again merely guessing, the ALSA devices are:? a) unavailable to the user under which the job runs;? b) considered busy and not made available to the temporary environment set during the job;? or c) available under the job environment, but the "connection" to them ends when the job environment disappears and JS8Call is left with some null reference.? Regarding (a), believe it or not, root is blocked from some system services - I presume for the sake of security - so could very well NOT have access to audio services when executing a job.

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These threads might be helpful:?

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The solution may basically be getting your login environment shared with the job so the devices are seen persistently.? The threads above have some troubleshooting suggestions that show whether the ALSA devices are even available when the job runs.

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Good luck!? Let us know when you figure it out.

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73,

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?? Dan

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