Greetings,
I thought I’d share my results thus far here. YMMV, of course, but this is what I’ve found in my testing.
Setup
Icom IC-7100 with Chameleon EmComm III Base antenna
Raspberry Pi 5 with Raspberry Pi OS (Linux hampi 6.1.0-rpi7-rpi-v8 #1 SMP PREEMPT Debian 1:6.1.63-1+rpt1 (2023-11-24) aarch64 GNU/Linux)
Wine + Box86 + Box64
Results
With some help from a couple of youtube videos and tips here on this list, I got things running. (The version of Box64 was really important.) I did initial testing with my Icom 7200 and a dummy load on the antenna. Rig comms were pretty easy to get working.
Then I moved to my 7100 with the real antenna.
Linux-based ham radio apps worked really well. I use GridTracker for logging and jtdx for FT8 a lot, so I got those going first. I also got flrig running so I could set rig parameters (e.g., power level) easily. All of these worked fine, although I occasionally have to reset audio device names in setup. (Not sure why, but they’d occasionally “forget” prior functioning configurations.) For GridTracker, I use UDP forwarding to send my log entries to my Mac running MacLogger. Worked flawlessly.
And then I started working with Winlink Express, VARA HF, and VARA FM. The good news is I got them all working and was able to send and receive emails via RMS as well as P2P. (I run an alternate NCS for Winlink Wednesday, so Winlink P2P mode matters greatly to me.)
The bad news is that stability is not ideal. Sometimes, when I switch from RMS to P2P, I get an error saying the TNC couldn’t initialize the server on 127.0.0.1. That seemed to be largely due to device resources being released slowly. If I waited a minute or two, it would usually work, but not always. I could manually kill windows process and that seemed to do it, but not every single time.
Even merely running for extended periods of time was not stable. I put my rig into VARA HF P2P mode and sent/received email with a buddy about 500 miles away (Alexandria, VA to Nashville, TN). It worked, bidirectionally just fine. But, after a couple hours, Winlink Express would sometimes die without warning or user interaction. Just poof and it was gone.
Conclusion
As of right now (Feb 2024), I feel the setup is great for lightweight portable operations. POTA would be awesome. Low power and light weight. Certainly, all the Linux ham apps ran like champs. My family and I take week-long trips to the North Carolina Outer Banks beaches often, and this will be my go-to for radio comms there. I run entirely on solar power + battery there, and this setup should be just fine. (Even better once the USB-C power issues are figured out completely.)
But, I am NOT ready to run it as my Winlink Wednesday station, though. I’ll stick with windows (ptui!) for now on that. When a windows (ptui!) app has better stability than a Linux one, that’s bad news. I hope things improve on that front, and I have no doubt they will.
Cheers,
Ken van Wyk, K0RvW
Armata Scientia
Peter VK3PYE