--

richard
kd8noa

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Oh and to explain my PSM suggestion Don.

PSM is "kind of " like the old AX25 FM squelch detect where the TX wont key whilst a valid signal is still in the RX passband. It does this by "buffering" the outbound signal and asserting PTT only when the RF channel is clear. It can also add the usual slot/persist delay numbers to reduce hidden TX problems.

I used it in the past with fldigi when I setup some auto responding notification scripts. Simple command stuff like "send me a picture", or "what is your current GPS output". PSM let me send a reply as soon as the channel was clear rather than using a fixed delay.

For your particular case the TX audio also needs to appear in the RX stream. The simplest way to do that is to just enable the transceiver monitor. If that isn't available a local audio software loopback will probably work.

Cheers Bob

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Hi Don

I often run two instances of fldigi using the same audio device (Icom 9100) I also can concurrently run wsjt-x and qsstv. CAT is shared via flrig. I do of course QSY for the latter modes. The 2nd fldigi instance is mainly for RX only but it does allow TX.

Pulseaudio and Pipewire under Linux quite happily share the audio channels. I assume Windows has a similar feature.

In the config the 2nd fldigi instance has "Flrig PTT keys modem" under rig control checked. I don't use it this way, but I can (for example) TX two separate modes on the same frequency with (say) different audio offsets.

My main fldigi command start is;
/usr/local/bin/fldigi --home-dir /home/user/.fldigi
My main fldigi command start is;
/usr/local/bin/fldigi --home-dir /home/user/.fldigi.rxonly

The configs also differ in the TCP ports used for flamp I/O. No doubt flmsg would need a similar setup. I don't think flarq can be setup that way though.

TX/RX contention would be an issue. I have not looked into that. Perhaps PSM (under fldigi) could be used to detect the "other modem" in the same bandpass and thus stall the TX for a while.

wsjt-x needed some features disabled so it wouldn't do automatic CAT things.

Cheers Bob VK2YQA

This is a strange problem you're trying to solve. Do you really need to run two modes on the same transceiver at the same time? You do realize that will cause problems when one mode wants to transmit and the other mode is in the middle of reception, since no conventional amateur transceiver is full-duplex. How are you going to coordinate the need to transmit versus receive? It's a lot more than just figuring how to share the CAT port. Now, if this is receive-only, then you can use various sound mixing applications to create virtual sound cards for the two instances of fldigi (assuming you have figured out how to get them to use different configuration subdirectories).

You might want to figure out those higher-level issues.

Andrew, KA2DDO

________________________________________
From: [email protected] <[email protected]> on behalf of John W Totzke - W0JWT - MO <jwtotzke@...>
Sent: Saturday, July 27, 2024 12:35 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [nbems] Can one run two instances of FLDIGI at the same time?

Use Flrig to control the two fldigi setups. Search the web, there are some doc. on how to do it.

On Sat, Jul 27, 2024 at 11:32?AM Don Rolph via groups.io<> <don.rolph@...<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
kd8ftr:

Thanks for replying.

So this is using two different transceivers.

My need is to run two modes simultaneously on one transceiver/one frequency. So I believe i would have to be able to share the card AND disambiguate the CAT control com port.

On Sat, Jul 27, 2024 at 12:29?PM kd8ftr via groups.io<> <kd8ftr@...<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
I have setup 2 instances of FLDigi one VHF one HF.
I used a signalink for one instance and internal card for the other, so I can't think of a way to share one card easily.
For setup I created two separate folders with different names, made a copy of all the folders in each directory, changed the default port for flmsg on one, and used the command line options to direct the desktop shortcut to the correct file.


--

73,
AB1PH
Don Rolph


--
John W. Totzke W?JWT

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I had originally thought to make this a wiki entry, but this and other ideas are probably worth discussing. It may be of use to the NBEMS groups. Note these methods generally are not worth it if the TX payload size is (say) <500 bytes/characters.

I have been experimenting with sending larger files over HF (like 150kbytes max) and thought I may share some of the pre-processing ideas I have worked though. I have been more or less using flamp/fldigi with PSK250RC7 (and slower) as well as HamDRM EasyDRF E/B/A 4/16/256 and recording/playback via a remote SDR. These tests ranged from 40-15m on 300-4000km paths. I never seem to be able to arrange ARQ and BSR sessions with other amateurs!

There are two basic kinds of transfers, lossy and not. Lossy in a sense also includes the picture modes of Thor, IFKP, FSQ and MFSK etc. I could argue too that a jpg file is also lossy, but for this exercise I am talking about whatever file data I send is faithfully received at the RX end. It is worth pointing out that DSSTV programs like EasyPAL and QSSTV by default actually re-encode pictures to a lesser quality (as JP2's), so the result is not as good as the original.

So onto some real world uses.
- JPG's are an obvious for a scene/event photo, but terrible for a scanned pieces of paper. They generally tend to be a bit large for HF so any method to reduce size without drastically reducing their usefulness is worth a thought. I am sure the quality and resolution side (and cropping) is well understood, so in addition;
?? ?- Dropping from 24bit colour to 8bit monochrome reduces by about 15-25%
?? ?- Changing DCT sub-sampling from 4:4:4 to 4:2:0 reduces by about 15%
?? ?- The EXIF tags and image thumbnail can add 20-25kbytes to the file, so worthwhile removing unless needed.
- PNG as a drop-in for 24bit/colour JPG's (conversion) doesn't help at all as it is lossless. As a 1 (b/w) or 16 colour though they are worth trying. It is worthwhile ensuring that the image to process contains solid areas of 1 colour though. Dithering makes them huge. Think cartoons or limited colour logos.
- G4 TIF is about the best compressed bitmap B&W standard there is. This was the original format used in the Windows Faxviewer, so seems well supported.
- Using a cell phone to take a photo of a black/written/drawn page of paper works well. There probably isn't any need to go larger than the resolution of a "fine mode fax". A 1500x2000 JPG half page of text that has been threshold detected and converted to PNG is about 39kBytes, but as a G4 tiff that comes down to maybe 26kBytes. A simple map drawn on paper with a thick pen will be much smaller.
- Vector graphic standards romp all over bitmap for filesize. These include PDF, EPS and SVG. Be wary though about just converting an existing bitmap. By default postscript and PDF will save that as a bitmap area and will therefore be huge. As a guide, extracting just the PA-B circuit diagram page from my Icom 9100 PDF manual is about 123kBytes.
- There are tools that convert raster to vector, Potrace comes to mind, but there are others. You might photograph a hand drawn (with ruler) map or diagram, convert it to B&W (BMP, PBM etc) then use potrace to create SVG, PDF, EPS etc. The straighter the lines on the paper are the smaller the filesize will be.
- Simplifying GPX tracks. You may like to walk around with your GPS equipped phone and log your track. Simplifying is worthwhile as it removes points in the middle of straight lines. It is also possible to use the standard phone camera and snap images with location enabled. These images can be used to create a GPS track and is also possible to overlay the images on a map. Google Earth allows this as does Viking. In an EMS situation, walking around photographing geolocated damage might be helpful, but only relevant to radio xfers if the cell phone system was down!

Software tools - Linux & Windows (EasyDRF runs under wine). Note the code examples are in Linux format.
- Personally I use Gimp (GUI) for many bitmap functions, for one offs.
- Viking (GUI) for displaying geotagged images and some GPX processing.
- GPSbabel (GUI/CLI) for conversion/simplifying tracks/routes/waypoints. It will even create POIs for Garmin GPS units.
- Exiftool (CLI) for manipulating image (and movie) EFIX tags
- ImageMagick (CLI) for manipulating images, en-mass if need be. Main program subnames are convert and mogrify.
- EasyDRF (GUI) HamDRM based DSSTV like file/text transfers. Has better performance than QSSTV/EasyPAL. Runs under Wine. Operationally similar to flamp, ie full/partial resends, broadcast FEC mode, but doesn't handle a modem change mid transfer.
- Fldigi, Flamp, Flmsg, Flarq, Of course!

Code examples, CLI

Imagemagick - In most cases "mogrify" can be substituted for "convert" to overwrite the input file with the same name. Mogrify also works well on directories of files whereas convert will need a scripting loop.

Convert/overwrite a JPG image sub-sampling
This is a code segment I used to convert a through windscreen webcam image for queued/scheduled flamp transmission. (which is another project entirely) A good example of Imagemagick possibilities.
?convert input.jpg? \
?? ?-gravity Center -crop 960x360+0+0 +repage \
?? ?-resize 480x180 \
?? ?-auto-level -channel RGB -auto-gamma \
?? ?-strip -interlace Plane -sampling-factor 4:2:0 \
?? ?-define jpeg:dct-method=float \
?? ?-gravity NorthWest -fill red -font Times-Roman -pointsize 16 -annotate +1+1 "See EXIF" \
?? ?-quality 65 \
?? ?/home/user/.nbems/FLAMP/tx/output.jpg

Convert/overwrite a JPG image to 8 bit monochrome
?convert input.jpg -set colorspace Gray -separate -average output.jpg

Convert a JPG image to G4 TIF, including 50% resize
?convert input.jpg -auto-level -auto-gamma -threshold 50% -resize 50% -compress Group4 output.tif
Play with the threshold manually if needed

Convert a JPG to B&W bitmap then create a SVG file.
?convert input.jpg -auto-level -auto-gamma -threshold 50% interim.pbm
?potrace interim.pbm -b svg -o output.svg
Obviously possible to pipe the first to second command directly.

Remove EXIF tags and thumbnail/preview from JPG's (and any other image type that would have them)
?exiftool -ThumbnailImage= input.jpg (Remove just the thunbnail)
?exiftool -Preview:All= input.jpg (Remove just the preview thunbnail)
?exiftool -ifd1:all= -ext jpg input.jpg (remove thumbnail and directly associated EXIF tags)
?exiftool -all= input.jpg (remove all EXIF tags)
exiftool can work on wildcard filenames and directories but by default will save the original as input.jpg_original. This can be changed by adding the -overwrite_original switch.

Simplify GPS tracks - for gpx and nmea input
?gpsbabel -i gpx -f input.gpx -x simplify,crosstrack,error=0.002k -x position,distance=5m -o gpx -F output.gpx
?gpsbabel -i nmea -f input.nmea -x simplify,crosstrack,error=0.002k -x position,distance=5m -o gpx -F output.gpx
The output includes date/time position speed, but also some satellite info and vdop/hdop. For on the ground re-usage it may be better to reduce the filesize by converting to a route rather than leave as a track. There are many options in gpsbabel that one can play with! If you don't feel like checking, the simple filter;
?cat output.gpx |grep -vE 'dop|speed|sat' >output2.gpx
will remove the extraneous data approximately halving the file size.
The output is also essentially text so it will compress quite happily with gzip/zip etc, but it may be better to just use the on the fly (text) compressing of flamp/flmsg/EasyDRF. As a general guide I took a drive day 5 fix/sec gpx file of 50 miles over 70 minutes (7.3MBytes), applied the filter above down to 100kBytes, then compressed down to 9.3kBytes

Create GPS GPX from directory of geoencoded images
Firstly create a format file as below ()
?exiftool -fileOrder gpsdatetime -p gpx.fmt <input-dir> > output.gpx

#------------------------------------------------------------------------------
# File:???????? gpx.fmt
#
# Description:? Example ExifTool print format file to generate a GPX track log
#
# Usage:??????? exiftool -p gpx.fmt -ee3 FILE [...] > out.gpx
#
# Requires:???? ExifTool version 10.49 or later
#
# Revisions:??? 2010/02/05 - P. Harvey created
#?????????????? 2018/01/04 - PH Added IF to be sure position exists
#?????????????? 2018/01/06 - PH Use DateFmt function instead of -d option
#?????????????? 2019/10/24 - PH Preserve sub-seconds in GPSDateTime value
#
# Notes:???? 1) Input file(s) must contain GPSLatitude and GPSLongitude.
#??????????? 2) The -ee3 option is to extract the full track from video files.
#??????????? 3) The -fileOrder option may be used to control the order of the
#?????????????? generated track points when processing multiple files.
#------------------------------------------------------------------------------
#[HEAD]<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
#[HEAD]<gpx version="1.0"
#[HEAD] creator="ExifTool $ExifToolVersion"
#[HEAD] xmlns:xsi=
#[HEAD] xmlns=
#[HEAD] xsi:schemaLocation=>
#[HEAD]<trk>
#[HEAD]<number>1</number>
#[HEAD]<trkseg>
#[IF]? $gpslatitude $gpslongitude
#[BODY]<trkpt lat="$gpslatitude#" lon="$gpslongitude#">
#[BODY]? <ele>$gpsaltitude#</ele>
#[BODY]? <time>${gpsdatetime#;my ($ss)=/\.\d+/g;DateFmt("%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ");s/Z/${ss}Z/ if $ss}</time>
#[BODY]</trkpt>
#[TAIL]</trkseg>
#[TAIL]</trk>
#[TAIL]</gpx>

And that's it! I'm impressed if you read right through!

Cheers Bob VK2YQA

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Lem/Bruce

I launch a fldigi-shell flrig-shell bash script as needed to log various parameters, including s/n. The script is is very untidy/rough. I'll streamline it one day hi.

Partial;

while [ -f /home/user/snlog.flg ] ; do
?? ?touch /home/user/snlog.active
?? ?# check fldigi process and self kill
?? ?if [ "`ps -C fldigi --no-headers`" = "" ] ; then
?? ???? pkill -f snrlogstream
?? ???? rm -f /home/user/snlog.active
?? ???? exit 0
?? ?fi

?? ?DSTRING=`date --rfc-3339=seconds -u`
?? ?FREQ=`fldigi-shell -c "rig.get_frequency"`
?? ?BWDTH=`fldigi-shell -c "rig.get_bandwidth"`
??? SMETER=`flrig-shell -c "rig.get_Sunits"|tail -n 1|grep -v Error|grep -v rig|tr -d " "`
?? ?MODEM=`fldigi-shell -c "modem.get_name"`
?? ?CALL=`fldigi-shell -c "log.get_call"`
?? ?SNR=`fldigi-shell -c "main.get_status1"|tr -d "s/n: "`
?? ?if [ "$CALL" = "" ] ; then
?? ???? CALL=NONE
?? ???? echo $DSTRING $FREQ $BWDTH $MODEM $CALL $SNR $SMETER >>/home/user/.fldigi/snr3.log
?? ???? echo $CALL $SNR $SMETER >>/home/user/.fldigi/snr3n.log
?? ?else
?? ???? echo $DSTRING $FREQ $BWDTH $MODEM $CALL $SNR $SMETER >>/home/user/.fldigi/snr3.log
?? ???? echo $CALL $SNR $SMETER >>/home/user/.fldigi/snr3n.log
??? fi

?? ?sleep 6
??? #6 is about 10 secs
?? ???? STATE=`fldigi-shell -c "main.get_trx_state"`
?? ?while [ "$STATE" = "TX" ] ; do
?? ???? STATE=`fldigi-shell -c "main.get_trx_state"`
?? ???? echo $STATE >>/tmp/logsn.tmp
?? ???? sleep 5
?? ?done
done

Logfile;

Date,Time,Freq,Bwidth,Modem,Callsign,S/N,Smeter
2024-07-11 07:20:54+00:00 14071000.000000 500 OLIVIA-8/250 KF7KKR -2.3dB S0
2024-07-11 07:21:06+00:00 14071000.000000 500 OLIVIA-8/250 KF7KKR -6.5dB S0
2024-07-11 07:21:18+00:00 14071000.000000 500 OLIVIA-8/250 KF7KKR -3.2dB S0
2024-07-11 07:21:29+00:00 14071000.000000 500 OLIVIA-8/250 KF7KKR -3.1dB S0
2024-07-11 07:21:40+00:00 14071000.000000 500 OLIVIA-8/250 KF7KKR -3.1dB S0

Cheers Bob VK2YQA

Is there anyway to capture the S/N of a station when they check into a net? I use FLnet to log stations. I could also record them in a log for FLdigi. The current macro I am using is:

<CALL> <INFO1>

Then I have to cut and paste into notepad or something like that.

Thank you,

--
Bruce WA1YZN