Portal:HAM Radio

Welcome to the HAM (Amateur) Radio Portal edit

HAM Radio or Amateur Radio Linux program description overview, including use-cases for combining Linux and amateur radio, applications to meet those goals, and how openSUSE fits into that picture.

Why Linux and Ham Radio?

Over the past century or so, ham radio has been about more than communicating, but also experimenting and pushing the boundary of radio as a hobby and a technology. Now, as much as ever, radio experimentation is alive and well. Linux - as a kernel, OS, and platform - is perfectly suited to the experimental and tinkering aspects of amateur radio. Even so, stable and mature software for supporting amateur radio is often found at home in a Linux environment. Some brief use cases include:

Computer control of radio transceivers (CAT)
Using programming software to preload or configure handhelds
Digital Modes - Digital protocols (text or voice) implemented in software, then streamed to/from the radio as audio
Networking - Ham radio networking is built in to the Linux IP stack!
Software Defined Radio - SDR has opened the floodgates of RF experimentation to hobbyists

User documentation

The most useful packages are included in openSUSE Tumbleweed, please check the Software Search. Installing the package maintained for your distribution is the recommended and preferred way.

Most packages assume familiarity with the radio subject matter, as may be achieved by passing a HAM radio license exam and practical training in a local club. Transmissions on HAM radio bands requires a license, while reception-only (SWL) is generally allowed.

Below is a list of learning platforms by location:

Germany: https://www.50ohm.de/
US: https://www.arrl.org/getting-licensed
UK: https://rsgb.org/main/clubs-training/

Common HAM Radio Programs

Incomplete list of Hamradio programs as recommended by the Linux in the Ham Shack Podcast:

zypper install chirp cqrlog QtRadio xsmc-calc qrq tqsl xlog

Using repositories

Only if needed, users can add the repositories for additional or updated packages.

zypper ar --refresh --check obs://hamradio hamradio
zypper ar --refresh --check obs://hardware:sdr hardware_sdr
zypper ref

General help

If you need any help join the channel #opensuse of irc.opensuse.org.

Reporting bugs

See Submitting_bug_reports.

Development documentation

We invite bug fixes and package contributions from our target audience at any level of involvement. See "How to contribute to Factory" to get started.

Development team:

Martin Hauke (obs: mnhauke)
Martin Pluskal (obs: pluskalm)
Wojciech Kazubski (obs: wkazubski)
Дмитрий Рощин (obs: Dmitry_R)
Andreas Stieger (obs: AndreasStieger)

Development projects

We maintain two development projects: hamradio for software of general interest for HAM radio, such as software related to logging, CW, digital modes, learning CW. We also maintain packages in hardware:sdr for making use of modern Software Defined Radio hardware and related digital processing of radio signals.

Development guidelines

We apply the same general guidelines as applicable for packages in the openSUSE project. While we have some flexibility we see them as guidelines to achieve good quality and long-term maintainability, certainly for any package that we intend to include in the openSUSE distribution.

For package versions, we pick the latest upstream release. We may deviate to newer git versions if we have a good reason to do so. For fixing builds broken by dependencies, we prefer to apply a patch. We use either downloadable sources or reproducible source services. We are good open source citizens, so we will attempt to send upstream any bugfix or build fix patches that we create.

We do not modify packages directly in the project, even if we have project or package write access access. We branch the packages and submit our changes as submit requests. This provides visibility to other project maintainers for feedback or follow-up suggestions. The only exception is the "obvious rule": typo fixes, fixing _link files, or forgetting to delete old tarballs.

Project maintainers can make changes to packages that have package level maintainers, but they should wait for an appropriate amount of time (2-3 days) to allow them to reviews.

We provide a package changelog that summarizes the most important changes as an information to the reasonably informed user. This includes major new features or incompatible changes, but excludes items not relevant to the user. We document the rationale for any non-obvious packaging changes.

We generally submit packages for inclusion in the openSUSE Tumbleweed distribution to make them available to a broad audience.