This month involved more improvements to the FreeDV GUI application. One improvement involved the unit test framework; it’s now possible to capture the features decoded by RADE (prior to being fed into the FARGAN codec). This is useful for quantifying changes in the receive pipeline and ensuring that what’s encoded by RADE is also mostly returned by the decoder on a clean channel.
The biggest improvement, however, is the implementation of the same LDPC based callsign encoding and decoding system that’s used in the legacy FreeDV modes. This data is placed in what’s known as the End Of Over (EOO) block at the end of the RADE transmission and allows the application to report received callsigns to FreeDV Reporter and PSK Reporter, albeit only at the end of the transmission. FreeDV Reporter specific logic was added to mitigate this by reporting that a RADE signal is being received once a second while still in sync (just with no callsign), hopefully still allowing people to see that someone’s possibly decoding them in real time.
Since we’re touching the FreeDV Reporter logic, it was also a good opportunity to make some significant changes to the FreeDV Reporter service and website. First, the “left the chat”/”entered the chat” messages were removed by PLT request in order to make it easier to see actual chat messages. Next, the separate popup window for viewing who’s in the chat was removed in favor of an always-visible bar at the bottom of the chat tab containing the callsigns of the users that are logged into chat. The message backlog was also extended to 30 days (from 7 days) and preserved into a database so that the chat messages aren’t lost in the event that the FreeDV Reporter server needs to be restarted.
Besides the above, there were some other minor fixes with the Windows installer/uninstaller along with logic added to detect whether microphone permissions have been granted. RADE is also now called RADEV1 in the FreeDV application to differentiate it versus a future version 2 of RADE. Some infrastructure was also added to be able to sign macOS builds (required to avoid errors involving “damaged” applications in newer versions of macOS).
In any case, we’re now going to focus on additional testing prior to releasing a new preview build of FreeDV for general usage. Hopefully we’ll have additional updates on that soon.
More information can be found in the commit history below:
(Note that all commit logs above were generated with the following command line:)
git log --author="member@email" --after "Month 1, 2024" --before "Month 31, 2024" --all > commit.log
When you release the new version of RADEV1, I would really appreciate you letting me know.
Thank you.
There’ll definitely be announcements here and elsewhere (i.e. Discord) when the next preview release of 2.0 is officially released to the public 🙂
A suggestion for small helpful feature on future version of RADE. I use antenna tuners that need a sine wave to do “its thing”. The two I use will not respond to the RADE frequency spectrum transmitted. It would be helpful to have a button to activate a low frequency tone in pass band (so it would not interfere with other stations) with an adjustable output level that could be set by the user when RADE is not in operation. I am enjoying the current version and look forward to the next one.
Hi Dayne,
Please submit a feature request form, instructions on the home page.
Thanks,
David