This past month, I was finally able to verify the official reference FreeDV application (“freedv-gui”) with RADEV2. With this, we’re now able to begin testing of RADEV2 with volunteers running this version of the software. So far, there have been mainly minor issues with the application itself and not the performance of RADEV2, which is encouraging. However, it’s still fairly early in the testing process, so there is still time for issues to come up.
Additionally, with the help of Claude, I’ve been able to finally do some optimization of the FreeDV application that I haven’t had time to do perviously. For example, it was able to attain an over 50% improvement in CPU usage on macOS in rendering the various GUI plots and other UI elements. Smaller improvements were also made for Windows and Linux (when using Wayland directly instead of Xwayland).
As another example of what AI is able to do, I also pointed it at FreeDV’s audio pipeline and it was able to find some additional optimization opportunities there. For instance, libsamplerate (which is what we use for audio resampling) has traditionally used as much or even more CPU than RADE itself for transmit. Claude simply analyzed the code, suggested some fixes, ran benchmarks to confirm and as a result, libsamplerate no longer shows up as using significant CPU usage.
Next month we’ll be at Pacificon talking about the new things going on with FreeDV as well as continuing testing of RADEV2.
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, 2026" --before "Month 31, 2026 23:59:59" --all