Qt Dab Versions Save

Qt-DAB-6.X is the development version of Qt-DAB. It seems fairly stable though. Apart from some errors related to servicename identification and multiple scans, errors that are repaired in this version, the main visible changes are (1) the inclusion of a selection between portaudio and Xmultimedia as "output driver". For selection, the configuration widget has a selector. (2) some services do not contain a "slide show", in which case a default label is shown. In the 6.X version, the single default label is replaced by a number of slides with (most of them) in the background showing a computer from my youth (3) there were some problems with the identification of TII data, since in my environment there are two transmitters where the software seems unable to decide which has the strongest signal so I added a "block option", where the software selects on other criteria than strength of the correlation. Furthermore, the TII decoding is slightly adapted, such that it tries to identify TII data from more than a single transmitter. the configuration widget contains a "DX" selector, when enabled, Qt-DAB-6.X shows in a separate table all transmitters that are detected.

As usual, there is an AppImage and there are three Windows installers (one 64 bit, and 2 3 bit versions, the 32 bit versions support RTLSDR V4 resp RTLSDR V3)

A small - but irritating error - was removed. I was too enthousiastic in cleaning up the dx display, but with switching services there is no need to do so. Fixed

21-04: documentation uploaded and versions with (experimental) support for journaline

After some time indicating the version as Beta. it is now time to freeze the functionality and move on. Copared to the most recent Beta version there are not mmany changes.

The changes are such that maintaining V4 was not realistic, saving V5 succeeded. As usual (for some time now) there are two 32 bit windows versions, one with support for V4 dabsticks (which seems to make the software a little deaf when using older type dabsticks) and one for support for V3.

The 64 bit Windows version is compiled with V4 support in. The known issue is that in this versions not all types of slide can be displayed.

Further development will be done in the version in the directory "qt-dab-RC"

Qt_DAB 6.5Beta is the logical successor of 6.40. The most important visible change is the "double view" in what was the ensemble list. The list now shows either the ensemble list - with a mark for those services that are included in the favorites list - or the favorites list - with for each service the channel where it was found. Furthermore, Qt_DAB now has support for accessing a spyServer (although one needs quite some bandwidth to use it).

It turned out that some virus scanners (falsely) detected something in the Windows installers. Removing all optimization flags in the compilation seems to have solved that. Of course the Linux AppImage is optimized maximally.

As usual, two windows installers (with different libraries included for RTLSDR V4 support and for support of only older versions) and an AppImage for use in Linux x64, a manual is updated and included in the sourcetree and in the list below.

The installer 6.5Beta contains the RTLSDR library supporting the V4 versions, the installer with V3 in its name has support for the older sticks.

As (almost always) some virusscanners (Windows of course) merk the 6.5 installers as infected, most don't. Since with 6.40 no such signals were received, I added a freshly compiled 6.40 version - generated with the same tools, the same source tree, with the only difference in the GUI handler - and a 64 bit version (from the latter it is known that it does not handle all slide formats. If your virusscanner does not show the same behaviour on the latter 2, be convinced that it is a false positive. All versions presented here are built on the same day, from the same sourcetree with the same toolset

In the most recent updates an erroneous rounding in the computation of distances and corners was corrected and the color selection was changed: it turned out that Qt provides a menu for that. Firthermore, the color of the font used for showing the name of the selected service and the dynamic Label can now be set by clicking on the name of the selected service (just above the slide position)

In Qt-DAB 6.40 a transition is being prepared to move from 32 bit Windows programs to 64 bits. In the release the scanning code was largely rewritten and the scan button on the main widget now only controls the visibility of a scan-monitor. Furthermore, the number of buttons on the main widget is reduced. While the schedule button is moved to the configuration and control widget, the content button, the technical widget button and the mute button are replaced by "clickable labels", resp. the label containing the ensemble name for the content button, the label containing the selected service name for the technical display, and the newly introduced speaker label for the mute button.

The label indicating the computer load disappeared, as well the the label telling the estimated TII. After all, the name of the transmitter is given - if available - on the bottom line of the widget

This repo contains two 32 bit versions, one for the rtlsdrV4 library, the other one for the "old" V3 library. The 64 bit version is compiled with the library for the rtlsdr V4 devices

Note The latest AppImage has - experimental - a device entry "spyServer" and is a development to use the excellent spyserver software for remotely accessing devices like rtlsdr and airspy. Obviously, the Airspy HF will be refused as device since it cannot provide the minimum required samplerate (the Airspy one will do of course).

With some help from Youssef (Airspy) a (very) first version of the device interface for the spyserver is now also running under windows (the regular 32-6.40 version). There are 2 instances, one for a 16 bit transfer and one for 8 bit.

Be aware of the bandwidth: the datastream contains samples with a rate of 2.5MS/s. Using the 16 bit transfer, there are 4 bytes per sample (two int16 values), so the bitrate will be close to 80Mb/s. Using the 8 bit transfer, the rate is app halved of course, however, the samples are less accurate.

I added an experimental version, labeled with "E". The main difference with previous versions is that the ensembleList is replaced by a table that contains a. the currently active ensemble, b. the remaning elements of the favorites

To be able to distinguish, the table has three columns, the second one tells the channel, the third one is a marker, if set the service is (also) part of the list of favorites. Of course, if a service from the current ensemble is also a favorite, it is then marked as such but it does not appear a second time in the list. Note that selecting a service from the favorites (in another example) will show a reordering of the list

Comments are welcome

Since 6.25 there are many changes, internally and visible, so it was time to freeze a release. The most significant visible change is that what was called presets is now renamed "favorites" and is places in a separare widget. Adding a servicename to the favorites is simplified: under normal settings, clicking with the right mouse button on a service name in the ensemble window or in the scan list widget will add that name to the favorites. Since this change was added to the 4 and 5 version as well, there are renamed.

Having the right library for the dabsticks seems to be an issue, that is why the (Windows) V6.30 is available in two versions, the regular 6.30 version uses the library that was developed for a.o the V4 dabsticks, the Qt-DAB V3 version has built-in support for the "old" driver for "older" versions of the support library for rtlsdr based devices. Note that the 2 versions are identical, apart from the library that is linked in, their appearance is also identical. The Windows V4 and V5 versions are linked with the "old" support library.

For Linux x64 there are appimages, created on an Ubuntu 20 running VM.

The manual (attached) is updated to reflect the changes (well, at least hopefully). A separate document exists - also attached - that gives some guidelines on building an executable. Note that it is written on the afore mentioned U20 system, libraries may have other names on other distros. That document contains a section on how to add a device to the list of supported devices.

Note that the Qt-DAB system supports interfaces to various devices, the approach is that by selecting a device, an attempt is made to read the required functions from the device library, so the device libraries themselves are NOT included in the precompiled Linux versions. They are included in the Windows installers though (that is why there are 2 versions)

While having "skin"s is nice, there was one drawback. On deselecting a service in the ensemble display, the font of the deselected service was made black. While for most of the skins the background is black, it meant that the servicename was essentially invisible. The default setting now is "white". In the ".ini" file you can set the default servicename color to whatever you want with "fontColor=XXX", where the XXX stands for a stringname of a color. Version 6.30 - both the W installer and the AppImage included - contains on the configuration and control widget a button for setting the color. Note that the versions 4 and 5 will use that color.

Just a minor update, not enough for a new version number Latest update: issue in scheduling,.

Since there are a lot of internal changes (deferred maintenance) and since there is a (minor) modification to the GUI I decided to release an updated version. The number 6.25 indicates that it is close to 6.2, but that there are some differences

The manual is not yet updated, and the versions 4 and 5 remain the same and can be found in the 6.2 release

NOTE ON APPIMAGES The AppImage was prepared on an U(buntu)16 system, U18 AppImages gave problems. It turns out that the U16 AppImage causes problems with curl, i.e. it needs some libraries, not provided by the AppImage that are not available on a U22 system. U20 did not give the problem.

To overcome the problem I created an AppImage on an U20 system. It turns out that that AppImage needs a libfuse library, not by default on the system. However, after loading and installing it the AppImage seems to work fine

The U20 AppImage is labeled Qt_DAB-6-x86_64-new.AppImage

NOTE ON RTLSDR DEVICES The "new" RTLSDR V4 device requires a library that is compatible with - through different from - the older libraries Since there were comments that Qt-DAB with the "new" library was deaf.

For a fair test I created two versions of the Windows installer for Qt-DAB, one with the "old" library (the one with V3 in its name) and a version with the "new" library for V4 versions (Of course the V3 supported version will not work with RTLSDR V4 devices)

The versions can coexist, however, their appearance will be the same, after all it is just for testing

Qt-DAB-6.2 has undergone quite some rewriting of code parts (essentially maintenance, long overdue), and it adds another tab to the tabbed widget. In this case the offsets (errors) in the decoded data are made visible by computing - per carrier/bin - the development of the average offset. This means that quite some aspects if the incoming/decoded signal can be made visible. We had already the spectrum of the incoming signals, the correlation that is used to do the fine timing synchronization, the transition between the NULL period and the first data block is shown, the spectrum of the NULL period containing the TII data is shown, and a (subset of) the channel, i.e. a measurement of the deformation of the transmitted signal when arriving to the receiver. And now, the deviation of the elements of the decoded signal - resulting from this deformation - is made visible. The manual is now updated to V6.2

Qt-DAB 6.1 replaces 6.0. Apart from many changes in the code (invisible), there are a few mods made to the GUI. A number of changes - the invisible ones - had effect of the 4.7 and 5.4 version as well.

The 4/7/5.4 version(s) differ slightly from the previous versions. First of all a few errors were removed, second, the history handler is replaced by a handler for scanlists. The history - well funny - turned out to be less usefull when working from different places, with different ensembles on the same channels.

The basic idea is that on scanning (single scan), a list with service names is generated and displayed in the scanlist. New is that touching a service name in this list with the mouse and a right hand mouse click, the service name is added to the preset list. The configuration and control widget has a selector. When set, the scan list is empties on starting the scan.

It was about time for a new release, there were too many changes/improvements/error repairs from the august version

Saving and restoring gain values for each channel and each tabsetting for the Airspy is now rewritten and seems to be fixed

For the most important widgets, the location =and size - on the screen is saved and used on restart of the program