I encountered a
bug using the ATU
on R1CBU 0.29.2.
I had lots of tunings very near each other,
so it switched a lot.
It queries and uses the nearest tuning to current frequency,
so lots of close tunings will cause thrashing as you move.
I cleared the atu
table in params.db
to alleviate the problem for a bit.
POTA US-1356 Gifford Pinchot
I visited Gifford Pinchot State Part, US-1356, and strung up the EFHW from a picnic table to a tree. I managed it in 1 throw to a nice spot. I made 20 contacts:
- 18 FT8
- 2 CW, including N4T, the Dry Tortugas DXpedition
Using R1CBU 0.29.1, I knew to pay special attention to undo the AM bug from SWR Scan by switching through modes after an SWR Scan. In this firmware, though, WSJTX would set digital mode (USB-D) and it would bounce back to USB, which doesn’t take sound from the connection to the computer. I had to work around it by disabling WSJTX’s ability to set the mode. Then I could set USB-D and it would stay there.
R1CBU 0.29.2
After my park outing, I returned to find an update to R1CBU 0.29.2. It includes fixes for:
- SWR Scan that leaves the radio in AM mode
- CAT control of modes
New Firmware for X6100
There’s a new person building onto Oleg’s R1CBU firmware. He first made a patch TGZ available, and then an entire image.
He has a repo for this work,
and it includes some build instructions which reference the buildroot
and submodules.
I think I’m close to being able to build it,
but I’m seeing some errors trying
to find the xkbcommon
headers.
I did patch his source with my DB changes.
I built the DB: sqlite3 params.db < params.sql
,
mounted the DATA
partition,
and copied my custom params.db to it.
It’s looking nice so far.
I can use flrig
and have wsjtx
and fldigi
both talk to it simultaneously.
That’s the main improvement in my mind,
but it includes some other fixes:
- volume encoder can be spun quickly now
- smoothing of the TX/SWR graphs
- finer detail in the waterfall
Adjusting Bands on R1CBU
I updated the bands on my X6100 running R1CBU to follow the US band plan/privileges:
- Clone source: https://github.com/strijar/x6100_gui
- Update
sql/bands_ham.csv
to break bands by plan and privileges for US - Update
sql/params.sql
to not importband_params.csv
, but to instead build it from thebands
table - Rebuild the db:
sqlite3 params.db < params.sql
- Copy the new
params.db
to theDATA
partition of the SD card
Rebuilding the database loses all your settings on the radio, so you have to put those back, but I can now see where the general privileges start and end on each band.
[Read More]R1CBU 0.20.1
I updated my X6100 to
R1CBU 0.20.1.
Oleg provided a tgz
with only the updated files,
so I dropped the file into /DATA
partition,
started up the radio,
and it unpacked the update.
The tgz
contained the x6100_ui
binary and params.db
.
This can be an interesting way to make my own updates without needing
to know how to rebuild the entire image.
I see the changes applied to his
x6100_gui
github repo,
so I know that’s a good base
for making future changes.
Learning to do make updates is interesting, because the original maintainer, Oleg, is likely done updating this firmware in favor of building his own radio in the image of the X6100. He’s frustrated trying to get help and documentation from Xiegu. I run the R1CBU firmware full-time.
R1CBU 0.20.0
A new R1CBU firmware is available for the X6100.
I wrote the image to the micro SD card:
$ sudo dd if=x6100_r1cbu_v0.20.0_sdcard.img bs=1M of=/dev/sdb status=progress
It’s working fine. Auto levels for waterfall and spectrum seems useful, but it still shows the min/max level settings that do nothing while in auto. I had to set up all preferences again, since it comes with a new database on the image.
RTTY Round-Up
I participated in the RTTY Round-Up.
Trouble with fldigi/R1CBU
I screwed around lots trying to get fldigi
talking to the radio.
R1CBU software works great with wsjt-x
,
but fldigi
and flrig
completely failed to connect.
It wouldn’t key the radio.
Switching back to stock software on the radio worked fine with flrig
,
but where’s the fun in that.
For flrig
,
I could tell it
that it was an older version
of the radio (X5105?),
and it would key and set frequency,
but flrig
wouldn’t read back the frequency
when updated at the radio.
I ultimately got fldigi
talking to R1CBU
by using flcat
with an xml file
for G106.
Then I could “tune” power output following
instructions in fldigi
manual.
Working!
I started making some contacts on 10M and 15M.
It’s much more like voice contacts:
yelling back and forth on the same channel.
I’m using macros
and sticking to those for the contest.
They’re on the 3rd page of macros in fldigi
.
I’ve made at least a few contacts, so I’ll submit them to the contest
R1CBU on X6100
I’ve loaded the R1CBU UI on the X6100. Reading the manual exposes all sorts of great features and conveniences:
Highlights
- Large waterfall
- Lots of options on MFK and VOL knobs, and it’s customizable
- SWR scan is very fast
- CW decoder is robust
- ALC starts at 0.0
- Serial console access:
minicom -D /dev/ttyACM0
, root, 123
Bugs
- Setting time down to the second is weird. I used serial console and CLI instead.