Report from DCC 2007

About 200 hams and friends gathered at the 26th TAPR/ARRL Digital Communications Conference for 2007 was held in Windsor Locks, CT, Sept. 28-30, 2007.

Many great papers and conversations. I presented my talk (PDF), "SourceForge, Hamlib, and Rigserve: Free Beer, Free Speech, and Rig Control", which is also printed in a somewhat different form (PDF) in the Proceedings.

A few cheap photos from my Treo 650 phone:

A typical session

Gerry Youngblood explains the Flex-Radio SDR-5000

Steve Bible, N7HPR, TAPR Vice President

Banquet speaker Bruce Perens, K6BP

Bruce had many fine insights into the state of the amateur radio world. For one thing, he noted that the average age at DCC is about 10 years less than at Dayton. "We are the future of amateur radio."

SourceForge, Hamlib, and Rigserve... DCC'07

My contribution for the TAPR/ARRL Digital Communications Conference, Sept., 2007 appears here, as a PDF.

DCC is always a good show for advanced Amateur Radio technology. This year, it will be in Windsor Locks, CT, not too far from me. Previous Conference Proceedings are available.

Birth of an Icon

Inkscape is a cool, open-source and free program for vector graphics drawing. It produces output in the SVG (scalable vector graphics) format, which is human-readable XML, and which can be used directly in future web pages. (Version 2 of Mozilla/Firefox, for example.) Inkscape is available for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X.

I'm not a graphics pro by any means, but I was able to put this program icon together without much trouble. This is for our new project at rigserve.sourceforge.net.

New Rigserve Project on Sourceforge

Some of you know that I've been working on "Rigserve", which is meant to be a much streamlined server-style application providing much of the functionality of Hamlib. We avoid most of the cross-platform problems by defining our API over an IP connection, which is human-readable and even testable over Telnet. Rigserve is implemented in object-oriented style using Python, which should allow it to run on many platforms. I am not sorry to jettison low-level C, the GNU Automake stuff, SWIG, and all that!

We have talked about the relationship of this development to Hamlib. Should we think of it as a candidate for "V2 Hamlib"? Well, Rigserve is not a library, and there is no backwards compatibility. Rigserve does share some philosophy with Hamlib, but that's about it. I have concluded that it should stand on its own, but we should give full credit to the many folks who have brought us Hamlib as we have it today.

[There are some alternate approaches, too, such as XML rigCAT descriptions at http://w1hkj.com/xmlarchives.html . These may be useful to both Hamlib and Rigserve down the road.]

There is now a project at http://sourceforge.net/projects/rigserve with a slightly updated version 0.21 available for download. The files are managed in the Subversion (SVN) repository.

I would welcome anyone who wants to contribute to rigserve to join this project. There shouldn't be a conflict of interest here, because the intersection of hotshot C and Python programmers is probably limited. Though I am neither(!), I will continue to support the TenTec Orion for Hamlib.

It has been interesting to start a Sourceforge project and to learn Subversion and the other tools. Frustrating, too, because SF's shell server and compile farm chose this week to go into meltdown. The project web page is at rigserve.sf.net.

73, Martin AA6E