[ale] Linux radio scanner (longish)

[John Mills]

Jeff, and all -

A 'google' for icom pcr-1000 should bring up a _lot_ of hits. The protocol
is popped and documented. There are command-line, GUI, and daemon drivers
available for this receiver. One GUI animal is available as a source
tarball named: 'qtpcr-1.1.3.tar.gz'. I run it under Slack-9.1 and there
may be an RPM. I had to add some 'gtk' and related libs to install it.  
Functional though a bit crude looking.

The canonic example is 'javaradio' - a server that exports a _really_nice_ 
GUI for remote control. I wasn't prepared to serve it [a precondition of 
getting the sources], so I don't have them. I expect they can be found, 
and the project docs are an _excellent_ read on how to serve a radio over 
the net.

'PCRD' is a "control daemon", c/o Carl Walker, WA1RAJ.

There is an "Unofficial FAQ" from <radio at qsy.to> that will probably come 
up on your searches.

The only attribution on my printout of the control protocol ("PCR1000
Command List" for your googling pleasure) is: "Provided by: Coyote" - I
don't have the link handy, but can probably dig up an electronic copy if
you don't turn it up.


I even found a PIC-driven control panel to drive the receiver from a few
pushbuttons and an LCD character array. &8-) PIC assembly code and PWB
layouts included.

CAUTION - If you decide to mess with the PROM, read about it first,
including ICOM's bench notes. Many important parts of the receiver are
driven out of the PROM, such as its RF alignment! You can easily make an
expensive brick if you take a wrong turn. OTOH you may want to use one of
the available utilities to make a _backup_copy_ of the PROM's contents. I
once found such a utility from a guy in [IIRC] Argentina. (I don't plan to
do this, so I may or may not have kept any notes on how to do it.)

On Mon, 19 Jan 2004 hbbs at comcast.net wrote:

> The only related thing that I've seen myself is an Icom multiband
> receiver with an RS-232 port.  Hooked up to a PC, the radio could be
> controlled from a Windows app.  I knew a contractor at the Dept. of
> Energy who did this sort of thing for logging frequency use data.

> I expect that if the Icom serial data spec were available, you could use
> a Linux machine to do anything with it that you wanted in any manner
> that you wanted - GUI app, Web app, Perl, Python, Expect, bash, you name
> it.
 
> - Jeff
> > I'm looking for someone who is familiar with linux ham radio or just 
> > understands enough about it to tell me what the feasibility of a linux 
> > police/fire scanner is.


 - John Mills
   john.m.mills at alum.mit.edu