CWCOM or similar on Linux/Unix//Open source

[OC71]

Hi,

Granted that my copy skills are mediocre at best and I haven't even started practising sending yet, is there anything similar to CWCOM, ot that can interface with the protocol used by CWCOM, that runs "natively" on *nix? And, when I say natively, I mean without recurring to Wine or any other emulators? Anything available in source code that I can compile?

The reason I can't use Wine is because of broken multilib on my Debian Stretch and I don't want to upgrade yet (long story).

I am trying to understand what protocol CWCOM uses and how I can hook up to it. The documentation seems stale or maybe I'm too thick to understand it. I am not a developer, just a bad hobbyist.

Thanks.

 

[MI0PYN]

I am trying to understand what protocol CWCOM uses and how I can hook up to it. The documentation seems stale or maybe I'm too thick to understand it. I am not a developer, just a bad hobbyist.

I was in the same boat as you, and you are right, the documentation is very stale, and disagrees with the network captures I took of actual CWCOM traffic. In short, a lot of reverse engineering would be required, which I didn't have bandwidth for.

I never did get anything to run on my Linux boxes without WINE, there were a few OS projects trying to get things working, but as far as I could tell, most have been somewhat abandoned.

If you are looking for a project, the protocol used by the Morserino is documented, and there are QSO-bots for that that you can play with, but that's for another thread I think.

 

[OC71]

Who actually wrote CWCOM?

I think there is/was a program for Linux that uses the IRC protocol to send/receive Morse:

https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/CWirc

but it's abandonware.

https://web.archive.org/web/20030627191600/http://webperso.easyconnect.fr/om.the/web/cwirc/

The sources are still archived. I wonder if this program can be used to interface with CWCOM.

Last minute EDIT: the readme is till available:

http://users.skynet.be/ppc/cwirc/download/README.txt

 

[OC71]

http://users.skynet.be/ppc/cwirc/download/README.txt

6 - Note on CWirc and CWCom interfacings

    The interfacing of external devices to a serial port used by CWirc is
  strictly identical to the one used by CWCom for Windows, by MRX Software
  (http://www.mrx.com.au/d_cwcom.htm). Consequently, if you already use CWCom
  in Windows with a key and/or a sounder connected to a serial port, you won't
  need to modify anything to your hardware setup to use CWirc in Unix.

This looks promising.

 

[foggycoder]

I'm just getting into Linux, having installed Linux Mint 20 with the Cinnamon desktop on a cheap Dell "thin client" from eBay, so this is something I might have a go at once the winter sets in properly.

If you type "How to hook up a morse code Straight Key to your LINUX computer" into the search bar of YouTube, you'll find a series of videos on morse code over Linux plus a few other relevant ones.

It looks a bit complicated. But then everything to do with Linux seems a bit complicated to me!

This is starting to look like a Linux thing rather than a CWCOM thing so, rather than go off-topic, I've started a new thread in the "Internet Based CW Operating" section of the forum. We should continue there, I think.

 

[OC71]

Update: I'm working on a native Linux/Unix implementation of CWCOM. I'm getting somewhere but I am not there yet.

With the help of Debian developer Alex Myczko, I have installed an experimental version of the irmc:
https://github.com/8cH9azbsFifZ/irmc

On Debian:

wget https://sid.ethz.ch/debian/irmc/irmc_0.3.6-1_amd64.deb
wget https://sid.ethz.ch/debian/irmc/irmc-dbgsym_0.3.6-1_amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i irmc_0.3.6-1_amd64.deb

Then, for example I can get a welcome message in morse here:

 irmc -h mtc-kob.dyndns.org -c 101

Also try this:

 irmc -h mtc-kob.dyndns.org -c 300

Proof of concept:

What I'm looking for is, if you have any skeds on CWCOM, please post when and which servers you are using, so I can see if I can decode them.