Categories
Ham Radio

Serial port work – linux

[Today’s run: 6.8 miles]

I recently picked up an old IBM notebook computer for use with my radio stuff.  I was able to load a version of Linux on it (the free unix-like operating system) and it seems to be working pretty well.

Today I worked on getting the serial port set up  to talk to my GPSDO.  The GPSDO writes out a message every 16 seconds.  I’d like to gather those into log files and then do some statistics work on them.

It has been quite a while since I have done much with serial ports from a linux box in a scripting environment (even longer for C programming).

I got the serial port figured out using  minicom, a terminal/modem program.  While that was working I ran ‘stty -g  < /dev/ttySx > saved.stty’ on another window (for the right ‘x’ to match my serial port). That saves the serial port settings in a file.

Then I got out of minicom.  I ran ‘stty `cat saved.stty` < /dev/ttySx’  which puts those settings back in place.  Then I could run ‘cat /dev/ttySx’ and see the logging lines showing up on the screen.  From there it was pretty easy to create a little script to write the logging to a file.  I took the opportunity to add timestamps in UTC to every log line.

I want to get the TRF logging program installed on this laptop, then I can use it for contest logging.  I don’t think it has the horsepower to use for digital modes, but time will tell.