[Ham-Mac] QST: darwinPSK for Mac OSX - Status Report

[Richard Kriss]

This is a QST to share with the group a message from Tom Dove, K3ORC
<tdove@toad.net> regarding the status of the work in process to get a PSK31
application running on a Mac.

I have had a sneak preview of Tom's early darwinPSK and it is neat, but
recognize this is not a simple plug-and-play Mac OSX application at this
time.  To be able to run darwinpsk I first  had to install the Apple
Developer Tools (300 MB), Mac OS X11, Fink, and FinkCommander. This
collection of tools will make you hair hurt unless you are unix person.

TNX to Tom K3ORC and Volker DL1KSV for the dedicated effort to bring
darwinPSK to the Ham-Mac community.

If you are interested in this project, contact Tom Dove, K3ORC, direct at
<tdove@toad.net>.  What is needed is someone with the skills (and tools) to
help Tom and the team convert darwinPSK to a Mac OSX application.


73 de Dick, AA5VU
Austin, Texas
aa5vu@arrl.net or aa5vu@qsl.net

------ Forwarded Message
From: Tom Dove <tdove@toad.net>
Date: Thu, 1 May 2003 08:28:00 -0400

Subject: DarwinPSK group

Hi all,

I've been corresponding with a number of people about DarwinPSK in the
past month, so it seems we should all meet each other. Mac users are a
minority, and hams with Macs are an even smaller minority, but it
appears that quite a few of us are interested in using PSK31.

Thus, I'm sending this note to everybody who has contacted me about
psk31 on the Mac. Several of you are accomplished programmers, which I
am not, and several are engineers, which I am not. I am a writer,
formerly a high-school science teacher. Together, perhaps we can put
our talents together and refine the software into something excellent.

The author of LinPSK, Volker Schroer / DL1KSV, has done a wonderful job
of it. He is working with KDevelop and Linux on an Intel-based machine
and does not have a Mac. I'm a continent away, with a couple of Macs
that run Apple X11 and KDE, and have an interest in porting Linux
software to my favorite machines. I guess we're the "Development Team"
if such a grand title is deserved. Since work and family can interfere
with recreational software development (hi, hi) and there's a natural
time lag because the two teammates are in Germany and Maryland, we may
not proceed as fast on the project as everybody would prefer.

Here's the status:

DarwinPSK came out of LinPSK about two years ago, after considerable
effort in porting from Intel-based Linux to the Mac. It ran very well.
It used XFree86, generally installed with the Fink package manager, the
Qt2 libraries for its subroutines and Esound for sound I/O.

The developers of the Qt subroutines came out with a new version, Qt3,
late last year. Apple released OSX 10.2 (Jaguar) and its own version of
X-Windows, called X11. The result was that DarwinPSK no longer worked.
Simultaneously, Volker had been working on a new version of LinPSK that
used the Qt3 libraries on Intel-based Linux and had more features than
the original. I began working with him again to port this new version
to the Mac as DarwinPSK.

So here we are: A new version of DarwinPSK now works on the Mac with
Apple X11, Qt3 and esound. This version also requires fftw (Fastest
Fourier Transformation in the West). You can get Apple X11 and its
associated SDK (Software Development Kit) from the Apple Web site. All
this software is free. The present version does have bugs, including
problems with sound levels. The output volume is distorted and too
high. It copies and decodes PSK31 communications on 20 meters very
well, and is quite easy to use.

While I do have a pre-compiled binary version of DarwinPSK, it doesn't
seem to run on all machines, so you may need to have the ability to
build X11 software on your own Mac. For that, you need the latest Apple
Developer Tools from the Apple site. This is a very large download. I
recommend Fink to manage the packages on your X-Windows system, and
it's available at www.fink.sourceforge.net, along with a nice user
interface called Fink Commander which eliminates most of the need to
type commands into a Terminal window. Install qt3, esound and fftw with
Fink. All this software is free, also.

If you have a setup like this and want the latest DarwinPSK, email me
and I'll send you either the binary or the source code so you can build
it on your Mac. Volker wrote today that he's sending me a new version
after this weekend, so you might want to wait for that.

It's good to meet you all. Keep in contact.

73 de Tom / K3ORC

------ End of Forwarded Message