Keith Novak

I finally had time to get back into playing around with my radio (Xiegu G90). Like any good radio operator, the first thing I did was to promptly break my entire setup.

Some backstory: last year, I bought a copy of “RigPi” which is essentially a customized image of Raspbian that comes pre-loaded with a bunch of different radio software and configurations that make the setup of a remote “radio PC” easier. (Side note – if I were to do it all again, I *wouldn’t* – I would take the time to just install all the necessary packages onto a bare Raspbian install.)

The thing about RigPi is it uses a lot of outdated package versions. And I guess they are all custom installed because some of them were out of date even when there was a repository version available?

So, if you can see where this is going… I had installed Cloudlog to serve as a central platform for logging contacts. I wanted to get that tied in with Gridtracker, because Gridtracker auto-logs items from WSJT-X, and my WSJT-X install relies on FLRig to work…

The issue started with Gridtracker if I recall correctly. I installed an updated version (or it was a fresh install, I honestly forget if RigPi came with it). But it wasn’t talking to WSJT-X for some reason. So I looked and found I was severely out of data on WSJT-X. OK, easy enough… until I installed the updated version and it broke FLRig somehow (overwriting a shared library, maybe?)… So then it was a matter of building a new version of FLRig.

This was by no means a monumental task, it was just a chain reaction of rebuilding software in newer versions then redoing some of my configurations. Not a great way to spend the day playing radio.

Going forward, I am going to look at a customized version of WSJT-X called “WSJT-X-Improved” which has Cloudlog support built in. I can also bypass FLRig – i’m not even sure why I ended up relying on it for WSJT-X anyway. I can also cut out Gridtracker at that point since Cloudlog has a “good enough” version of a grid square tracker.