YO3DAN-PA2LA's RADIO dedicated page

Linux or Android in the shack

I'm an enthusiast Registered Linux User #254818 .

Linux it's a FREE and fully documented operating system. All the source code for all programs are available. A user can have full control of his computer. Linux runs well on older hardware or low resources computers (e.g.netbooks), it is far more stable than any version of Windows to date and it doesn't violate your privacy (as Windows does). There is plenty of very good software (both commercial and free) available. Moving from Windows to Linux need just a bit of learning.

I started using Linux some more than 20 years ago, with the Red Hat distribution. Further, a hort period of time I "tasted" the Slackware distribution, then for couple of years I've used Debian. After that, I've discovered that SuSE is very friendly and has a very polished graphic interface. Chronologically, the last distribution I enjoy is KDE Neon.
In my opinion, Debian is the most suitable Linux distribution for students, engineers, radio amateurs and technical interested people. You can run KDE Neon from a CD, from a USB memory stick (live mode) or you can permanently install it on computer.
Among many applications categories, two entry menus of a special interest to amateur radio are available: HamRadio and Electronics. In order to see them grouped in the start menu, in a standard installation, an extra package is required, extra-xdg-menus. This package installs various optional extra desktop menus for grouping applications on KDE and other XDG menu-spec compliant desktop environments.
And when one would like to connect the radio transceiver through a computer interface, the libhamlib-utils portable shared libraries offers a standardized API to control the radio equipment.

Ham Radio Linux software

I would like to mention here some of the Linux software which I like and I think also that might be useful to any other radioamateur:

flrig - rig control program (also for Windows, iOS). It cooperates with fldigi, a modem program for most of the digital modes used by radio amateurs today: CW, PSK, MFSK, RTTY, Hell, DominoEX, Olivia and Throb.
WSJT-X that implements communication protocols or "modes" called FT4, FT8, JT4, JT9, JT65, QRA64, ISCAT, MSK144, and WSPR, as well as one called Echo for detecting and measuring your own radio signals reflected from the Moon.
Andy's Ham Radio Linux distribution made by Andy KB1OIQ.
ShackBox by F0FAK, the newest and most advanced linux distribution for hamradio operators
CQRLog by Petr OK2CQR and Martin OK1RR
GPredict by Alex OZ9AEC
GNURadio is a free software development toolkit. The list of the typical applications based on this toolkit includes: software defined radio, radio astronomy, monostatic radar, radio streaming, FLEX pager decoder, radio channel sounder, full-rate GSM vocoder, etc.
SPLAT! (Signal Propagation, Loss And Terrain) an analysis tool for the radio spectrum between 20 MHz and 20 GHz developed by John KD2BD;
AI9NL Harv's Hamshack Hack a distribution (live Linux CD); Take a look to this screenshot !

Radio Linux is a big repository containing almost all packages related to Ham Radio. If you are looking for logging or contesting software, for digital modes, for software to control your rig, or for anything else, then you should start from here.

Ham Radio Android software

Android is an operating system based on the Linux kernel developed by Google and dedicated to mobile devices (smartphones, laptops, tablets, etc). Currently, there are over 200,000 apps available for Android. I use several of them for my ham radio activities.