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Jan's SDRuno Plugin collection

Last - and a little this - year I made a few plugins for SDRuno. Being an enthousiastic user of SDR RSP's since 2014, I had quite some experience in writing a variety of SDR applications. Most of my software is developed under Linux, runs under Linux and is cross compiled for Windows.

One of my programs is a "shortwave" receiver, a program with about 10 decoders for various formats, such as CW, weatherfax, dr, psk, etc etc.

The plugins are developed as (almost) windows "mirrors" of these decoders. It is "almost" since the framework I am using in my Linux software is Qt and the gcc compiler collection, and the plugins are developed for a framework in "nana", using the MSVC "development" environment.

The Plugins are the ones starting with "SDRunoPlugin_", for each a brief description is given below.

While these plugins run fine on my W10 Box (W10 home edition), there are sometimes questions from people who notice that the plugin fails to load. This is especially the case with the plugins for the weatherfax and the navTex. They share the possibility of saving output to a file.

Now since I am completely ignorant about windows (and hope to stay that for a very long time), I only can tell that it seems that some dll's are missing.

YOU CAN CHECK WHETHER OR NOT DLL'S ARE MISSING BY APPLYING THE DEPENDENCY CHECKER ON THE PLUGINS ON YOUR SYSTEM. A ZIPPED VERSION OF THE DEPENDENCY CHECKER IS IN THIS FOLDER. JUST DOWNLOAD IT TO E.G. "Downloads", UNZIP IT WHICH WILL GIVE A FOLDER "Dependencies_x64_Release", GO INTO THE UNPACKED FOLDER AND START "DependenciesGui".

Use the File button on the opened widget and, from the folder where the community plugins are stored, in my case "c:\Documents and Settings\xxx\Source\Repos\plugin", select the plugin you want to investigate

The result will be shown, as in the picture. If dll's are missing or cannot be loaded properly it will clearly be indicated.

The dependency analyser states that the plugins need the following dll's to be available in C:\Windows\SysWOW64

Kernel32.dll
user32.dll
gdi32.dll
COMDLG32.dll
SHELL32.dll
MSVCP140.dll
VCRUNTIME140.dll

ucrtbase.dll

The AAC decoder in the drm plugin further needs libfdk-aac-2.dll, which needs libgcc_a_dw2-1.dll, which on its turn needs libwinpthread-1.dll

How do I fix the api-ms-win-crt-runtime-l1-1-0. dll or other missing dll error?

Install the software via Windows Update. Download Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2015 from Microsoft directly. Install or Repair the Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2015 on your computer.

The current version of these plugins use the so-called IQout entry. This entry outputs an incoming signal, decimated to 192000 Samples per second (note that unfortunately, the I and Q component are interchanged, a better name would be the QIout entry);

So, while the previous version of these plugins required the user to set the input rate in SDRuno to 2 MHz, and the decimation factor to 32 (resulting in a samplerate of app 63 Khz), that is not needed anymore, the plugins will open the required SP entry and do their own furter decimation to - usually - 12 or 2 KHz.

An issue is of course that a signal with a width of say 31 Hz (just a PSK 31 signal) is hardly (better: not) detectable on a spectrum with a width of 2 or more MHz. USE THE ZOOM FACILITY ON THE MAIN SPECTRUM WIDGET TO MAKE THE SIGNAL YOU WANT TO TUNE TO AND SEE, VISIBLE. Furthermore, the filter options provided by the SDRuno for this setting is not optimal, it is far too large. The plugins themself will do heavy filtering to obtain a reasonable clean signal with the required bandwidth.

Note that for each plugin the dll and a small pdf describing the plugin is now clustered into a directory with the name of the plugin

The plugins in the list are:

• a plugin for DRM (Digital Radio Mondiale, not Digital Rights management). DRM is transmitted on shortwave (a variant, DRM+ is transmitted in the good old FM broadcast bands), and is - as the name suggests - a form of digital radio. The common DRM signals have a spectrum width of 10 KHz, and a transmission can carry up to 4 streams, although I have never seen a transmission with more than 2 streams. The current version supports AAC and - slightly experimental - xHE-AAC. It is experimental since testing xHE-AAC decoding is with only two input files.

• a plugin for CW. The CW decoder is pretty basic, but the current version has as addition that - within a user specified range - the software itself will shift to the strongest signal. Shifting goes reasonably fast and if no signal is detected nothing will happen. The software will try - within a reasonable range - to detect the transmission speed. An indicator for the speed can be set.

• a plugin for PSK. PSK is a difficult signal, it's bandwidth is small and there is a great variety in "modes" and settings. Here as well, the software tries within a reasonable range to shift to the strongest signal, important since a frequency offset of half a dozen Hz will make decoding difficult or even impossible. The plugin has a variety of selectors for different settings

• a plugin for RTTY. Amateur RTTY has a width of 170 Hz, and a baudrate of 45. Some weather forecasts use a baudrate of 100 and a width of 800 Hz. Of course, the plugin contains a number of selectors for setting baudrate and signal width.

• a plugin for NavTex. On 518 KHz coastguards transmit data. The signal has a baudrate of 100, and a frequency shift of 170 Hz.

• a plugin for weatherfax. Weatherfaxes are still transmitted on shortwave (here a.o 3855 KHz, 4610 KHz). The weatherfax plugin is able to synchronize on an incoming transmission (although there is a "cheat" button to skip the synchronization phase) and will show a fax signaal. A Wefax576 signal has a width of about 1800 pixels and a length of 1200 lines, it is shown as a 900 x 600 picture. However, if the picture is saved, the format of the saved picture is the original 1800 x 1200 size.

The current version, version 2, now saves all settings between invocations/

• a plugin for FT8 decoding. In FT8 mode, short messages are sent, less than 13 seconds, encoded in 7 tones (3 bits per tone) with a tone distance of just over 6 Hz. The FT8 decoder plugin helps in decoding these messages, furthermore, it allows sending data, extracted from these messages to the s0-called PSKReporter, a website making the reporters, the "monitors" visible.

• an EXPERIMENTAL plugin for acars decoding. Het Acars protocol is a protocol for digital data transmission betweeb airplane and ground station. The transmissions take place in the VHF band, about 131 MHz. The plugin - using the Msk decoding implementation of the Acars decoder of Thierry Leconte - supports decoding a single channel, selectable though the GUI.

All these plugins are created by me, Copyright will be
with me. Of course the copyrights of the owners of these rights
of the additional dll's is gratefully acknowledged.

The software - either is source or as dll - is made available
under a GNU GPLV2, meaning that anyone is allowed to look at
the software and modify or extend the software, under the
restriction that all these modications and/or additions are
made available under the same conditions as this software
is available