Decode off-the-air Winlink message - request for programming help

Most of the time, Ohio ARES doesn't use flarq; they use the flmsg/fldigi combination, but as I said, if you do not get everything without errors, it doesn't decode. And the applications themselves can be used as a monitor, which is probably why you don't see complaints about that software.

 

You can use the applications to monitor A conversation you were not a part of , even if you are using FLARQ?

 

It would seem likely it could be done.

 

Well, I think that they would be in exactly the same circumstance as WINLINK.

It is clearly possible. It can be read. But I doubt that anyone has written the software for it.

So the failure of people to complain equally as vociferously about this software indicates a strange bias against the WINLINK group. It does no good for the petitioner to cite the fact that his petition does indeed not cite any particular group, when the comments in public forum are obviously only mentioning one group in particular

In both cases, the material can be read, by anyone who writes the proper software because nothing is encrypted

It may require effort it may be difficult but it is possible.

Trying to use the words “effectively encrypted” is like trying to say “somewhat pregnant”. That dog won’t hunt among educated people

 

Well, we finished the 17 hour EXTRA class course over the weekend-- a dozen students, some of them already extras, but they knew how much hands-on we provide, so they came anyway and we didn't disappoint them!!!!

Now it is back to this project.
I think I have now identified the code that Wiseman used to open the serial port, read from the serial port, and even dissect what was read [a VERY long subroutine] and close it.

Oh how I *hate* programming.....

But there is just the tiniest chance that I can make some of this begin to play on my raspberrry pi, within a finite number of hours.

Again...a REAL programmer would have had this done eons ago. I'm sitting here having to re-learn what #define means......that level of green-ness on my part, just to read the code that John Wiseman wrote over a decade ago to do this for the BBS crowd.....

But at least I have a tiny clue.

Gordon

 

I JUST CAPTURED HEXADECIMAL FROM A PACTOR MODEM FOR THE VERY FIRST TIME EVER IN C CODE.
Found an example bit of code on a programmer web site, it compiled perfectly and instantly was able to read the pactor serial port.
That means I can now start to work on the actual characters.

I must have put 8-12 hours into getting just this tiny step accomplished. But now I have a raspberry pi with a compiler, a working monitor, I finally figured out the right "keyboard"...I found an EDITOR that works and doesn't throw in extra characters....and I can now open a serial port.

For a crappy programmer-doc like me, this is huge huge progress..
Could have been done eons ago by people who really do this for a living.
I'm not sure, but I think the WINLINK people write in Visual Basic....which I have no ability to do. All I can do is C. They sent me C# code to do this....but it made zero sense to me. Drat. I was floundering in the 68 pages of just ONE of Wiseman's fantastic source code files...and couldl NOT find where he got the ReadFile () subroutine --- I cannot find that it is supported on a raspberry and coulld not find where he had written it, despite searching for a hour in his files. so I went hunting for an alternate way to find working code.....



Gordon

 

Yes, anything written to run on Windows only from the WDT is written in VB.NET. Pat is written in GO, which I have no experience with, and Paclink-UNIX is written in C. C# is slightly different than C, but that's mostly in the handling of function references; I actually took a bit of code that I found in an early alpha or beta version of ARDOP, converted it to C# and then compared it to the original C code after finding that. What I discovered was that it was essentially identical.

 

I'm doing something wrong. Can't get the characters to get captured. Not sure but probably making some dumb C error.
it READS them, but then my character handling into strings to get printed doesn't work properly.
Bet I am making some asinine beginner's mistake with passing contents or address of the char buf[] array.....


I think I'm going to strip out some of the fancy code I tried, and just WRITE OUT the string it read, using %s. ALMOST everything coming from the modem appears to be ASCII anyway.....


i have FINALLY found a way to read the modem without usingSCS ALPHA. Alpha locks up every time I remove the modem from my ancient VISTA computer, and then it cannot be stopped without rebooting the computer. Finally i remembered that WINLINK includes a Simple Terminal -- and BINGO!!! It can both READ and WRITE to the modem with ease. Now I can issue commands to it easily, and read its output also. so THAT part of this ancient computer setup...with a hack of a programmer-doc.....is finally working. The modem appears to auto-baud, so it works at 38400 and it works at 115200. The sample code i got issues a "Hello \n" to the modem -- that should be enough for it to autobaud and I try to use the Simple Terminal to verify its baud rate works....

 

Well....I may have been a bit premature. The raspberry does seem to see characters --- but they aren't making any sense and it looks like the serial port isn't working properly. I've spent HOURS trying to ferret out why and at this point I cannot get minicom or microcom or putty to read it either on the raspberry --- yet every time I connect to a PC running Simple Terminal from WINLINK folks....it works. Perfectly.

I've investigaed systemd, usb clock speed, ownership, cmdline.txt, different baud rates, everything I can think of....and I just can't get it to work. Others have had similar problems with terminal emulators on raspberrries, sometimes having to just get a different raspberry to get it to work. I may resort to that, but in the meantime I discoered codeblock has a gcc that runs on windows --- so I'm trying to move to a windows computer.....but of course, at that precise time, my primary computer announced it was TIME to upgrade all of windows to a new version....and they don't take no for an answer any more.

Sheesh.....at one opoint I clobbered the file information for the boot file an had to go find another linux box to get my raspberry working (everything around here is a clone of the raspberrry next to it....) So I'm back to where I was 3 hours ago....but still can't make the raspberry serial port read what a pc serial port reads easily. Obviously I'm doing something wrong but the only solution seems to be a very very careful comparison with John Wisean's code....so if I have to stay on the raspberry, that will probably be the next step.

What a pain in the patush.

 

Do you have access to a regular type PC running linux?