VARA HF not working on fresh install #2757
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Hello there 👋 Please respond as soon as possible if a Pi-Apps maintainer requests more information from you. Stale issues will be closed after a lengthy period of time with no response. |
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@WheezyE as you were the one who added this to pi-apps, please look into this. |
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Word is out on the internet, that for VARA on PI, using Raspbian OS 64bit and 32bit makes a difference. So I tried it again with 32bit. This time I got it working. Although, pretty unstable. Some observations:
And yes, this is VARA FM. I installed it with a copy of the installation script of VARA HF with file and folder names adapted as needed. |
theofficialgman
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help wanted
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@WheezyE please respond. |
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@WheezyE I'm going to need consider pulling VARA HF from Pi-Apps if there is not a maintainer able to assist users. If you or somebody else cannot help this person, then VARA HF will likely need to be dropped from Pi-Apps. |
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I had hoped to get to this one this weekend, but to be honest, I'm not really sure how to help either. I have less time these days than I used to and apologize for not responding this week. I'd hoped that migrating VARA HF into Pi-Apps would help the community to band together to fix stuff with VARA, but I think the future might just be another modem like mercury. Thank you Botspot, for your consideration of this one. If this is a community non-starter then I understand pulling it. |
My best guess is that this might have something to do with audio dropout during the OTA/radio connection with the other station you're calling. I've been mostly focused on the software side and haven't done much OTA testing. KM4ACK I believe has done a lot more than I have and I think his forum might be the best place to get real-use information regarding the VARA HF modem stability during an actual station-to-station OTA connection. This is a bit odd since I haven't heard of people having a problem with OTA connections with VARA HF on the Pi before, but I don't doubt that it could be unstable. You might try connecting to a winlink gateway using VARA HF through RMS Express (installed via Wine) instead of Pat just for testing purposes. The RMS Express installation should be relatively easy once you have VARA HF installed since it only needs wine-mono (already installed) to function. May be unrelated but, I also know that if you try to re-connect to VARA HF via TCP/IP after disconnecting control to it (to control it from Pat or RMS Express clients), the TCP/IP port will ignore the request for 60 seconds. WheezyE/Winelink#52 |
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I did two tests today: Test 1: RMS ExpressAs suggested by @WheezyE, I installed RMS Express and used it to make a connection. Observations:
Test 2: Clean winePi Apps installs quite a lot of stuff into a wine prefix. So I was wondering if I could get rid of anything that is not required for VARA. So I deleted First I downloaded and extracted the following artefacts to
rm -rf ~/.wine
export WINEARCH=win32
winetricks winxp
winetricks sound=alsa
winetricks vb6run
winetricks -q vcrun2015
wine ~/Downloads/VARA\ FM\ setup\ \(Run\ as\ Administrator\).exe
wine ~/Downloads/Winlink_Express_install.exe
cp pdh.dll ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/system32Observations:
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Where to go from here?
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Well done, and thank you for testing these OTA connections. From your tests, I’m guessing then that the system overhead may be too much on a standard Pi-Apps prefix for the sound to operate at full speed/fidelity (or maybe the sound driver crashes) during connections. I’ll see about getting VARA HF to install into its own wineprefix like you suggested. The other graphics errors should be solvable with wine UI tweaks for the wineprefix (which can be done from wine’s GUI or in the script via wine registry keys). If we get the 32-bit system working it might be worth testing the same method on a 64-bit system. I’ll see what I can do to put together a new script for Pi-Apps. Thank you very much |
Confirmations
What happened?
No transmission when using pat winlink with VARA
Description
Running
pat connect, I can see that pat connects to the VARA modem and that the modem is listening. However, nothing else happens.See also km4ack/73Linux#124.
What are your system specs (run the following command in your terminal)?
(Recommended) Error log? Terminal output? Debug messages?
$ pat connect varahf:///HB9AK 2025/04/01 19:53:46 my-rig ready. Dial frequency is 21.113.50 MHz. 2025/04/01 19:53:46 VARA modem (VARA HF v4.8.9) initialized 2025/04/01 19:53:46 Connecting to HB9AK (varahf)... 2025/04/01 19:57:21 VARA modem disconnected unexpectedly! 2025/04/01 19:57:21 Unable to establish connection to remote: connect timeoutThe text was updated successfully, but these errors were encountered: