As I get further and further down the rabbit hole of HAM radio, I started looking at Morse Code (CW) decoders. As it turns out, being just a licensed technician, I can only do limited voice communications on certain bands, all of which are above 10 meters (28 MHz). Below that, however, I can only use CW. Of course, I don’t happen to know Morse Code by heart.
While learning Morse Code is ultimately the goal, in the interim, I was hoping to find a way to “listen” to others and have a decoder to help me translate. There are a lot of great programs out there for this. However, there is a very limited number of Linux programs available. In fact, I could only find one: RSCW.
RSCW looks like a very nifty tool. But it was written a long time ago, back when GTK 1.2 was the normal method of building GUI’s on Linux. Now GTK is up to version 3.0. Unfortunately, the source code for RSCW just doesn’t build on any modern machine.
So, since it was licensed under the GPL 2.0, and all the source code was available, I took the liberty of editing it to work with GTK 2.0. Granted, we are up to GTK 3.0 now days, but that was too big of a leap in the programming. To modernize it to GTK 3.0 would just about require a complete re-write, and my programming skills are somewhat weak. But, it only took a few edits to update it to GTK 2.0, and 2.0 is still available in the Ubuntu repositories, so it worked out great on my home computer.
I did email the original author to let him know, but I haven’t heard back from him yet. However, if you want the GTK 2.0 version, you can get it on my Gitlab, and you can check the edits I made there as well.
Linux – keep it simple.