Scanning script written in Perl

[Walter Francis]

I've been using GQRX for a month or so and quickly found the GQRX Remote app, which is really nice to feed data into GQRX and it gave me the idea to write something to scan in GQRX.  It's working great for me, so I figured I'd post to see if it's useful to anyone else.  It's written in Perl, I am a Linux guy, but it would probably work on other OSes pretty easily.

It's on github, and the readme is hopefully complete enough to explain the usage.  It's here:  https://github.com/khaytsus/gqrx-scan

Here's a blurb from the readme..   Full usage etc is in the readme, and the script itself also has built-in help.  There's also a small utility script I use to pause scanning, which I've assigned to a key so no matter what window I'm in if I hear something interesting I can pause the scanning, then I'll go back a bit and check it out.

High level functionality

• Scan a range of frequencies with a specified mode (AM, FM, etc) or a csv file
• Monitor a single frequency or channel, pair with record etc to quickly record activity on a channel etc
• Exclude specific frequencies (birdies, interference, etc)
• Exclude specific channel names
• Scan a range of channels or a list of channels
• Scan a pattern of channels by name or frequency
• Resume scan from current frequency or channel

Signal Detection

• Pause scanning when a signal level threshold is met
  • Pause for N seconds, until clear, or until the enter key is hit
• Record audio

If anyone finds it useful, has any questions, suggestions, etc, I'd love to hear them.  I've been using it every day to scan local HAM repeaters, sometimes scan GMRS etc..  I still find that manually scanning things like the 10m band to be more effective, but I do sometimes have it scan while I do other things.  Hope it's useful for someone!

[Alexandru Csete]

Hi Walter,

This is very nice, thanks for the info.

I have created a page on the website to lists all known applications
that use the TCP or UDP interface:
http://gqrx.dk/doc/external-applications

Let me know if other applications exist.

Alex

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[Walter Francis]

Awesome, thanks Alex!  I just hope it's useful to folks.  I've already gotten a little feedback in email.  :)

The repo will be updated periodically, but unless I do anything major to it I probably won't post that much on it.  I am enhancing logging right now and have a little more error handling to do, but otherwise, it's working for me and I probably won't tinker with it too much but if anyone has anything that they'd really like to see, let me know.  I probably won't be doing anything super fancy, but if someone thinks of a useful enhancement I'll be glad to entertain it :)

[Aliaksandr Makarevich]

Hello guys!
I have a problem with gqrs-scan. I can't normally run it.
First I get an error "problem connecting to "127.0.0.1", port 7356: Connection refused at gqrx-scan line 213"

After opening 7356 port i get such error:

"Starting in file mode scanning all channels
Can't write to /home/wally/baofeng/gqrxscan.log, logging to /tmp/gqrxscan.log
Channel/Frequency pause time:  0.5s
Delaylevel: [-50]  Delaytime: [5]
Bookmark file does not exist:  /opt/gqrx-remote/gqrx-bookmarks.csv"

~/gqrx-scan$ perl gqrx-scan --type file --start 153000000 --end 153000000 --delaylevel=-50 --record
This is how I'm trying to start aplication.

[Walter Francis]

On Friday, May 29, 2015 at 4:21:32 PM UTC-4, Aliaksandr Makarevich wrote:

Hello guys!
I have a problem with gqrs-scan. I can't normally run it.
First I get an error "problem connecting to "127.0.0.1", port 7356: Connection refused at gqrx-scan line 213"

I'm sure you figured this out, but this means you didn't have the Remote enabled in GQRX.
 

After opening 7356 port i get such error:

"Starting in file mode scanning all channels
Can't write to /home/wally/baofeng/gqrxscan.log, logging to /tmp/gqrxscan.log

This means you haven't changed the paths in the script ;)  Note that it's pointing to my home directory, /home/wally  You need to adjust this for your home path.  Perhaps I'll make this a generic path and create it if it does not exist, but it doesn't fix everything.
 

Channel/Frequency pause time:  0.5s
Delaylevel: [-50]  Delaytime: [5]
Bookmark file does not exist:  /opt/gqrx-remote/gqrx-bookmarks.csv"

This is again a path issue.  You don't have a csv file at that path.  It should be fine, however, if you're using --type scan, you're specifying file, which is going to look for a bookmark file to scan channels from.  I believe you mean..

~/gqrx-scan$ perl gqrx-scan --type scan --start 153000000 --end 153000000 --delaylevel=-50 --record
 

[Greg Fenton]

Perhaps change line 40 from

my $logpath = "/home/wally/baofeng/";

to

my $logpath = $home ."/baofeng/";

Which would make the issue disappear.

Greg

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[Walter Francis]

It's slightly more than that, but yes ;)