Ham Radio in WSL
I have been trying to run my ham radio programs in WSL lately. I've poked around with WSL in the past to run a media servers, but never looked into it much in regards to hardware or porgrams with a GUI. Unfortunately, I haven't found a good SDR receiver software for Windows that will interface via audio with "soundcard" mode software, such as the WSJT-X.
So, I'm running my shack on an old (circa 2010-2012) gaming desktop that is stuck on Windows 10. I'd still like to play games on it, and I currently use the Windows side as a fileserver for backups. As a result, I don't want to boot into Linux just to keep a ham receiver running overnight.
Of course, an easier answer would be put move all this to a remote linux box running on a lower powered SBC. The downsides to that are that it costs money (and boy are Raspberry Pis expensive these days), and it's one more device to administer, whereas this experimentation only costs time.
I figure I'll need to make the following WSL features work to use it for ham radio:
- SDR receiver requires support for USB devices, requires building the kernel from source for Windows 10
- WSL running GUI through Xming
- installed SoapySDR support for the RTLSDR dongle, and CubicSDR software
- SoapySDR requires Avahi, which doesn't work out of the box.
I've tested these on my Windows 11 tablet, where I'm now stuck on SoapySDR/CubicSDR finding the RTLSDR receiver but not appearing to actually pull data from it. Now I need to try these steps again on my Windows 10 desktop. I'm stuck on the GUI working from there, I think I need to experiment with X Forwarding next.
Once I have those features working, I plan on testing WSJT-X and CubicSDR (which relies on SoapySDR).