When browsing through the owners manual of that new radio, the pages devoted to the computer commands seem like an afterthought. While the manufacturers are not interested in becoming software houses, they do adequately document the computer control capabilities which allow independent control software to be written. With the myriad possibilities of radios and manufacturers available, writing that ultimate logging or PSK31 application can be a daunting task if even basic radio control support is desired. The Ham Radio Control Libraries project aims to develop a solution to this problem.

Hamlib itself is not an end-user application for radio control. Rather, it is a collection of libraries, both shared, or dynamic linked libraries, if you will, and static libraries that provide end-user applications with a common means of acessing and controlling radios (and perhaps other ham radio related peripheral devices in the future) directly connected to a computer or remotely over a network. Hamlib is currently being developed on the Linux operating system, but plans include it being usable on various flavors of UNIX and Windows, or whatever platform GNU autoconf will support. Hamlib consists of several parts. The application programming interface, API, shared library is libhamlib-&curver;.so which is installed in /usr/local/lib by default. For ease of use when linking, libhamlib.so is provided as a symbolic link to the latest version of Hamlib installed. Of course, the installation directory may be changed by passing the proper option to the configure script in the base directory of the source distribution. While the static library is libhamlib.a and installed in /usr/local/lib as well. The second main part of Hamlib consists of a number of "backend" libraries each able to communicate to a specific radio. For example, libhamlib-ft747.so is the shared backend library that provides Hamlib access to the Yaesu FT-747 radio. By default the backend libraries are also installed in /usr/local/lib. Both shared and static libraries are provided by the default installation.

The Hamlib libraries are Free Software licensed under the GNU Public License, GPL, version 2. It is important to be aware that use of Hamlib in a proprietary program has severe restrictions placed on it by the GPL. As a result one must carefully consider what kind of license to use for your program. Of course we encourage using the GPL for your program as it adds to the pool of available Free Software to the ham community. The advantages of Free Software are multitude, but the primary ones include accessability of your code to others who can fix problems or add new functionality. Another advantage is that your code is always available to be studied by other experimenters and your code has a much lower chance of becoming dead bits that can't be used on newer operating systems. For an experimenter's hobby like ham radio, Free Software offers many more advantages than disadvantages to you and the ham community.

If you are interested in working on Hamlib development itself, there exist a few resources on the World Wide Web. The main project page is at http://sourceforge.net/projects/hamlib/. A homepage is currently in development at http://hamlib.sourceforge.net A development mailing list is hosted by http://sourceforge.net. Subscription information and an archive can be accessed through the Hamlib project main page.

At this time Hamlib is not included as a binary package in any major distribution that we're aware of (hopefully this will change soon). Until then you may retrieve the source from the Hamlib project page at http://sourceforge.net/projects/hamlib/.

The latest stable version is &curver;. Currently the project is in its early stages and only a few backend libraries are included. Hamlib is currently in heavy development.

The latest development code is available via anonymous CVS through the project page.

The following instructions are copied from the Sourceforge website (modified with hamlib in the right places) and did work for me.

Hamlib's SourceForge CVS repository can be checked out through anonymous (pserver) CVS with the following instruction set. When prompted for a password for anonymous, simply press the Enter key. myhost:~/src $ cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.hamlib.\ > sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/hamlib login myhost:~/src $ cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.hamlib.\ > sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/hamlib co hamlib Long commands like those above are difficult to work with because once the line wraps the bash(1) shell seems to start doing weird things. The trick is breaking the line into two (or more) parts with the \ character. When the right edge of the screen is reached simply add \ to the end of the text you are typing and then press Enter. You will receive a > from bash(1) and you may continue typing the command. If there is no space character in the command you are typing, be sure you don't add a space before the \ or at the beginning of the next line. If you break the line where a space would exist in the command, either putting the space before the \ or at the beginning of the next line. bash(1) will splice the lines together to form one command once it receives a Enter character not preceded by a \. Updates from within the hamlib directory do not need the -d parameter. If you get the following error: cvs login: failed to open /home/user/.cvspass for reading: No such file or directory cvs [login aborted]: fatal error: exiting You can probably solve this by using the touch command to create the file .cvspass in your home directory: myhost:~ $ touch .cvspass

Building Hamlib from source isn't as daunting as it may seem at first, thanks to GNU autoconf, a tool used by the developers that generates the configure script found in the base directory of the source distribution. Running configure will test your system to be sure that any required packages for building Hamlib are present. While configure checks for many components, the only critical dependency is that the C library development header files are installed. Of course, you'll need a C compiler and its associated libraries.

While my favorite method of unpacking .tar.gz files is to use the Linux version of the Swiss Army Knife, Midnight Commander, the instructions provided are for using tar at the command prompt.

The first order of business is choosing a location for the source distribution. Some may choose to place the archive under /usr/local/src, or may prefer to work within their home directory. The disadvantage of working in /usr/local/src is that one must either be logged in as root or be a member of a group such as staff that has write permissions on the directory. The advantage of working in one's home directory is that writing and deleting files can be done with much lower risk of damage to the system areas of the filesystem. Either way, you will need to be logged in as root to install the libraries after compiling. On with unpacking the archive. For this example I will make a few assumptions, the archive is downloaded and stored in ~/Download and the source distribution will be installed in ~/src. If you are new to UNIX type systems, you may be puzzled just what ~ prepended to a path name means. It is simply a short hand for your home directory. If your user name is fred, then ~ refers to /home/fred on most systems, of course there are exceptions. If you are logged in as root then ~ refers to /root. The following sequence of commands will get the Hamlib archive to the right place (substitute your paths in the examples). First we'll move the archive into the directory where it will be extracted then use the tar command to extract the archive into its own directory. myhost:~ $ mv Download/hamlib-&curver;.tar.gz src myhost:~ $ cd src myhost:~/src $ tar xvfz hamlib-&curver;.tar.gz Now you should have a directory called hamlib-&curver; in the directory you executed the tar command. This would be a good time to familiarize yourself with the files in the archive.

Thanks to the clever design of GNU autoconf compiling Hamlib is as easy as running: myhost:~/src/hamlib-&curver; $ ./configure The configure script checks for the presence of the proper development files required to build Hamlib. After the checks configure then creates the Makefiles from the included templates in the archive. The next step is to compile Hamlib: myhost:~/src/hamlib-&curver; $ make Now there should be considerable output to the screen during the compile process. The main thing here is to make sure that gcc doesn't fail while reporting an error. The most common failure is a message saying that a certain file cannot be found. Most likely the named file will have a .h extension which means the development files of a required library aren't installed on your system. As of this writing only the glibc development files are required.

Hamlib is a tool for software authors wishing to take advantage of the computer control capabilities of modern transceivers and other devices used around the radio shack. When Hamlib reaches maturity it will likely be available in your favorite packaging format and manually compiling it won't be necessary unless you wish to customize Hamlib itself. The remainder of this manual assumes a working knowledge of UNIX type systems. If you are new to Linux, I suggest getting a copy of Running Linux by O'Reilly and Associates from your local bookstore. You can preview this excellent reference on the Web at http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/runux3/.