ham.el

Amateur radio support for Emacs, by K6SM.

ham-rig.el is a transceiver control panel. It shows frequency, band, mode, passband, VFO, split and tuning step; an S-meter while receiving; and power, ALC, compression, SWR and supply voltage and current while transmitting. A second panel adjusts every level and switch the radio offers. It speaks to the radio through Hamlib's rigctld, and publishes what it sees on an event bus so other packages can follow the radio.

ham-spacewx.el is a space weather panel: solar flux, sunspot number, X-ray flux and its multi-day peak, proton flux, the planetary K and A indices, and the real time solar wind. It reports the NOAA R, S and G scales as they stand and as they peaked over the last day, and estimates the maximum usable frequency and band conditions for your own location.

ham.el is the library underneath: an event bus, an asynchronous line transport, Maidenhead and great-circle geodesy, a band plan, and frequency parsing and formatting. It has no user interface.

Everything works in a terminal.

File	Contents
ham.el	Event bus, TCP transport, geodesy, band plan.
ham-rig.el	Transceiver panel and controls panel.
ham-remote.el	Audio transport for operating over a network.
ham-spacewx.el	Space weather, NOAA scales and a propagation estimate.

Requirements

• Emacs 29.1 or later
• Hamlib, for rigctld
• curl, optional, for ham-spacewx — standard on macOS and Linux, and shipped with Windows since 10/1803. Without it the panel falls back to Emacs's own url.el, whose connection setup can block the editor when the network is unreachable.
• An audio transport, optional, for ham-remote — Mumble is the one to start with, and Getting started with audio walks through it from nothing. trx and zita-njbridge are alternatives.

Developed on Emacs 29.3 and Hamlib 4.5.5, tested with a Yaesu FTDX10.

Installation

(add-to-list 'load-path "~/.emacs.d/lisp/ham/")
(require 'ham-rig)

Running rigctld

Start one rigctld for the radio and leave it running:

rigctld -m 1042 -r /dev/ttyUSB0 -s 38400

rigctl -l lists model numbers; 1042 is the FTDX10.

Run one rigctld and point every program at it — this package, WSJT-X, fldigi, your logger. It owns the serial port; opening that port directly locks out everything else on the station.

With no radio to hand, Hamlib's dummy works:

rigctld -m 1 -P RIG

-P RIG makes the dummy accept PTT, which it otherwise refuses.

ham-rig-host may be any machine, so a rigctld across the network works as well as a local one. wfview provides rigctld emulation, which gives you LAN remote operation with wfview carrying the audio.

The rig panel

M-x ham-rig opens the panel and connects.

  FTDX-10   connected   localhost:4532

  14.074.000   20m   STEP 1 k

  VFO VFOA    MODE USB       BW 2400 Hz   SPLIT off

  RX  ████▏░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░  S3

Key	Action
↑ ↓	Tune one step
M-↑ M-↓	Tune ten steps (also PgUp PgDn)
← →	Smaller / larger step
.	Choose a step
f	Set frequency: 14074, 14.074 or 14.074.000
m	Set mode
b	Change band
v	Swap VFO
s	Toggle split
t	Key or unkey
T	Panic unkey
u	Antenna tuner in or out
A	Run the tuner's tuning cycle
P	Switch the radio on or off
C	Controls panel
g	Poll everything now
c d	Connect / disconnect
? h	Every key, in a buffer
i	Capabilities the radio reported
S	Link statistics

Tuning

↑ and ↓ tune by the current step; ← and → change the step, which is shown beside the band. Steps run from 1 Hz to 1 MHz, set by ham-rig-tuning-steps and ham-rig-default-tuning-step.

The readout moves on the keypress and the next poll corrects it to what the radio settled on, so holding a key tunes smoothly. Only the newest frequency is sent.

Transmitting

While keyed, the S-meter is replaced by a bar for each meter the radio reports, and the elapsed transmission time:

  TX   12s
  PWR  ██████████████████░░░░  85 W
  ALC  ███████░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░
  COMP ██████████░░░░░░░░░░░░  12 dB
  SWR  ████████░░░░░░░░░░░░░░  2.40
  VDD  ███████████████████░░░  13.2 V
  ID   █░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░  1.8 A

• SWR runs 1:1 at the left to infinity at the right, scaled by reflection coefficient. Amber past 2:1, red past 3:1.
• ALC is a bar alone — the number Hamlib reports for it has no units. Amber past half scale, red past 80%.
• Power reads in watts, converted by the radio.
• Compression, supply voltage and current read in dB, volts and amps, as the radio reports them.

ham-rig-tx-meters chooses which meters appear, and only those the radio reports are shown.

Two settings control how a meter is drawn:

• ham-rig-meter-zones sets where a bar turns amber and red. The ALC thresholds are a starting point, not a specification — Hamlib does not report where a radio's own ALC zone ends. Compare the bar against the radio's ALC marking and move them to match.
• ham-rig-meter-ranges sets the range a bar is drawn over, where the range Hamlib declares does not describe the readings. An FTDX10 declares supply voltage as 0 to 1 and then answers 13.25, so a bar drawn over the declared range sits at full scale whatever the radio is doing. A bar stuck at one end means the range here needs correcting for your radio.

Transmit safety

• A watchdog unkeys the radio if a transmission runs too long.
• Unkeying is confirmed, not assumed. After commanding the radio off, ham-rig reads PTT back. If the radio still reports itself transmitting it commands the unkey again, up to ham-rig-unkey-attempts times, and warns you to use the front panel if it never succeeds.
• Emacs unkeys on exit.
• Losing the link while keyed warns, and unkeys again on reconnection.
• The event bus never keys the radio. Only a direct keystroke transmits.

The watchdog budget is ham-rig-tx-timeout (180 s) when the length of a transmission is not known in advance, as with live voice. Where the length is known, a caller declares it with ham-rig-expect-transmission and the budget becomes that duration times ham-rig-tx-watchdog-margin, bounded below by ham-rig-tx-watchdog-floor and above by ham-rig-tx-timeout-max. The antenna tuner cycle uses this: it is held to about 25 seconds rather than three minutes, so a tuner that jams keys the transmitter for seconds instead of minutes.

CAT has no dead-man behaviour: if the control link dies mid-transmission, nothing in software can unkey the radio. Enable your transceiver's own TX timeout timer.

The controls panel

C, or M-x ham-rig-controls.

  FTDX-10   controls

  LEVELS
    PREAMP       ######.... AMP1    IPO/AMP1/AMP2
    RFPOWER      #####..... 50 W    5%..100%
    DNR          ####...... 40%     0%..100%
    MICGAIN      ####...... 35%     0%..100%
    KEYSPD       ###....... 22      4..60
    IF           #####..... -200    -1200..1200

  FUNCTIONS
    TUNER        on
    VOX          off

Key	Action
← →	Adjust, or toggle a switch
M-← M-→	Adjust ten steps (also - +)
RET SPC	Toggle a switch, or set a level
=	Type a value
g	Re-read everything
? h	Every key, in a buffer

The list is built from the radio's own \dump_caps report, so it shows what this radio has: IF shift, notch, transmit power, noise reduction, noise blanker, CW speed and pitch, mic gain, VOX gain and delay, monitor level, compression, break-in delay, preamp, attenuator, squelch, AF and RF gain, and switches for the tuner, VOX, ANF, APF, manual notch and RIT. A different radio gives a different panel.

Read-only meters stay out of this panel. Controls the radio reports with no usable range are omitted — on the FTDX10 that is AGC, which takes named settings Hamlib does not describe.

Units

Hamlib reports most levels as a fraction rather than in the radio's own units.

• Transmit power reads in watts, converted by the radio.
• Preamp and attenuator read as switch positions.
• Everything else normalised reads as a percentage.

Two limits are worth knowing:

• Hamlib names a preamp position 10dB, not AMP1. Supply your radio's words with ham-rig-control-value-labels and ham-rig-control-labels:

  (setq ham-rig-control-value-labels
        '(("PREAMP" (0 . "IPO") (10 . "AMP1") (20 . "AMP2")))
        ham-rig-control-labels '(("NR" . "DNR")))

• Where Hamlib has already flattened a scale, the original is unrecoverable. The FTDX10's DNR runs 1 to 15 on the radio; Hamlib presents 0 to 1 in tenths, so it reads as a percentage.

Roofing filter and contour are not available: the FTDX10 backend exposes them as neither level nor function.

Operating remotely

ham-rig-host already reaches a rigctld on any machine. ham-remote.el adds the audio, in both directions, and M-x ham-remote shows what it is doing:

  trx   radio.local   compressed

  RX audio  running   142s
  TX audio  running   142s

  PTT  receiving

Key	Action
s S	Start / stop the audio
r	Restart
R	Show what to run at the radio end
M	Mumble client settings
w	Write a Mumble server configuration
g	Refresh

No audio passes through Emacs. External programs carry it, and this package starts them, restarts them if they die, sequences them against PTT, and reports their state.

Getting started with audio

If you have not used Mumble before, start here. Mumble is a voice chat system; we are using it as a two-way audio link with a radio on one end. Nothing about it is ham-specific, which is why its defaults are wrong for us in a few important ways — this section gets you from nothing to a working link.

Three pieces, on two machines.

   your desk                          the radio
  ┌──────────────┐                  ┌──────────────────────┐
  │ Mumble       │                  │ Mumble client        │
  │ client       │ ◄──────────────► │ (mic = receiver out, │
  │ (headset)    │      audio       │  speaker = rig mic)  │
  │              │                  │                      │
  │ Emacs        │ ◄──────────────► │ rigctld              │
  │ ham-rig      │   rig control    │                      │
  │ ham-remote   │                  │ Mumble server ◄──────┼── usually here
  └──────────────┘                  └──────────────────────┘

Both ends run a Mumble client. One machine also runs the Mumble server, which the two clients meet on. The server normally lives at the radio end — a Raspberry Pi is plenty — but it can be anywhere both ends can reach.

The server is what makes this easier than a direct connection: only one machine needs a reachable address, and it is the one that stays put.

1. Install

	Client	Server
Debian, Ubuntu, Raspberry Pi OS	sudo apt install mumble	sudo apt install mumble-server
Fedora	sudo dnf install mumble	sudo dnf install mumble-server
Arch	sudo pacman -S mumble	sudo pacman -S murmur
macOS	brew install --cask mumble	run it on Linux instead
Windows	installer from mumble.info	installer from mumble.info
FreeBSD	pkg install mumble	pkg install murmur

Install the client on both machines and the server on one of them.

The server binary is called mumble-server on newer packages and murmurd on older ones; ham-remote looks for both, so you do not need to know which you have.

2. Set up the server

On Debian and Raspberry Pi OS the package asks the important questions for you:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure mumble-server

Say yes to starting at boot. It will ask you to set a SuperUser password — that is the server's administrator account, and you only need it if you later want to change server settings from inside a client. Write it down anyway.

Elsewhere, or to set it again later:

sudo mumble-server -ini /etc/mumble-server.ini -supw YOUR-PASSWORD

On older packages that binary is murmurd; the arguments are the same.

Then replace the stock configuration with one tuned for a radio link. In Emacs, on the machine that will run the server:

M-x ham-remote-mumble-write-server-config

That writes a file (see ham-remote-mumble-server-config for where). Copy it over /etc/mumble-server.ini, keeping a backup, and restart the service:

sudo systemctl restart mumble-server

Run it under the system's own service manager rather than from Emacs: the server should be up whether or not anyone is logged in. ham-remote can run it — set ham-remote-mumble-run to server or both — which is handy for trying the whole thing out on one machine before you commit to wiring.

What it changes and why is in Mumble below; the short version is that it forces Opus, keeps the user count small, and stops the server writing a log that would wear out an SD card.

Open the port. Mumble uses 64738, both TCP and UDP. TCP carries the control connection and UDP carries the voice; if UDP cannot get through, Mumble still works but routes voice over TCP, which is noticeably worse. If the radio is across the internet rather than the house, forward both on the router, or — better — put both machines on a VPN and skip the forwarding entirely. You want the VPN anyway: rigctld has no authentication of its own.

3. Set up the client at your desk

Run mumble once by hand before involving Emacs. On first launch it offers two wizards:

• The Audio Wizard picks your input and output devices and sets levels. Run it — device selection is the fiddly part and it does it well.
• The Certificate Wizard creates your identity. Mumble authenticates by certificate rather than by password, so accept the default and let it make one.

Then undo some of what the Audio Wizard did. It is tuned for a headset in a quiet room and will have enabled things that ruin a radio link. Press M in the ham-remote panel — or M-x ham-remote-show-mumble-setup — for the full list; the ones that matter are echo cancellation, noise suppression and gain control (all off) and transmit mode (Push To Talk).

Now tell ham-remote where the server is:

(setq ham-remote-host "radio.local"        ; the machine running the server
      ham-remote-transport "mumble"
      ham-remote-mumble-user "K6SM"        ; your callsign
      ham-remote-mumble-run 'client)

M-x ham-remote, then s. The panel should show Mumble running.

4. Set up the client at the radio

The radio end runs a Mumble client too, with two differences: its microphone is the receiver rather than a person, and it transmits continuously — there is nobody there to key it.

Wire the audio first. You need the receiver's audio going into the machine's input, and the machine's output going into the transmitter's audio input. Most modern transceivers present a USB sound device that does both; otherwise an interface like a SignaLink sits between. Pick that device — not the machine's built-in one — in Mumble's Audio Wizard.

R in the panel prints the exact command and settings for this end.

Set the transmit level with the rig's ALC meter, not by ear: bring the audio up until ALC just begins to move and stop there.

5. Check it works

1. At your desk, M-x ham-remote and s. The panel shows Mumble running.
2. You should hear the band. If not, the problem is at the radio end's input.
3. M-x ham-rig, connect, and key with t. The panel's MIC should flip from shut to open, and the radio should transmit your voice.
4. Unkey. MIC goes back to shut.

That MIC line is worth watching. ham-remote holds the Mumble microphone closed except while the rig is keyed, so your shack is not on the air between overs — but that only works if Mumble is in Push To Talk mode. If MIC says open when you are not transmitting, that setting is wrong.

When it does not work

Symptom	Usually
No audio either way	Server not reachable: check port 64738 TCP and UDP
Audio breaks up	Raise the jitter buffer 10 ms at a time
Everything sounds far away and thin	Noise suppression or AGC still on
Weak signals vanish into silence	Noise suppression
Digital modes will not decode	Any of the three processors; or use a lossless back end
First syllable clipped	Mumble in voice-activated mode, not Push To Talk
MIC open with the rig unkeyed	Mumble not in Push To Talk mode
Delay grows the longer you talk	Buffering somewhere; restart the client
Hum on transmit	Ground loop — an isolating interface, not a software fix

M-x ham-remote-show-mumble-setup lists every setting and what it is for.

Choosing a transport

Which program carries the audio is a back end, selected by name in ham-remote-transport:

Back end	Carries	Needs
trx	Opus over RTP; low bandwidth	trx
zita-njbridge	Uncompressed samples	zita-njbridge, JACK
mumble	Opus through a Mumble server	mumble, mumble-server

Every command is a list of strings you can edit — ham-remote-trx-transmit-command and friends — with %h for host, %p port, %d device, %r sample rate, %c channels, %m the program, %u user, %n channel and %U a mumble:// URL. Correct them there if your build's options differ; no code changes are needed. Register your own back end with ham-remote-register-transport.

trx and zita-njbridge are pairs of one-way pipes: one process per direction. Mumble is not — one client carries both ways, and a server sits in the middle. A back end says which processes it needs, so both shapes work.

For trx, the latency control is the Opus frame size, -f, in samples: at 48 kHz the codec permits 120, 240, 480 or 960 — 2.5, 5, 10 or 20 ms. The receiver's jitter buffer, -j, trades delay against tolerance of an uneven network.

Mumble

Mumble is the one back end that is not a pair of pipes between two hosts. A server sits in the middle, which is why it is worth having: it crosses NAT from both sides, it survives an address that changes, and more than one person can listen to the same radio.

ham-remote-mumble-run says which halves this machine runs — client at the operator end, server on the machine at the radio end, both to try it on one box. M-x ham-remote starts and stops whichever apply, watches them, and restarts them if they die.

The microphone follows the transmitter. Mumble is otherwise open all the time, which puts the shack on the air between overs, or listening for a voice, which clips the first syllable and opens on a cough. With ham-remote-mumble-follow-ptt set, keying the rig runs mumble rpc starttalking and unkeying runs stoptalking, so the microphone is open only while the transmitter is. The panel shows MIC open or MIC shut — an open microphone nobody noticed is the failure worth seeing. This requires Mumble to be in Push To Talk mode; in continuous or voice-activated mode the gating does nothing.

M prints the client settings a remote station wants. The ones that matter:

Setting	Value	Why
Echo cancellation	off
Noise suppression	off	A weak signal is exactly what it removes
Amplification / AGC	off
Transmit	Push To Talk	So the rig's PTT can drive it
Audio per packet	10 ms	The main latency control
Quality	72 kb/s	≥64 kb/s enables Opus low delay mode
Jitter buffer	20 ms, then raise	Jitter breaks audio; latency alone does not
Text to speech, sounds	off	They would go out over the air

The first three are on by default and are each a model of a human voice in a quiet room. What crosses this link is often neither — a signal at the noise floor, or a modulated waveform carrying data. Leave them on and the band sounds dead and digital modes stop decoding.

w writes a server configuration. It sets opusthreshold=0, which forces Opus whatever connects: a server falls back to CELT the moment one old client appears, which costs more CPU and sounds worse. On a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W that is the difference between working and not. It also keeps users small and sets logdays=0, since the server writes its log to SQLite and on a machine booting off an SD card those writes are what wears it out.

The server neither mixes nor transcodes — it forwards packets — so its load is per-client crypto and networking rather than audio work. A Pi handles a remote station's two or three clients comfortably.

Mumble authenticates by certificate, so no password appears on any command line, where every process list on the machine could read it. A server that needs one should be saved in the client's own server list.

Mumble compresses, so ham-remote-require-lossless refuses it — see below.

Compressed audio and digital voice

A back end declares whether it preserves the waveform. This matters for digital voice: what crosses the link is then a modulated waveform rather than speech, and a codec built to model the human voice will destroy it. Set ham-remote-require-lossless and a compressing back end is refused, naming one that would do instead.

The radio end

The radio end runs its half under systemd, so it starts at boot and does not depend on Emacs. R in the panel, or M-x ham-remote-show-radio-end, prints the two commands for your current configuration, along with the rigctld invocation.

Both need a tunnel: rigctld has no authentication or encryption at all. WireGuard suits this better than SSH, whose forwarding is built for TCP while the audio is UDP.

Not yet done

Nothing at the operator's end can unkey the transmitter once the network is gone. This is the same gap CAT has, made likelier by a longer link. A radio-end watchdog is the next piece of work. Until it exists, remote operation rests on the transceiver's own transmit timeout — enable it.

Space weather

M-x ham-spacewx opens the panel. Nothing needs configuring first; it reads the public feeds published by the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center.

The second line carries the NOAA scales — radio blackout, radiation storm and geomagnetic storm — as they stand now and as they peaked over the last 24 hours. A storm that has already passed still shaped the day's propagation, so both matter.

The propagation estimate comes first, because it is the question the rest of the panel is evidence for. The indices behind it follow.

The panel lays itself out to fifty columns — ham-spacewx-panel-width — so it can sit in a side window beside the log or the rig panel without wrapping:

Propagation for grid CM98jr
  MUF, 3000 km hop (MHz)          26.4
  MUF in 12 h (MHz)               9.7
  Absorption floor (MHz)          6.4
  Bands by day
    160m 80m 40m 30m 20m 17m 15m 12m 10m 6m
  Bands at night
    160m 80m 40m 30m 20m 17m 15m 12m 10m 6m

Solar wind (DSCOVR)
  Speed (km/s, 6 h, 250–800)
    ~~~~~~~------------~~~~~~~~=  527
  Bz (nT, 15 h, ±20)
    ~~~~-------~~~~======++++++=  5.0 north

A reading takes two lines. The first names it and gives, in one parenthesis, everything about it that does not change between refreshes: its unit, how long its trace covers, and the scale that trace is drawn to. The second draws the trace and puts the number at the end of it, so every value in the panel lines up on the right hand end of its own sparkline — which is where the eye already is. The trace says what has been happening; the number finishes the sentence with what is happening now, and the words after it say what that means.

Splitting them that way means the eye returning to the panel lands on what moved. A unit and a scale do not change; the number does.

Sparklines are one width across the panel whatever the feed's cadence, so rows covering the same period line up column for column. When a feed has aged out, its age replaces the scale in the parenthesis: a number you cannot date matters more than the height of its ramp. Bz is drawn about zero, since its sign is the whole point, and reports its half height instead — a trace sitting low spent that window southward.

Values, traces and the words beside them share one set of colours. Readings that feed a NOAA scale are coloured on that scale, so the panel and the published alert level agree. The rest use the same palette to mean quiet, degraded and serious.

Two things sit outside that palette. What is in parentheses wears the same quiet face as the panel's opening lines, because it is context rather than content and should not compete with the readings. The propagation figures wear a colour of their own, because nothing measured them: they are worked out from the indices above them, and the colour says so on every row without a word of caveat on any of them. An age in parentheses is the exception to the first rule — a reading that has stopped being current should not read as quietly as one that has not.

Key	Action
g	Read any feed whose data has passed its own interval
G	Read every feed now
w	Show the exact solar wind record in use
c	Discard stored readings
?	Explain the panel

The same commands are on the Space Wx menu.

When a feed fails

A failed read keeps the last good reading rather than blanking the row, and says how old it is. Stale space weather is worth seeing as long as the panel is honest about its age; an empty panel tells you nothing. Any reading past ham-spacewx-stale-after carries its age, whatever the reason.

A machine resuming from sleep finds every feed timing out at once. The panel notices the gap, waits for the network, and retries once.

A feed can also arrive whole and carry nothing. GOES publishes a flux of exactly zero for every record while its X-ray instrument is down, rather than omitting them, and zero is not a quiet sun — the long band sits near 1e-8 at solar minimum and cannot physically reach zero. Drawn as data those zeros make a flat trace along the bottom of the ramp, in the colour of a quiet reading: a picture of six calm hours that were never observed. They are dropped instead, and the panel says no data: every flux reads zero. ham-spacewx-xray-floor sets where a measurement stops counting as one.

M-x ham-spacewx-diagnose re-reads every feed and reports what each answered: the fields it carries, how many records survive being narrowed to one energy channel, how many of those carry a measurement, and the current value of every reading taken from it. The report updates itself as the feeds land. It is the first thing to run when a row is empty, because it separates a moved endpoint from a network problem from an instrument outage from a payload this package does not understand.

Solar wind

The real time solar wind files carry every reporting spacecraft in one document, interleaved and not in time order. The panel sorts by timestamp, narrows to a single spacecraft, and drops samples the feed grades as poor — reading a mixture of DSCOVR and ACE is meaningless, since they sit at different points and are calibrated separately.

w shows the exact record in use: spacecraft, timestamp and quality grade. Put it beside NOAA's own plot when the two disagree.

ham-spacewx-wind-spacecraft follows SWPC's active flag by default, or pins to one spacecraft so you can compare like with like.

Propagation estimate

Set ham-station-grid to your locator and the panel opens with an estimated maximum usable frequency for a 3000 km hop now and twelve hours out, an absorption floor, and per-band summaries for day and night — the evening's bands being the thing worth planning around. Now and twelve hours out are two rows rather than one row and a parenthesis, so they share a column and can be compared by looking down it.

The section is headed with the locator it was worked out for — Propagation for grid CM98jr — because whose ionosphere this is matters more than a reminder that it is modelled. That caveat is below, and in the help.

This is a model, not a measurement. It predicts the ionosphere from solar and geomagnetic indices; an ionosonde network measures it directly. Where the two disagree the ionosonde is right. The chain is the standard one: solar ultraviolet ionises the F2 layer, so the critical frequency follows the solar zenith angle and the level of solar activity; multiplying by an obliquity factor gives the maximum usable frequency; the D layer, lit by the same sunlight and flooded by flare X-rays, absorbs rather than refracts and sets a floor. A band is open between the two. Geomagnetic storms depress the F2 layer in proportion to geomagnetic latitude, which is why a storm closes paths from Alaska while leaving equatorial ones alone. The F2 maximum lags local noon by a couple of hours, because recombination at that height is slow.

The parameterisation follows OpenHamClock (MIT), so this panel and the figures published elsewhere agree rather than differing by several MHz for no visible reason. Every coefficient is a defcustom, so the model can be corrected against real soundings rather than argued about.

Configuration

M-x customize-group RET ham-rig, RET ham-spacewx, and RET ham.

Option	Default	Meaning
ham-rig-host ham-rig-port	localhost 4532	Where rigctld listens
ham-rig-fast-interval	0.2	Seconds between frequency, PTT and meter polls
ham-rig-slow-interval	1.0	Seconds between mode, VFO and split polls
ham-rig-tx-timeout	180	Watchdog unkey when the duration is unknown
ham-rig-tx-timeout-max	600	Ceiling on the watchdog, whatever is declared
ham-rig-tx-watchdog-margin	1.25	Allowance over a declared duration
ham-rig-unkey-attempts	3	Unkey commands before warning the operator
ham-rig-atu-timeout	20	Expected length of a tuner cycle, in seconds
ham-remote-host	radio.local	Machine at the radio end
ham-remote-transport	trx	Which back end carries the audio
ham-remote-mumble-run	client	Which halves of Mumble this machine runs
ham-remote-mumble-follow-ptt	t	Microphone open only while keyed
ham-remote-mumble-user	login name	Name to join the server under
ham-remote-mumble-channel	nil	Channel to join, or the default
ham-remote-mumble-port	64738	Mumble's registered port
ham-remote-mumble-bandwidth	72000	Per-client ceiling, bits per second
ham-remote-mumble-users	4	Slots the server admits
ham-remote-require-lossless	nil	Refuse a back end that compresses
ham-rig-meter-ranges	VDD, ID, comp	Range to draw a meter over
ham-rig-meter-zones	SWR, ALC	Where a bar turns amber and red
ham-remote-settle-delay	0.2	Seconds from keying to audio being worth sending
ham-rig-tuning-steps	1 Hz … 1 MHz	Steps ← and → cycle
ham-rig-tx-meters	power, ALC, comp, SWR, VDD, ID	Meters shown while keyed
ham-rig-meter-units	comp, VDD, ID	Full scale for normalised meters
ham-rig-meter-zones	SWR at 2 and 3	Where a meter turns amber and red
ham-rig-controls-exclude	nil	Controls to omit
ham-rig-poll-when-hidden	nil	Keep polling with no panel visible
ham-frequency-format	dotted	14.074.000, khz or mhz
ham-band-default-frequencies	digital calling	Where b moves on each band
ham-station-grid	nil	Your Maidenhead locator
ham-spacewx-fetch-backend	auto	curl subprocess, or Emacs's url.el
ham-spacewx-panel-width	50	Columns the panel lays itself out to
ham-spacewx-metric-views	per reading	Window and width of each sparkline
ham-spacewx-noaa-scales	R, S, G	Thresholds each scale's levels begin at
ham-spacewx-severity-thresholds	per reading	Where an unscaled reading turns
ham-spacewx-wind-spacecraft	active	Which spacecraft the wind comes from
ham-spacewx-wind-speed-field	proton	Proton or alpha particle speed
ham-spacewx-max-quality	0	Strictness of the feed's own grading
ham-spacewx-stale-after	3600	When a reading is called old
ham-spacewx-xray-floor	1e-9	Below this a flux is a gap, not a reading
ham-spacewx-xray-long-band-regexp	0.1-0.8	How the long band is spelled
ham-spacewx-auto-refresh-interval	600	Seconds between refreshes
ham-spacewx-obliquity-factor	3.2	M(3000)F2, turning foF2 into a MUF
ham-spacewx-fof2-noon-per-sfi	0.04	foF2 rise per solar flux unit
ham-spacewx-f2-peak-hour	14.0	Local hour of the F2 maximum
ham-spacewx-bands	160m–6m	Bands the estimate reports on

Polling stops when no panel is visible and nothing has subscribed.

M-x ham-rig-show-stats reports request count, timeouts, discarded replies, errors, mean and maximum round-trip latency, and queue depth. Check it on a new radio: rising latency or a queue that will not drain means ham-rig-fast-interval is too short for the CAT rate.

Following the radio from your own code

(ham-subscribe ham-rig-topic-frequency 'my-logger
               (lambda (hz)
                 (message "now on %s" (ham-format-frequency hz))))

Topic	Arguments
ham-rig-topic-frequency	frequency in Hz
ham-rig-topic-mode	mode string, passband in Hz
ham-rig-topic-ptt	t or nil
ham-rig-topic-vfo	VFO name
ham-rig-topic-split	t or nil
ham-rig-topic-connection	state symbol, detail string

Events fire on change, not on every poll. Subscribing again with the same id replaces the handler. Handlers run synchronously from a process filter and must not block; one that signals an error cannot affect the others.

To read state directly: ham-rig-frequency, ham-rig-current-mode, ham-rig-ptt-p, ham-rig-connected-p, ham-rig-power-state, and ham-rig-get for the rest.

ham-spacewx publishes on ham-spacewx-updated with the source key and its payload, and offers ham-spacewx-kp, ham-spacewx-solar-flux, ham-spacewx-sunspot-number, ham-spacewx-xray-flux, ham-spacewx-proton-flux, ham-spacewx-solar-wind-speed, ham-spacewx-bz, ham-spacewx-scale-now, ham-spacewx-muf and ham-spacewx-band-condition.

ham.el also offers ham-maidenhead-to-latlon and ham-latlon-to-maidenhead (4, 6 or 8 characters), ham-great-circle and ham-grid-distance returning distance and bearing, ham-band-for-frequency, ham-parse-frequency and ham-format-frequency.

Credits

The propagation estimate's parameterisation is adapted from OpenHamClock, MIT licensed.

Space weather data comes from the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center, a work of the United States government and in the public domain.

License

GPL-3.0-or-later.