An SDRuno plugin for FT* decoding (V2.

2)

Jan van Katwijk

Lazy Chair Computing
The Netherlands
[email protected]

September 23, 2022

1 Introduction
The FT8 plugin is a plugin for decoding FT8 messages and showing the decoded messages.
The plugin is experimental in the sense that its development is going on.
The plugin - as a community plugin - can be installed by placing it in the folder for
community plugins. Ask SDRplay.com where the folder need to be placed on your system, on
my system the folder can be found as subfolder in ”Documenten”.

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2 Selecting a samplerate
The plugin uses the IQOUT option of the SDRuno platform. This output is 192000 samples
per second. The plugin itself will reduce the samplerate to 12000 (and filter accordingly). The
plugin - when started - will do the selection of the IQOUT port.
The default setting for SDRuno (at least with me) is that the input samplerate is 2 MHz,
and the main spectrum display will show a spectrum of the full 2 MHz.

Figure 1: ft8Plugin: uno widget

It is useful to zoom in in the spectrum, after all the spectrum of the region of interest is
only a few KHz wide.

3 The FT8 plugin and the reporter map

The widget for the FT8 plugin is straight forward and does not have a lot of controls. On top
there are two lines with buttons and some info, and there is a larger space where the text of
the messages received is written.
On start up the white box will show the callsign and the grid of the receiver - obviously
only if specified1 . Then it will show for each decoded FT8 message a few fields

• the time of decoding the message;

• the strength of the FT8 message, relative to the average signal strength during reception
of the FT8 message;

• the frequency of the message with an accuracy of 3.125 Hz (tone distance is 6.25 Hz);

• the message type;

• the message itself.

On the top line in the control part of the widget there are two selectors and two buttons
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If no callsign and grid are specified no data will be transmitted to the pskreporter site.

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 Figure 2: ft8Plugin: the widget

• The first selector sets the value for the number of iterations, to be applied in the LDPC
decoding. Higher values may lead to better decoding but are expensive in terms of CPU
load. Default value is 10, which should be enough for. A selected value will be stored
and used the next invocation of the plugin.

• the second selector sets the bandwidth within the spectrum in which ft8 messages are
searched for. Default value is 2 KHz, maximum is 6 MHz. The selected frequency is
here the center frequency, so a width of 2 KHz means from -1 KHz to +1 KHz wrt the
selected frequency. Obviously, the larger the width, the more processing power is needed.

• Next a button labeled file is there. As the name suggests, a file can be selected in which
the data is stored. If the data is being written the label next to the button will be colored
red, if no data is written the color of the label will be green.

• the second button on the first row is labeled preset. The plugin supports a number of
preset frequency values. In previous versions this was a static list, in this version the
user can add his/hers preferred frequencies to the list (and the default list is shortened).

• to the far right of the top line there is the inevitable copyright symbol.
The second line in the widget shows three (or four) buttons, a label and a combobox
• the button with the label reporter can be used to switch the PSKReporter on or off. The
state is reflected in the label, green indicates that the reporter is ”on”, otherwise the
label will color red.

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 • the PSK reporter sends the data to the server

"https://www.pskreporter.info/pskmap.html

In order for the pskReporter info site to show the ”monitor”, i.e. data of the receiver that
sends the messages, the ft8 plugin sends some information on the ”home” station, a.o.
a callsign and the grid location to the pskreporter. The button callsign, when touched,
shows a widget where a callsign and a grid can be entered. Values will be maintained
between invocations of the plugin.

• if the psk report function is selected, a third button shows, labeled ”show”. If touched,
the ft8 plugin shows the elements of the messages that are transmitter to the psk reporter.
Transmission takes place in UDP mode, using port 4739 of the pskreporter server.

• FT8 is transmitted is well defined regions in different amateur bands. To ease switching
between these bands, the plugin now contains a button - labeled - presets where one
may select among a list of frequencies, known to be in these regions. By default the list
merely contains four of five frequencies (of course the one I am using most of the time),
and as said, your own preferred frequencoes can be added to the list. Of course, the
added frequencies will be saved between sessions.

• the delete button will remove the last entered preset frequency.

Figure 3: ft8Plugin: the map, example

The widget will show up to 30 of the last received messages. Of course all messages are
saved in a file whenever a file is selected

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 Figure 4: ft8Plugin: file output

4 A note on FT8 decoding

FT8 decoding is essentially based on a - more or less - ”intelligent” brute force approach
(sounds like a ”Contradictio in terminis”). In a first step an attempt is made to preselect
”potentials”, i.e. potential messages based on matching the input with a costas array of 7
tones.
In the second step for each of these potentials an LDPC based error detection/recovery
mechanism is applied. First the 79 subsequent tones are collected, the 58 data tones are
mapped upon 174 soft bits (3 bits per tone) and the LDPC algorithm is asked to make that
into ”hard” bits. Finally, in a third step the resulting message is subjected to a CRC check.
If the check succeeds the bits are translated into a message.
Note that the parameters in the first stage may be too strict, and not all messages are in
the set of potentials, or they may be too loose, and the set of potentials is too large. Some
criteria have to be applied to do the selection, but it is not obvious that a single set of criteria
is optimal under all circumstances.
An encoded FT8 message is 91 bits (including the CRC), and 83 error correction bits are
appended. Of course, the probability that on receiving a transmission, the error correction
bits contain - roughly - the same amount of errors as the message bits is pretty large.
The net effect is that the result of the application of the error correction may be that
incoming garbage is transformed to something resembling a message, and the other way, a
correct message may suffer from errors in the error correction bits and may be transformed
into garbage. A CRC check is therefore absolutely needed.
Anyway, the decoder may - and probably will - miss some messages in the transmitted
band, and I am still looking for the ”best” parameter settings for the different functions.

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5 Future work
Current work is on optimizing parameter settings and extending the encoding. Detecting
potential messages requires finding detecting peaks in the spectrum where the amplitude value
is (relatively) large, compared to its environment. While that sounds easy, there is a pretty
large ”noise” component, and parameters for detecting very small peaks are not always capabel
of detecting large peaks.
In the current version an attempt is made to decode all message types, however, messages
in some message types need further processing.
Further work is required to extract all calls that can be send to the PSKreporter.

6 Copyright and acknowledgments

The code in the plugin uses parts of the code of the FT4FT8 decoding software of Karlis Goba.
Especially the LDPC decoder is (almost) a copy of his code, and the copyright to the parts
taken or derived from his code are gratefully acknowledged.
The copyrights of the code of the plugin - not covered by the above - is by me. The software
is available under a GPL V2. Note that under this license you are free to use the plugin, and
I will make the source available to you on request, but the software is provided ”as is”, and no
garantees are given that the software meets your requirements.
Note that - as the title of this document states - the plugin is still experimental, implying
that the search for optimal parameter settings continues.