Last week during the regular confabs’ with Iain (M0PCB) we was discussing how best to utilise the RF Space SDR-IQ receivers we both have so that we can make a poor man’s CW Skimmer Server. We had already both seen comments about W3OAs applications but neither of us could find a suitable download so after discussing how it should work I took on the challenge to develop something using in Python.
Thankfully CW Skimmer has a telnet feature with quite a few commands to control the application so all I needed to-do was write a script that connected to that and then have an internal timer so that every 2 minutes it changed band, Iain provided me with a set of center frequencies for 160-10m.
Writing python code for @m0pcb to control CW Skimmer so it switches band every x minutes. #hamr pic.twitter.com/Sv7HTayfQh
— Peter Goodhall (@2e0sql) January 30, 2015
After 40mins we had a usable script that was jumping though all bands – then after a couple of bug fixes including one to keep trying to connect if you close CW Skimmer was added so you can run the python script on any computer on the network.
As this uses Telnet it will work with any SDR or radio connected to CW Skimmer so handy for anyone’s shack if you don’t own an expensive QS1R.
The scripts downloadable from github https://github.com/magicbug/pyCWSkimmerFrequencyChange