DV4mini on Ubuntu 14.04

By end of december I got the chance to get one of the much coveted DV4mini Sticks for the use as a D-Star dongle. After plugging it to an Ubuntu 14.04 system the kernel created a serial device (/dev/ttyACMx). After downloading the software from [1] I executed mono dv4mini.exe and nothing worked. The GUI sayed it is searching the DV4mini device and obviously could not find it.

The output of the terminal from the binary showed something like this:

$ mono dv4mini.exe 
using momory pipes
09:50:09,112176 (0000):   DV4mini ... DV4mini driver started successfully 
09:50:09,112177 (9112):    SERIAL ... search DV4mini USB stick 
09:50:09,113273 (0001):   DV4mini ... Configuration file directory: /home/florian 
09:50:09,113302 (0000):       ADF ... set RX / TX qrg: 435100000 / 435100000 
09:50:09,113338 (0000):   DV4mini ... set mode: D-Star 
09:50:09,113478 (0000):     DSTAR ... XRF/REF processing started:  
09:50:09,113514 (0000):       DMR ... Start DV4m Modul  V0.01 
09:50:09,113606 (0000):       DMR ... Start on TS2 Reflector Version:20150922 
09:50:09,113642 (0000):       DMR ... Start on TS2 Reflector Version:20150922 
09:50:10,112953 (0999):   DV4mini ... no config: /home/florian/dv4m00016463194F.cfg 
09:50:11,125178 (1013):   DV4mini ... no data from Stick since 1 s 

It seems like it could not read a config file. From other users I heard that this file should be generated automatically but this did not happen in my case.

After digging around for a while I tested the stick on a virtualized Windows 7 Pro system with success. After installing the necessary drivers the OS allocated a COM Port and dv4mini worked without any errors. Further I tested running dv_serial on the Windows system and the dv4mini.exe GUI on the Linux host. This worked fine but the other way round did not. So I guessed that dv_serial is the problematic part.

A few days later I met some other OM in order to analyze a buggy feature of the DV4mini stick causing some audio dropouts. While we were at it I copied a config file from a running DV4mini system and renamed it accordingly.

With that config file in place the GUI started propery on my Ubuntu 14.04 box and the D-Star hotpot was usable. For documentation pruposes I will list the contents of my file here:

DF2ET  E2624112M434250000434250000JO31OL        00    
00DB0BS   ^@Bochum                                           ^@     ^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@

That seems a little unstructured but the main config items are visible like callsign, DMR ID, QRG (RX & TX), maidenhead locator, DMR Repeater callsgin and location.

To have a litte better insight to that file, here is the hex representation:

$ cat ~/dv4m00016463194F.cfg | xxd 
0000000: 4446 3245 5420 2045 3236 3234 3131 324d  DF2ET  E2624112M
0000010: 3433 3432 3530 3030 3034 3334 3235 3030  4342500004342500
0000020: 3030 4a4f 3331 4f4c 2020 2020 2020 2020  00JO31OL        
0000030: 3030 2020 2020 2020 2020 2020 2020 2020  00              
0000040: 200a 3030 4442 3042 5320 2020 0042 6f63   .00DB0BS   .Boc
0000050: 6875 6d20 2020 2020 2020 2020 2020 2020  hum             
0000060: 2020 2020 2020 2020 2020 2020 2020 2020                  
0000070: 2020 2020 2020 2020 2020 2020 2020 0020                . 
0000080: 2020 2020 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000      ............
0000090: 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000  ................
00000a0: 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000  ................
00000b0: 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000  ................
00000c0: 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000  ................
00000d0: 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000  ................
00000e0: 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000  ................
00000f0: 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0a              ...........

References

[1] http://dv4m.ham-dmr.ch/