Rafe — documentation

A web-based remote head for the Icom IC-705 (and, via a small server, any USB Icom radio or SDR): panadapter, audio, CI-V control and a big suite of decoders from any browser.

Guides

• Operator's guide — the listener/operator app and its full feature set (tuning, DSP, scope, CW, digimodes, digital voice, the map / greyline / frequency-directory / satellite / AIS tools, logbook).
• RS-BA1 server — the standalone RS-BA1 network server: serve a USB radio or an SDR, run it independently, and add multiple remote SDRs (as switchable radios or as data collectors).
• RS-BA1 protocol spec — the reverse-engineered Icom UDP remote-control protocol our client/server speaks: the three streams, handshake + login/token, retransmission, CI-V & audio framing, and the CI-V 0x27 spectrum-scope / waterfall transport.
• Install guide — get the server up and running on Linux Mint/Ubuntu, add the SDR decode tools, and deploy remote collectors.

Codec & signal-processing internals

• The Beginner's Tour of the Digital Modes — start here if you're new: every protocol in the catalogue explained from zero, easiest first, with diagrams. No maths, no prior radio knowledge assumed.
• The Mathematics of the Digital Modes — the intermediate guide: the theory behind every operating principle (correlation and matched filters, Shannon, CRC algebra, Hamming/Reed–Solomon/Viterbi/LDPC, interleaving, LFSRs, source coding), each derived gently and pinned with one fully worked, machine-verified numeric example.
• Protocol Commonalities — an engineer's guided tour of the shared building blocks (modulation, sync, CRC, FEC, interleaving, source coding, receiver DSP), built up from the simplest concepts (OOK/FSK) to the full stack. Read this first for the why; the per-protocol specs give the what.
• Protocol reproduction specs — full, from-scratch reproduction specifications (algorithm + every constant/table) for every native protocol: the WSJT-X family, the fldigi modems, and the LoRa/Meshtastic stack. One document per protocol.
• Native digimodes — the in-repo FT8/WSJT-X/fldigi decoders that replace the external binaries.
• Codec SDK / codec backends — the pluggable text-codec registry and the native/third-party fallback switch.
• RVQ-Voice — technical paper on the native 1.6–3.2 kbps digital-voice codec (SoundStream-style RVQ on a classical vocoder).
• LoRa / LoRa open issues — the two LoRa implementations (audio-band CSS + real LimeSDR Semtech/Meshtastic transceiver).

Architecture at a glance

  browser ── WebSocket/HTTPS ──► Rafe app ────────► radio (RS-BA1 UDP)
   (operator head)                    │                 · IC-705 over WLAN
                                      │                 · IC-7300/SDR via rsba1server
                                      ├─► decoders: FT8/FT4, RTTY/PSK (fldigi),
                                      │   POCSAG, SSTV, APRS, NAVTEX, WEFAX,
                                      │   WSJT-X, ARDOP/Winlink, FreeDV/M17/P25
                                      ├─► whisper.cpp (voice transcript)
                                      ├─► SatDump  ◄── LimeSDR (weather/Inmarsat)
                                      └─► AIS ingest ◄── local SDR + remote Pis

• deploy/BUILD-NOTES.md — source-build gotchas and fixes.
• deploy/install-mint.sh — the one-shot installer.

Screenshots