Orion Control

(An independent project, not affiliated with or endorsed by Ten-Tec — Ten-Tec model numbers: Orion = 565, Orion II = 566, Omni VII = 588.)

A Flex/SmartSDR-style console for the Ten-Tec Orion (565/566): full computer control, a live wideband panadapter/waterfall fed by an SDRplay RSP, drag-the-filter-edges tuning, a draggable notch, CW decode and a multi-channel CW skimmer, DX-cluster/RBN/POTA spots painted on the spectrum, whole-band overview landings on the band buttons, an SWR sweep plotted right on the pan, a real-VOACAP propagation overlay on the world-map backdrop (the genuine engine is bundled in the AppImage — no setup), WinKeyer keying, rotor control, and rigctld emulation so WSJT-X, fldigi, cqrlog and GridTracker keep working unchanged — one serial port, no flrig.

Status: ALPHA, Orion-only. Daily-driven at one station for months; you are among the first others to run it. Expect rough edges, report everything. The Omni VII personality exists in the code but is currently untested — stay on the Orion for now.

Install (easiest — one line)

New to Linux? This script does everything for you: installs the libraries, sets up the SDRplay API and serial-port access, downloads the latest console, and adds it to your applications menu.

bash <(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/n8mus/orion3-sdr-console/master/install.sh)

Log out and back in once after the first run (for serial access), then launch Orion Control from your menu. Re-run any time to update. Prefer to build from source? See Build and run below.

What you need

Hardware

• Ten-Tec Orion 565 or Orion II 566 (developed against V3 firmware) with a serial CAT connection — native RS-232 or a quality USB-serial adapter (a cheap one cost this station weeks of RFI hunting; FTDI on a direct motherboard port, or a real COM port, strongly advised).
• SDRplay RSP (developed on an RSP2; nearby models likely work) fed from the Orion's spare RX antenna jack or an antenna tap. ⚠️ The SDR feed MUST be TX-protected. If your tap does not isolate the SDR when you transmit, 100 W will destroy it. Know your isolation before you key up.
• A monitor at least 1920 px wide (the layout needs 1808 px).
• Optional, each unlocking a feature: WinKeyer USB (CW keying, memories, type-ahead), a USB audio codec / SignaLink carrying the radio's RX audio (CW decode through the radio's own filters + the pitch meter), a rotctld-compatible rotor, and cqrlog (one-click QSO logging via the console's UDP bridge).

Software (Linux; developed on Arch)

• Qt 6 (base + serialport), cmake, a C++20 compiler, rnnoise.
• The SDRplay API v3.x service from sdrplay.com/downloads — proprietary, installed by you, never bundled here. The sdrplay_apiService must be running (their installer sets that up).
• Optional: hamlib (rotctld for the rotor); PipeWire/PulseAudio utilities (pactl, pw-record — present on any modern desktop) for the audio features.
• The VOACAP propagation overlay: bundled in the AppImage (VOACAP's core is public-domain US-government code, so unlike the SDRplay API it ships inside). Building from source instead? Build voacapl (./configure --prefix=$HOME/.local && make && make install && makeitshfbc) — or skip it and the overlay simply stays off with a hint.

Build and run

cmake -S . -B build -DBUILD_SDRPLAY=ON
cmake --build build -j$(nproc)
./build/tentec-console

First run

The Station setup dialog opens by itself: your callsign and grid, the radio model and CAT serial port, WinKeyer port, radio-audio capture device, DX-cluster login, rotor. The Test buttons probe the real hardware — the radio test shows the Orion's firmware string, the keyer test runs the WinKeyer handshake. It lives in SDR ▾ → Station setup… afterwards. Radio model/port changes take effect on the next launch.

Every port field lists the serial devices this machine actually has, so you pick rather than type, and each is offered under a stable name where one exists: the kernel's /dev/serial/by-id/… for USB adapters, plus any symlink your own udev rules put in /dev. Prefer those — plain /dev/ttyUSB0 and /dev/ttyS4 names get reassigned when you add or move hardware, which silently points a setting at the wrong device (adding one PCIe serial card here renumbered four ports and aimed a rotor daemon at a transceiver). Native PCIe/COM ports get no stable name from the kernel, so a udev rule is the only way to pin one; write it and the console will offer it. Nothing is preconfigured — an empty field means that feature is off. The rotor is the exception: the console never opens that port itself, it talks to rotctld (default 127.0.0.1:4533), so the rotor's device is configured in rotctld, not here.

Then:

• rigctld emulation is on TCP 4532. Point WSJT-X / cqrlog / GridTracker there (any rigctld-compatible client works). Stop any real rigctld or flrig instance first — one master per radio.
• The panadapter's gain is managed by Auto LNA (SDR ▾ menu). A loud evening band stepping the attenuation up is normal operation, not a fault.
• Click to tune (CW zap snaps to the carrier), wheel to step, drag a passband edge to cut the filter, drag the passband body to slide PBT, right-click to park VFO B, Z zero-beats, X flips CW sideband.

Reporting problems

Run from a terminal and include everything it printed. If it crashed, coredumpctl list should show it — coredumpctl info output is gold. Say what band, what mode, what you clicked, and whether the radio, the SDR, or both were connected. Screenshots welcome.

Known alpha limitations

• US band plan assumptions (60 m channels, CW skimmer windows, band-plan shading).
• Orion-only until an Omni VII CAT path is re-established and tested.
• Linux-only today; a Windows port is planned after the alpha settles.
• One console instance at a time (exclusive serial + single-tuner SDR).

License

GPL-3.0 for the combined work: the CW decode engine is a port of fldigi's (© W1HKJ & contributors, GPL-3), which lifts the rest of this GPL-2.0-or-later codebase to GPL-3 in combination. You received this software with its complete source; if you pass binaries along, the source goes with them. Which files sit under which license, and why the base is GPLv2-or-later, is in NOTICE. The SDRplay API is proprietary and is not part of this distribution — every user installs it themselves from SDRplay.

73 — and all signals depart at exactly Warp 1.