How to install Linrad under Windows.
(Part of SM 5 BSZ home page)
(Jan 24 2013)
The installation consists of three independent parts:

1) The Linrad executable linrad.exe and the two text files help.lir and errors.lir have to be placed in the Linrad directory which may be created new or which may be an old directory. Possibly with a previous Linrad version in it.

2) Libraries and other binary files that Linrad needs access to have to be placed in the PATH. They may be placed with one copy in each Linrad directory, but it is more practical to place them in the system directory {sys} which is C:\WINNT\System32 under Windows 98 and Windows 2000 and C:\Windows\System32 under Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7.

3) The hardware that Linrad will use has to be properly installed and configured in Windows. There are many problems with drive routines under Windows. Elderly hardware is not well (if at all) supported by modern Windows versions. There are often bugs of various kinds in soundcard drivers and the manufacturers might not supply drivers that are suitable for an SDR application like Linrad.

Step 1. Installing the executable under Windows.

  • Easiest is to download and execute the installer setup-linrad-xx.yy It will create the appropriate Linrad directory and put the necessary files in it. It will also create a desktop icon and an uninstaller.

  • Alternatively you may download wlrx-yy.zip and unzip it into a suitable directory. In that case you should right click on linrad.exe in Windows Explorer and send linrad.exe to the desktop to create an icon. In both cases you would use the same pre-compiled version of Linrad with portaudio and support for Si570 and soft66.

  • You may also decide to compile the executable yourself by downloading and extracting the Linrad source code into a suitable directory. You will need mingw32 and nasm to compile. First run configure.exe then make.bat (mingw has to reside in C:\mingw). configure.exe will check which files are present and produce Makefile which will control whether the generated linrad.exe will include support for Portaudio and/or Si570 and/or soft66.

    For Portaudio you need to have palir-xx.dll in your Linrad directory. You can get it from these archives: palir-01.zip (485835 bytes, Oct 2009) or palir-02.zip (493856 bytes, March 2011) For information about Portaudio in Linrad click here: Portaudio in Linrad. Among other things there is a description how palir-xx.dll is generated from source code.

    For the Si570 support you need the libusb files, libusb.a and usb.h and for soft66 support you also need libftdi.a, libsoft66.a, ftdi.h and soft66.h at the appropriate places in the mingw32 directory. The easiest way is to download and unpack this file mingw516nasmplus.zip (25 307 732 bytes) It will create C:\MinGW and install everything needed to compile Linrad. In case you already have mingw32 and nasm you can get the other files from here: linrad-libs.zip (447113 bytes)

    In case you want to compile for Windows 98 you must delete the libusb files C:\mingw\lib\libusb.a and/or C:\mingw\include\usb.h and rerun configure. (The Si570 support does not work under Windows 98.)

  • You may also compile linrad.exe under Linux. The configure script will tell you to install mingw32, nasm and the linrad libraries which are contained in linrad-libs.tbz (419596 bytes)
The file setup-linrad-xx.yy can be generated from linrad.exe, help.lir and errors.lir (contained in wlrx.yy) by use of the inno setupsoftware.

Installing libraries and binaries under windows.

Easiest is to download and execute the installer setup-linrad-dll-package-02.exe (690056 bytes) It will place palir-01.dll, palir-02.dll, libusb0.dll and inpout32.dll in your {sys} directory.

This older version will be OK for Linrad versions up to Linrad-03.21: setup-linrad-dll-package-01.exe (614050 bytes)

In case you want to use the Perseus HF receiver you must also have perseususb.dll in the path with the Perseus .sbs firmware files in the same directory as perseususb.dll. See below.

Installing drive routines under Windows.

This is not really a Linrad problem, it belongs to the manufacturer of your hardware and to Microsoft. There is a lot to say about drive routines for soundcards under Windows, but at the moment little of that will be exposed here. Use Google, Yahoo or some other search engine. Investigate your sound device, look for inappropriate sound effects as the one described in this MOON-NET posting Upgraded computer, new issues. Disable sound effects in Windows or select Portaudio with ASIO, WDM-KS or WASAPI drivers in the Linrad setup.

The Delta 44 drivers may be incorrect under Vista and Windows 7 The audiodg.exe bug(?) may cause excessive CPU load and some soundcards are useless due to misaligned samples. Soundblaster Audigy 24 bit, EMU 1212M and others have this error.

The WSE units need a parallel port. This link: How to add a parallel port discusses some of the possible solutions for adding a parallel port.

In case you want to use Linrad with SDR-14, SDR-IQ or Perseus under Windows, first install the drivers supplied by the manufacturer and make sure the units run with the manufacturers software.

With the Perseus such a strategy might fail. perseus.exe might not work at all on a Pentium 3 and it might not work under Windows 98. To run Linrad with the Perseus HF receiver on obsolete platforms (software and/or hardware,) download this file: old-perseus.zip (63321 bytes) It contains an old version of perseususb.dll as well as a directory Drivers. By installing the drive routine from "Drivers" and by placing the old perseususb.dll in the path where you have your .sbs files it is possible to run Linrad with the Perseus on Win 98 systems as well as on elderly Pentium 3 systems where the winusb drivers do not work.

The Perseus files are protected by copyright. All rights belong to http://www.microtelecom.it Each version of Linrad is compiled for a specific version number on the sbs files for Perseus. Go to this page if you want to use Perseus with Linrad and need specific version of the sbs files: sbs files for using Linrad with Perseus

For Perseus you might want to use this installer: setup-linrad-perseus-bin-package-01.exe (1883147 bytes) It will install perseususb.dll as well as the .sbs files in your system directory. The binary files for Perseus will then automatically become available for new Linrad versions.

For SDR-14 and SDR-IQ the file FTD2XX.DLL has to be available to Linrad and the SDR-14 or SDR-IQ drive routine has to be installed. In case if you do not want to install SpectraVue you can download this file ftd2xx.zip (266881 bytes), unpack it to a suitable place and instruct the Windows hardware installation tool to search for the drive routines for "SDR-14" or "SDR-IQ" there. You may place a copy of FTD2XX.DLL in the Linrad directory or in your system directory.

Source code for GNU software.

MinGW can be downloaded here; http://mingw.org/category/wiki/download
nasm is here: http://nasm.sourceforge.net or here: http://www.nasm.us
libusb-win32 is here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/libusb-win32/files

All the source code files of mingw, libusb-win32, libftdi-win32 libsoft66 libusb-1.0 and librtlsdr are available here: mingw516-src.htm

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