V11 Beta 8 — a test build. It replaces Beta 6 (Beta 7 was withdrawn before release for an LED VU crash, fixed here).
Faceplates (new)
- Chassis: Default, brushed Silver and brushed Black, with dome keys, engraved labels and slide faders. Every popup takes the chassis: menu, audio, tune/bookmarks, chat, recordings, About, the demodulator sheet and the small dialogs.
- Displays: Nixie tubes, VFD (Doto over a ghost grid), drawn 7-segment and the VCR display. Non-Latin station names are transliterated (Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic and others) on the displays that can only draw Latin.
- Meters: LED VU with peak hold and the squelch ring, and an analogue edgewise meter with VU ballistics. Both read the same number, unit and scale as the text readout (S-meter, SNR or dBFS).
- Landscape: the deck grows with the screen on big phones and stays at today's size on the SE. The status row drops items rather than squeezing them.
- A faceplate can never lock you out. If one crashes on draw, the app falls back to the default the next time it opens.
- Transparency effects: one setting. Off means fully opaque panels with no blur, which is faster on older devices. Low-end devices start with it off.
- Only the front-panel keys click (tune, zoom, menu, chat, audio, step).
Web client
- Much smaller page: about 160 KB on a first visit (was ~510 KB) and about 30 KB on a return visit. The script is cached, everything is compressed, and the map, the admin panel and the Opus decoder load only when needed.
- Controls colours: background, button ring, font (the frequency follows it) and transparency, with LED-style swatches. They are saved like the display settings, so they travel between servers.
- The start screen is solid and reads START RADIO. The waterfall always draws once the radio is started.
Radio and server
- RTL-SDR: fixes a tuning offset of about +1.95 MHz after direct sampling switched on and back off (thanks PU5WHB). Direct sampling, ppm, bias-T and digital AGC now wait for the hardware writer. The automatic HF crossover puts the tuner back too.
- Shared dial: lock-screen and car ⏮⏭, car picks and Siri now obey it, as on FM-DX.
- Advanced RDS: stays correct under full load. A known gap in the IQ re-syncs RDS at once. Radio library threads run at the IQ priority, and the counters for IQ dropped before the server sees it are exposed.
- Server health: the throttle snail works on Linux and reads the Pi's firmware clock (fire = heat, bolt = power). The tutorial explains both.
- A slow settings read on the server screen is no longer reported as a failure.
Credits: Kiko is listed by his callsign, PU5WHB.