Radio Catalog

What We're Doing

We are building a software catalog and creating version-controlled repositories to ensure these valuable projects remain accessible and relevant for the ham community. Our goal is to foster continued development and preserve history.

We contact original authors to recover lost or hidden revisions of source code and convert the sources to a git repository, then add it to our Radio Catalog. This provides a clean slate and encourages the continued usage or maintenance of these projects in the amateur radio community.

Original and unmodified master copies of recovered source code are sent to the Digital Library of Amateur Radio and Communications (DLARC) for permanent archival and public access.

In addition to preserving and modernizing these source code repositories, we are also packaging and introducing this software into the Nixpkgs collection, where it will be further maintained and used by thousands of people. We hope that other package repositories and Linux distributions systems will pick up and use our clean Git repositories

Key Goals

📜 Preserve project history using Git and the DLARC archive.

🔧 Enable future development and iteration.

🖥 Ensure that programs can be used with modern operating systems.

📦 Use Nix to package and distribute software more widely, with more reproducibility guarantees.

Repositories

GitHub: radiocatalog

GitLab: radiocatalog

🔐 Self-hosted Git coming soon.

FAQ

What is DLARC?
The Digital Library of Amateur Radio and Communications is a library of materials and collections related to amateur radio and early communications. We send raw, unmodified master copies of source code we recover there for archival in tarball format. Afterwards we use git to modernize these sources.
What is ARDC?
Amateur Radio Digital Communications (ARDC) is a foundation that supports amateur radio and digital communications. They fund projects like ours through grants.
Why did we choose Nix?
We chose Nix because it makes it possible to reproduce, run and distribute software on any modern Linux distribution, as well as potentially Darwin (macOS) and Windows hosts via the WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux).
What is RadCat? (🐱 + 🕶️ + 📻)
It's our nickname!

Thanks

This project was kickstarted by a grant from ARDC. ARDC is actively supporting open source and amateur radio projects. If you have an idea, you can apply for a grant just like we did. Apply here.

The details of our grant can be viewed by following the link below:

https://www.ardc.net/apply/grants/2024-grants/grant-radio-catalog-ham-radio-software-preservation-and-restoration/

Photos

📷 Coming soon: photos