DiscDV: FreeDV (and analog voice) on a real HF transceiver from a Discord voice call!

Please be aware that this program is in very early development stages. Use on the air only if you are a licensed amateur radio operator, and you understand that bugs are bound to occur!

How to use:

Step one: creating a Discord bot

(Skip if you've made bots before)

Go to https://discord.com/developers, sign in, and in the Applications tab, click New Application, and create a new application. Once done, head to the Bot tab, and create a bot. Name it what you'd like, and then hit Reset Token and copy the newly generated token. Paste this token into token.txt, and make sure no one else sees it! At this point, you can now generate an invite link for the bot by going to the OAuth2 tab, checking applications.commands and bot, and choosing the bot permissions (Administrator is recommended). Viola! The invite link is ready to be used.

Step two: installing Python

(Skip if you already have Python)

This is operating system dependent, so I will not be explaining this here. The internet exists for a reason!

Step three: installing packages

In the directory of the python files, open a terminal and run pip3 install -r requirements.txt

Step four: setting up DiscDV

At this point, you should have your Discord bot's token in token.txt.

You can run this program without Codec2 libraries if you only want to use analog voice, but if you want FreeDV, the next thing to do is download or build the required Codec2 libraries.

On Linux, this can be done by going to the codec2 GitHub page at https://github.com/drowe67/codec2, following the build instructions, and copying the libcodec2.so into a folder named lib in the directory of the python files.

On Windows, you can obtain the libcodec2.dll file by building it yourself, however I have found this tricky. Instead, you can download the FreeDV GUI program at https://freedv.org, then go to the installation folder and copying libcodec2.dll and liblpcnetfreedv.dll to the lib directory in the directory of the python files.

Then, run config.py, and find the numbers for the audio devices connecting your PC and radio. Edit the audio_input_device and audio_output_device variables in config.py to match those device numbers.

Finally, install hamlib from https://hamlib.github.io/

Edit the rigctld_command variable in config.py to start rigctld and control your radio properly. Go to https://hamlib.sourceforge.net/html/rigctld.1.html for help with rigctld.

Step five: you should be good to go!

Run the bot.py file with python3 bot.py to start the bot!

A note on OS compatibility

This program is designed for Windows and Linux, but only tested on Windows. There may be some issues on Linux that do not exist when running this program on Windows. This program is not designed to run on macOS.