[Xastir] Loss of incoming audio

[Curt, WE7U]

On Thu, 7 Jan 2010, Tim Billingsley wrote:

> A few moments ago I checked it and
> I received one station a few miles from me and nothing else. Transmit
> audio seems to work fine, but there is one other item that may help in
> diagnosis. Almost every time I start xastir it will transmit once and
> after that it stores every beacon/message/query until I stop the
> interface and restart it. At that point everything transmits fine. The
> receive is hit and miss at best. A couple of days ago I ran almost all
> day with no glitches, today I have had no luck at all. I am about to
> reboot again and see what it does.

Most of the trouble I had with soundmodem had to do with something
else whacking the receive levels.  Sometimes it was the desktop
environment trying to do audio when it came up or some kind of audio
alert, sometimes it was an audio or video player app.  By bringing
up an audio volume control application I could get it working again.

I mostly solved this problem by not running a Desktop Environment
like KDE or Gnome, and running just a Window Manager instead.  Most
people these days wouldn't go that route, but I'm a hard-core Unix
user so I feel at home with this.  I run FVWM2 window manager.

I don't know how to fix the soundcard order problem.  I haven't run
a system with multiple soundcards yet but was planning to play with
that in the future in order to isolate the video/audio/system sounds
from the ham radio stuff.  Perhaps someone with a USB 2nd soundcard
setup for their radios has solved these sorts of problems.

-- 
Curt, WE7U.                         <http://www.eskimo.com/~archer>
    APRS:  Where it's at!                    <http://www.xastir.org>
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