Getting PDW working using Virtualbox with linux host, pager decoder, pocsag

PWD is a great program for decoding pager tones, but it works only on windows.

If you are using virtualbox for windows on a Linux Host and have the group permissions set correctly, then you can decode from the sound card.

Of course you will need a scanner with a discriminator tap installed.  Connected to the input of the soundcard.

Tested on Mint Mate.

First, run alsamixer and unmute your sound card input channel, so you can monitor the sound comming in.  In my case, go to Mic and press "M" key to unmute.  The sound sound should be heard on the pc speakers.

Then open up Virtualbox (version 4) and select settings to ensure Also host driver is selected.

Then on the windows client, ensure that mic is selected, and pager tones can be recorded on the client, use sound recorder.

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Notes for compiling DSD for Linux Mate, digital sound decoder

DSD is a digital sound decoder.  It captures demodulated data tones from a radio scanner and processes them to decode the signal.  The sound source from the scanner comes from the scanners discriminator tap.  The Discriminator tap is the stage before audio filtering and amplification.  The best place to get data tones from a analouge radio receiver.  It is never 100% due to the analouge domain being digitised by the soundcard, sampling/noise may corrupt the data.

Gathered from various internet sources, works on Mint 13 (Maya).

DSD does not natively install on Linux Mint Mate without a few mods.  This is due to the lack of the oss soundsystem and /dev/dsp.  A patch is required for dsd_audio.c and both the makefiles of DSD and mbelib have to be modified.

Download dsd and mbelib, extract to seperate folders.

Download modified Makefiles from http://www.tarapippo.net/linux/dsd-makefiles.tar.gz
Extract and rename / overwrite the Makefiles for both DSD and mbelib.

Navigate to the mbdlib folder and:
make
sudo make install

Download dsd_audio_patch.txt from the fourm http://forums.radioreference.com/digital-voice-decoding-software/220493-fix-ubuntu-10-10-a.html

Navigate to dsd folder and patch dsd_audio.c with the following command:
patch dsd-1.4.1/dsd_audio.c dsd_audio_patch.txt

Then you can run (./configure not needed) and make command to compile the code.

now to test before installing.

Run DSD using the following command:
padsp -- ./dsd -i /dev/dsp -o /dev/dsp

padsp is making the OSS wrapper for dsd.

tip: First, run alsamixer and unmute your sound card input channel, so you can monitor the sound coming in.  In my case, go to Mic and press "M" key to unmute.  The sound sound should be heard on the pc speakers.

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