GitHub - kyleomalley/nocordhf: Open Source Digital Mode (FT8) Radio Software for Amateur Radio (MacOS/Linux/Windows))

A Discord-style chat-focused client for amateur radio modes. Two applications in one binary:

• FT8 — pure-Go FT8 modem with live waterfall, decode chat, HEARD sidebar, DXCC map, and ADIF / LoTW logging.
• MeshCore — connect to a MeshCore companion-radio LoRa device (USB or Bluetooth) and chat across the mesh: contacts, channels, per-message delivery state, live route visualization on the map.

Switch between modes from the left-hand mode rail. Each mode has its own settings, persistent chat history, and right-pane layout.

FT8 mode — Discord-style chat of decoded messages, live waterfall, HEARD sidebar, DXCC map.

Getting Started

Download the official release (MacOS)

The notarized macOS .app bundle from the GitHub releases page is the path of least resistance. On first launch macOS will prompt you for:

• Microphone access — required for FT8 mode (audio capture from your radio's USB CODEC).
• Bluetooth access — required for MeshCore mode when connecting to BLE-only trackers like the Seeed T1000-E.

Approve both when asked. If you skip a prompt you can re-enable it later under System Settings → Privacy & Security.

Build from source

git clone https://github.com/kyleomalley/nocordhf
cd nocordhf
go build ./cmd/nocordhf
./nocordhf

Requires Go 1.22+ and a C toolchain (Cgo is required for Fyne's GL backend, malgo audio, and the BLE driver).

Per-platform build dependencies:

• macOS — Xcode command-line tools (xcode-select --install).
• Debian / Ubuntu / derivatives:

  sudo apt-get install -y --no-install-recommends \
    gcc libgl1-mesa-dev xorg-dev libasound2-dev

  xorg-dev brings in libx11 / xcursor / xrandr / xinerama / xi in one go; libgl1-mesa-dev is the Fyne GL backend; libasound2-dev is malgo's ALSA capture path. BlueZ is talked to over DBus at runtime, no compile-time dev package needed.
• Fedora / RHEL:

  sudo dnf install gcc mesa-libGL-devel libX11-devel libXcursor-devel \
    libXrandr-devel libXinerama-devel libXi-devel alsa-lib-devel

• Windows — MSYS2 + MinGW gcc (or any cgo-capable Windows toolchain).

For a proper macOS .app bundle (with the microphone + Bluetooth permission strings the OS expects), use:

fyne package -os darwin -icon docs/icon.png

For a Debian .deb (icon, .desktop entry, runtime deps declared):

make release-linux NOCORDHF_VERSION=1.2.1

Outputs land under ./build/. Same release-win and release-mac targets exist for the other platforms — see the Makefile for env-var prerequisites.

First run — pick a mode

The mode rail on the left has chips for FT8 and MESH. Click the one you want; selection persists across launches.

First-run config — FT8

Open Settings (gear icon) and fill in:

• Callsign + Maidenhead grid — broadcast in your TX messages.
• Radio — pick the CAT family (Icom CI-V or Yaesu CAT v2), the serial port, and the baud rate. -no-cat on the command line disables CAT entirely if you only want RX.
• Audio device — the system mic name your radio's USB CODEC appears as. Test with ./nocordhf -list-audio to see the available devices.
• NTP — the chat header shows clock drift. FT8 needs ±0.5s to decode reliably; install chrony or ntpd if it's red.
• LoTW (optional) — enter ARRL credentials to sync QSL data into the map overlay. Add TQSL credentials to enable per-QSO auto-upload.

First-run config — MeshCore

Open Settings while in MESH mode. The dialog has two tabs:

• Device — pick USB Serial or Bluetooth transport.
  • For USB: select your board model (T-Beam, RAK4631, T-Echo, etc.), the serial port it appears as, and the baud rate (most boards default to 115200).
  • For Bluetooth: hit Scan… to discover nearby companion radios advertising the MeshCore service UUID, pick yours.
• Profile — set your Display name broadcast on the mesh. Optionally pin a Latitude / Longitude for your advert; or click Use radio GPS if your board has GNSS (T1000-E, T-Beam) to capture its current fix; or Pick on map… to click anywhere visually. Leave blank to use whatever the radio's GPS reports.

Once configured, click MESH again on the mode rail to (re)connect. The Contacts + Channels sidebar populates from the radio's tables.

FT8 mode

FT8 mode — scope view. Hollow boxes around every decoded signal in the live waterfall; click for chat scroll + magnification popup.

Operating mode for the standard 15-second FT8 protocol on the HF amateur bands. The right pane is a live waterfall + DXCC map; the center is a Discord-style chat of every decoded message; the left/right sidebars are the band list and HEARD callsigns.

Decoding

• Pure-Go FT8 modem in lib/ft8/ — encode, decode with belief-propagation + ordered-statistics decoder + a-priori rescue, full LDPC support. No native dependencies.
• Live waterfall with snap-to-slot scaling, slot timestamps, and hollow decode boxes drawn around every identified signal.
• Click any decoded signal in the waterfall: the chat scrolls and highlights the matching row, auto-scroll freezes, and a magnification popup pins to the click position.
• Hover over any waterfall signal for a live call / freq / SNR overlay (without losing the pinned popup).

Operating

• Type into the input box and hit Enter to TX on the next slot. Standard message slots: CQ, signal report, R+report, RR73, 73.
• Auto checkbox: when an inbound message addresses you, nocordhf walks the standard reply chain automatically until the QSO closes.
• HEARD sidebar lists recently-decoded RX-only callsigns with flag, prior-contact badge (L = LoTW QSL on this band, O = ADIF QSO logged), and recent-CQ marker. Sort A-Z / by SNR / by recency.
• Right-click any callsign-bearing surface (chat row, HEARD, waterfall box, map pin) for the same contextual menu: Reply, Profile, Open QRZ, Copy callsign.

Map

• Pannable / zoomable, CartoDB Dark Matter tiles. Stations cluster per cell so dense regions stay readable across zoom.
• Maidenhead grid overlay tinted by worked status: blue = worked locally (ADIF), yellow = LoTW QSO, red = LoTW QSL.
• Live QSO arc bows over the path between you and your current partner; arrowhead direction shows TX vs RX.

Logging

• ADIF auto-log to nocordhf.adif. The QSO tracker is passive — it watches the RX stream and closes a QSO on observed RR73 / 73 (no full FT8 handshake state machine).
• LoTW download merges QSL records into the map overlay; TQSL credentials enable per-QSO auto-upload.
• PSKReporter activity counts shown in the band list.

MeshCore mode

MeshCore mode. Contacts + Channels sidebar, per-thread chat, live RxLog at top of the right pane and a node-aware map underneath.

LoRa mesh chat using the MeshCore companion-radio protocol — connects to a USB- or Bluetooth-attached LoRa board running the MeshCore firmware (T1000-E, Heltec V3, T-Beam, T-Deck, T-Echo, RAK4631, generic nRF52840 trackers, etc.). Right pane is the live RxLog + basemap; left sidebar is your Contacts + Channels list.

Connecting

• USB or BLE — flip the transport in Settings → MeshCore → Device. BLE is required for trackers like the T1000-E that ship with BLE-only firmware.
• Auto-reconnect (default 5 minutes, configurable) handles macOS sleep/wake gracefully — when the OS tears down BLE during sleep, nocordhf surfaces a "link dropped" line and retries on schedule. Set to 0 to disable.

Contacts

• Sidebar Contacts list shows every node the radio has heard. Sort by Recent / Name / Type / Distance from your position. Each row has a clickable star to mark a favorite (favorites pin to the top of any sort).
• Right-click a contact for Info (pubkey, type, last advert, position), Reset path (clear the radio's cached out-route for that contact — DMs re-discover via FLOOD; useful when a cached path bit-rots), or Remove.
• Bulk delete dialog with presets: stale > 7 / 30 days, never heard, broken timestamps. Useful when the contact table fills up on a busy mesh.
• Manual-add contacts toggle in Profile — when on, the radio stops auto-adding every advert it hears. New peers must be approved explicitly.

Channels

• Sidebar Channels list shows every configured channel slot. + adds a new channel: pick Add hashtag channel for community channels (e.g. #test. Add private channel to paste an explicitly-shared 16-byte secret.
• Right-click a channel for Info / Remove.

Chat

• Per-thread chat history persists to nocordhf-meshcore.db (bbolt). Switch threads, switch modes, relaunch the app — history survives.
• Outbound messages track delivery state (sending... → delivered on PushSendConfirmed, failed after 90s with no ACK). Channel sends pre-validate against MeshCore's 140-byte text limit so silently-dropped oversize messages surface immediately.
• Live character counter (N/140) at the right of the input, amber within 10 of the cap, red over.
• @-mention completion: type @, press Tab to cycle through contact names. Inserts as @[Name] (the wire convention upstream clients render as a styled mention pill). Inbound mentions render with brackets stripped, color-coded — blue for "someone pinged someone else", warm amber for "you got pinged". Mentions of you flag the thread in the sidebar with (@N) instead of plain (N).
• Inline path-hash links: comma-separated 1/2/3-byte hex series (e.g. df,b7,43) get auto-detected against your contact roster; matched hops become clickable links that fly the map to that contact.
• Inline URL links: http / https URLs render underlined and open in your default browser on click. Right-click for Open / Copy.
• Hover any timestamp for the full local datetime tooltip.
• Right-click a chat row for Info (full route, SNR, delivery state) or Map Trace (animate the route the message took across the mesh).

RxLog

• Top-of-pane log of every mesh-layer packet your radio decoded off-air (PushLogRxData). Time, route type (FLOOD / DIRECT / TRANSPORT_*), payload type (TXT_MSG / ADVERT / PATH / ACK / …), hop count, SNR, RSSI. Newest at the bottom, auto-scrolls to follow.
• Right-click a row: Inspect for parsed metadata + hex dump, Show path on map to plot the route visually, Clear path to wipe overlays.

Map

• MeshCore nodes plot as colored dots: red = repeater, green = room, orange = sensor, blue = chat peer. Yellow diamond = you (driven by your radio's GPS, not the FT8 grid centroid).
• Lightning routes — when a message arrives or you send, the route animates as a curved arc from sender to recipient hop-by-hop, with arrowheads at each node. s.
• Auto path reset — if DMs to a contact fail twice in a row the radio's cached route is auto-cleared and the next send FLOODs to learn a fresh path. Surfaces in chat as a system line. Manual reset is also available via right-click.

Compatible radios (FT8)

CAT control auto-detects on the listed serial port. Audio uses whatever device name you pass via -audio.

Other Icom CI-V rigs (IC-705, IC-7610, IC-9700) should work with the existing CI-V driver — only the radio-address byte differs. Other Yaesu CAT-v2 rigs (FT-991A, FT-DX10) likewise share the protocol but haven't been verified on hardware.

-no-cat runs RX-only with no PTT or tune support, useful for pure-listener setups.

Compatible boards (MeshCore)

Any board running MeshCore companion-radio firmware is supported — the wire protocol is hardware-agnostic. Tested boards include:

Project layout

• cmd/nocordhf/ — application entrypoint.
• internal/nocord/ — application UI (Discord-style window, Fyne-based).
• lib/ — reusable packages, suitable for use in other Go ham-radio projects:
  • ft8/ — FT8 modem (encode, decode, LDPC, OSD, AP).
  • meshcore/ — MeshCore companion-radio modem (serial + BLE transports, frame parsing, packet decoder, persistent store).
  • audio/ — capture + playback (malgo-backed).
  • cat/ — radio CAT control (Icom CI-V, Yaesu).
  • waterfall/ — live FFT spectrogram.
  • mapview/ — pannable / zoomable map widget for Fyne.
  • adif/, lotw/, tqsl/ — logging + LoTW upload pipeline.
  • callsign/, hamdb/, pskreporter/ — callsign / station lookup + activity stats.
  • ntpcheck/ — clock-drift probe (FT8 needs ±0.5 s).
  • logging/ — zap-based structured logger.

License

NocordHF is released under the GNU General Public License v3.0. See LICENSE for the full text.

The FT8 modem in lib/ft8/ is an independent, clean-room Go implementation of the public FT8 protocol described in K9AN/G4WJS/K1JT, QEX July/August 2020. The MeshCore modem in lib/meshcore/ is a Go port of the open-source liamcottle/meshcore.js reference. Acknowledgements to WSJT-X, ft8_lib, MeshCore, and the project's other upstream dependencies are in CREDITS.md.

Disclaimer

NocordHF transmits on amateur radio bands. You must hold a valid amateur radio license, issued by your country's regulator, that permits operation on the bands and modes you intend to use. The operator is solely responsible for ensuring all transmissions comply with applicable regulations (in the US: FCC Part 97; elsewhere as applicable).

This software is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. The authors are not liable for any spurious emissions, missed contacts, illegal transmissions, equipment damage, or any other harm arising from the use of this software. See the GPL-3.0 LICENSE for the formal warranty disclaimer.

Use at your own risk.