Hardware, permissions and services

Finding your hardware

hamstack devices          # USB serial ports and sound cards, grouped by shared hub
hamstack devices watch    # live: shows each device as you plug it in or unplug it

A radio’s CAT port and its sound card normally hang off one USB hub, so they are listed together (a radio like the IC-7300 MK2 shows both of its serial ports and its codec in one group). A hub on your desk looks the same as one inside a radio, so a group is a hint, not a promise. Devices are named by USB vendor:product and serial number, which survive replugging and other USB ports. Discovery reads sysfs and needs no privileges (unlike dmesg).

Permissions

Opening a radio’s serial port needs a system group (uucp on Arch, dialout on Debian and Fedora); services running with nobody logged in (linger) also need audio for sound cards.

hamstack groups           # where you stand: account, this login, and your service manager
hamstack groups fix       # adds you with usermod, showing the command first

setup winlink offers this. Adding a group only helps services after your login and the user service manager restart: log out and in, then sudo systemctl restart user@UID.service (or reboot). doctor reports which of those is still pending.

Radio support check

doctor asks the installed rigctld whether it has a driver for your radio. Distributions often ship an older hamlib than a new radio needs (Debian 13’s hamlib 4.6.2 has no IC-7300 MK2 driver; 4.7.2 does), and the check says so instead of letting rigctld fail later.

The fix is a source build of the latest hamlib:

hamstack install hamlib --from-source

It shows a disclaimer first (it installs compilers and development libraries, takes a while, and leaves those packages installed), verifies the release tarball’s checksum, builds in a temporary folder and installs to ~/.local. Your distribution’s hamlib is left alone and hamstack prefers the newer copy even if ~/.local/bin is not first on PATH. setup winlink offers this when your radio needs it; an unattended run (--yes) only does it with --allow-source-build. hamstack update rebuilds a source-built hamlib the same way.

Services

systemd user units: hamstack-rigctld@RIG, hamstack-mercury@RIG, hamstack-direwolf@RIG, hamstack-pat and, with a GPS, hamstack-gpsd:

• mercury BindsTo rigctld (stopping rigctld stops it) and waits for rigctld’s port before starting;
• pat Wants mercury;
• the pat unit follows the active station (its config file and web UI address);
• a missing radio makes rigctld exit once with a clear message (no restart loop);
• the CAT serial device is resolved when the service starts, so replugging is fine. Mercury uses ARQ port 8300, the same as VARA HF: do not run both.