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comptext

Compares two text streams and scores how much of one arrived intact

What it does

Takes a sent file and a received file and reports the character accuracy between them as a percentage, aligning the two so that dropped or inserted characters do not throw the whole comparison off.

Why you would want it

It turns "that mode seemed better" into a number. Comparing two digital modes, two audio levels, two filter settings or two antennas on the same path is an experiment, and without a score it is an opinion. This is the W1HKJ suite's measuring instrument.

Before it will work

The original text and the received text as files. Getting the received text out of fldigi means logging it, which is a setting rather than a default.

How it installs

  • apt: comptext

Known problems

It scores characters, not meaning: a decode that is 90 percent accurate may still be unreadable if the errors land in the callsign. Use it to compare conditions against each other rather than as an absolute measure of whether a mode is usable. Debian's Homepage field for this package points at w1hkj.com, which no longer serves the project. Corrected 2026-08-29 after re-checking: it does still resolve, and both it and www.w1hkj.com 301-redirect to kylegentz.com, which has no DNS record at all — so the chain ends nowhere. The subpaths Debian cites return 404 on the way. An earlier note here said the redirect landed on "an unrelated site"; that was read from an empty response and the accurate statement is that the target does not exist. Either way the packaged link is useless, and the live project is w1hkj.org, which is what this manifest points at.

Keeping it current

  • probe: apt policy
  • strategy: apt_upgrade

Where to get help with the software itself

The W1HKJ suite -- linuxham on groups.io.

Source: catalog/packages/comptext.yaml