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comptty

The same accuracy comparison as comptext, for Baudot RTTY streams

What it does

Compares a sent and a received RTTY stream and reports accuracy, handling the Baudot shift states that make a naive character comparison meaningless -- a single missed shift character turns the rest of a line into digits without any of the letters being wrong.

Why you would want it

Because comptext scores it wrongly. Baudot is a five-bit code with figures and letters shifts, so an ordinary text diff of two RTTY decodes reports a catastrophe where one shift was lost. If you are measuring RTTY performance, this is the tool that knows that.

Before it will work

Sent and received streams as files, as with comptext.

How it installs

  • apt: comptty

Known problems

Narrower in scope than comptext by design and not useful for anything but RTTY. The shift-state handling is the whole value; using this on non-Baudot text gives worse results than comptext would. 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/comptty.yaml