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flaa

Drives a RigExpert antenna analyser from the desktop

What it does

Controls a RigExpert AA-series antenna analyser over its serial link: runs a sweep across a range you choose, plots SWR, impedance, return loss and the Smith chart on a screen rather than the instrument's own display, and saves the results.

Why you would want it

An antenna analyser's own screen is small and its memory is smaller. This turns a sweep into a file you can keep, compare against last year's, and put beside the change you made to the antenna. Comparing two sweeps is where antenna work actually happens, and no handheld instrument does it.

Before it will work

A RigExpert analyser and access to its serial device -- membership of the dialout group. This catalog also carries antscope2 territory: AHRL installs RigExpert's own vendor .deb on x86 only, and this is the portable, source-built alternative.

How it installs

  • source (autotools) from https://w1hkj.org/files/flaa/flaa-1.0.2.tar.gz
  • build dependencies: build-essential, pkg-config, libfltk1.3-dev
  • Build dependencies are MEASURED, not copied. Built in a Debian 13 container on 2026-08-28 with build-essential, pkg-config and libfltk1.3-dev and nothing else: configure exits 0, make exits 0, and the binary appears. AHRL lists extra packages for some of these (libpng-dev and libxft-dev for flcluster, libsamplerate0-dev for flnet); they are not needed, because libfltk1.3-dev already pulls what the build uses. This is the same over-specification the fldigi manifest records for libportaudio-ocaml-dev. The sha256 is ours. Upstream publishes checksums for its Windows installers only -- w1hkj.org/files/sha256vals.txt lists .exe files and no source tarballs -- so this digest was computed from the tarball fetched from the project's own site on 2026-08-28. It pins the exact bytes that were reviewed and built, which is the guarantee actually on offer; it is not an upstream signature and this manifest does not imply one.

Binaries this produces:

  • src/flaa

Known problems

It speaks to RigExpert instruments and not to other analysers; a NanoVNA needs nanovna-saver instead. Not packaged by any of our targets, so source is the only route -- measured, not assumed: apt-cache policy finds no candidate for flaa, flcluster, fllog, flnet or flwkey on Debian 13. Debian carries libflxmlrpc-dev at 0.1.4 and this build asks pkg-config for flxmlrpc >= 1.0.1, so the system library is NOT used: configure falls back to the copy bundled in the tarball and its summary line reads "Have flxmlrpc library ....... internal lib". Measured, not inferred. Installing libflxmlrpc-dev alongside would change nothing, which is why it is not a build dependency here.

Keeping it current

  • probe: none
  • strategy: rebuild
  • W1HKJ releases irregularly and announces on the linuxham list rather than through a tagged repository, so there is nothing to probe automatically. Check w1hkj.org/files/flaa/ when something else in the suite moves.

Where to get help with the software itself

The W1HKJ suite. The linuxham group on groups.io is where questions are answered. Note that Debian's Homepage field for the packaged members of this suite points at w1hkj.com, which now redirects to an unrelated site -- .org is the project.

Source: catalog/packages/flaa.yaml