Resizing the terminal during a scan left the screen full of wreckage:
box corners in the middle of a line, borders twice the width of the
window, a "receiver" header printed eight times down the left edge. Four
separate defects, which is why it looked so bad.
Live rendering works by moving the cursor back over the frame it drew
last time and overwriting it. That is only correct while the frame is
still where it was put, and none of these programs noticed when it was
not.
1. Nothing detected a resize. Both the scan display and saunterbrowse
now compare the console size on every frame and clear the screen when
it changes -- polled rather than handled as a signal, because the
display is redrawn several times a second anyway and a signal handler
that runs in the middle of a write has to be right about far more than
this does. Anything printed before the scan started scrolls away at
that point, which the manual now says.
2. The layout's model of its own height was wrong, in two places that
cancelled. The sweep panel was counted as one line shorter than it
is, the hit list as one line taller. The sum came out right whenever
both were drawn and wrong on a terminal too short for the hit list --
where the frame then overflowed by one line on every refresh and the
top of it marched down the screen. That is what the eight headers
were. Each panel height is a named constant now, and a test checks
every one of them against what is actually rendered.
3. Lines inside the panels could wrap. A band name, a long status line
or a decoded message made a panel a row taller than the arithmetic
allowed for, with the same result. Every one is drawn on a single
line and ellipsised now. The receiver panel drops its optional parts
instead, keeping the tuner and the flags: "SIMULATED" disappearing off
the end of a narrow line is how somebody comes to believe they are
listening to the air.
4. saunterbrowse's full-screen views did not fill the screen. Nothing
erases the alternate screen between frames -- the cursor is sent home
and the new frame written over the old one -- so pressing t or ? on a
tall window left most of the recording list visible underneath. Both
are wrapped in a layout now, which fills the terminal exactly.
The layout also gives up the receiver panel on a very short terminal,
which it previously had no way to do: on eight rows the smallest frame it
could describe was nine lines.
Testing this by rendering to a wide Console and reading the text back
cannot work -- whether the cursor lands where it should is a property of
the terminal, not of the renderable. So tests/terminal.py runs the
program in a pty, resizes the window underneath it the way a window
manager does, and feeds what it writes to a terminal emulator whose
screen is then read. Every fix above has a test that fails without it,
checked by reverting each one in turn. pyte is a dev dependency and
those tests skip without it; the arithmetic ones need nothing.
Also: t now opens the reader for a capture that carries decoded data
rather than speech, because the decoded panel already told the reader to
press it.
869 -> 949 tests.
A long scan leaves hundreds of recordings, each with a JSON sidecar of
measurements and, where a recogniser heard speech, a transcript. Reading
that meant opening files one at a time and guessing which were worth
playing.
saunterbrowse is a second executable in the same package. Arrow keys move
through the recordings; the transcript of whichever is highlighted fills
the top of the screen, because that is the part anyone actually wants to
read. Enter plays it, handing the file to whichever player is installed
-- the recordings are ordinary WAVs, every desktop already has something
that plays them, and a browser that cannot start would be worse than one
that cannot play. t opens the whole transcript full screen when it is
longer than the panel, and says so rather than cutting the end off
silently. / filters on the frequency, the name, the identification, or
anything that was said, which is the point of it: "was the repeater
mentioned" is a question about content.
Sidecars are read only for the rows on screen, so a directory of ten
thousand recordings opens instantly. Where there is no transcript the
panel says which of the reasons applies -- Morse (decoded, and shown),
data, a bare carrier, or speech never offered to a recogniser -- because
those want different things done about them. It only ever reads.
Two things were only found by driving it through a real terminal.
sys.stdin.read(1) goes through a buffered text wrapper, which in cbreak
mode waits for more bytes than one keypress provides: the program drew its
first frame and then hung, while tests against a stand-in stream object
passed. It reads the file descriptor now, and the tests drive a pty. And
stopping playback signalled only the direct child, so a player that is a
wrapper script kept the sound going with nothing on screen to stop it; the
whole process group is signalled instead, which is what start_new_session
was there for.
man saunterbrowse ships beside man bandsaunter, and the two point at each
other.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016PsWPTweCT6pwxKngvVxcg
Versions are now the release date and a revision within that day, padded to
two digits so they sort as text: 2026-08-21_01.
Neither packaging system accepts that form, so it is converted at the edge
rather than kept as a second version string that could drift out of step:
PEP 440 forbids dashes and underscores in a release segment, and a Debian
version may not contain an underscore at all. The date and revision in
__init__.py are the single source; pyproject reads the converted form, and
the tests check that pip and dpkg both order releases correctly.
packaging/build-deb.sh builds a .deb with plain dpkg-deb. Every dependency
is already in Debian, so apt resolves the lot; the package also blacklists
the DVB-T driver that would otherwise claim the receiver. Deliberately not
debhelper: the payload is pure Python with nothing to compile, and this way
the build needs nothing installed beyond dpkg.
The speech recognisers are not packaged for Debian and can only come from
pip, so they are suggested rather than depended on -- transcription is off
by default and reports plainly when no recogniser is present.
README now documents every dependency with its package name on Debian,
Fedora and Arch, how to let a user reach the receiver, and how to check the
install worked.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Sweeps any set of frequency ranges, records what it finds, and works out
what kind of signal it was.
- Frequency ranges entered by hand or picked from a 135-entry US band plan,
including whole-band and all-CW sweeps that resolve the demodulator per
segment.
- Detection calibrated against the peak-hold detector's own noise statistics,
so the threshold means real margin over static rather than over the floor.
- A content gate: captures are kept only if they carry voice, decodable CW,
or an identified digital keying scheme. Speech is recognised by a pitch
track that drifts, which static cannot imitate.
- Identification of NFM/WFM/AM/SSB, CW with Morse decoded to text, P25, DMR,
NXDN, D-STAR, POCSAG, FLEX, ACARS, AIS, APRS, n-FSK and n-PSK.
- Gapless streaming capture, with the signal path fast enough to keep up in
real time, so recordings play back at the right speed.
- Optional one-file-per-frequency recording with spoken timestamps, and
speech-to-text transcription.
- Menus and command line generated from one settings table, so neither can
offer something the other cannot; settings persist in ~/.config.
367 tests, run against synthetic signals, a built-in receiver simulator, and
real hardware.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
