Control of external radio via FLRig and DX Commander
Posted: Thu May 14, 2026 9:00 pm
SDR Console currently only supports control of external radio using Omni-Rig. While Omni-Rig is a great package it has some serious downsides.
The root problem is that it is very difficult to make Omni-Rig co-exist with other radio control applications such as FLRig, DX Commander or hamlib since they each need control of the COM port used to control to the radio. While there are ways of sharing COM ports across applications they are either technically out of reach for most users (e.g. com0com+hub4com) or expensive (commercial COM port splitters). There are no open source or functional free (beer) alternatives.
Adding the FLRig protocol for controlling external radios would solve this problem for lots of radio amateurs wanting to use SDR Radio as a panadapter/controller for their amateur radio rig. Other SDR programs are much harder to use for this, and harder to setup.
Support for external radios via FLRig would give:
- Wider range of external rigs supported - Omni-Rig has not been updated since 2019 while FLRig is in active development and supports more recent radios.
- Radio control via network - FLRig uses XML RPC protocol. This means SDR Console and FLRig can be running on different machines.
- Better interoperability. E.g. Omni-Rig only supports 2 external radios and many shacks have more than that.
- Future proof - The XML-RPC protocol used by FLRig is modern and future-proof, while Omni-Rig uses an already old COM architecture. Omni-Rig 1 has not been updated since 2019 and development of the incompatible Omni-Rig 2 protocl has stopped.
- More potential users for SDR Radio. FLRig is very popular, even with hams that don't use the full FL suite since it has a good interface to control many transceivers that lack a native Windows application.
From my perspective as a hobby programmer, it appears rather straight forward to implement support for the XML-RPC protocol used by FLRig. Some re-factoring may be needed but the upside is that it will be much easier to add other protocols in the future.
Ideally, support for e.g. DX Commander and hamlib can be added with little effort later. Then all users of the DX suite will be able to control their external radios easily. DX Commander uses its own TCP protocol.
The root problem is that it is very difficult to make Omni-Rig co-exist with other radio control applications such as FLRig, DX Commander or hamlib since they each need control of the COM port used to control to the radio. While there are ways of sharing COM ports across applications they are either technically out of reach for most users (e.g. com0com+hub4com) or expensive (commercial COM port splitters). There are no open source or functional free (beer) alternatives.
Adding the FLRig protocol for controlling external radios would solve this problem for lots of radio amateurs wanting to use SDR Radio as a panadapter/controller for their amateur radio rig. Other SDR programs are much harder to use for this, and harder to setup.
Support for external radios via FLRig would give:
- Wider range of external rigs supported - Omni-Rig has not been updated since 2019 while FLRig is in active development and supports more recent radios.
- Radio control via network - FLRig uses XML RPC protocol. This means SDR Console and FLRig can be running on different machines.
- Better interoperability. E.g. Omni-Rig only supports 2 external radios and many shacks have more than that.
- Future proof - The XML-RPC protocol used by FLRig is modern and future-proof, while Omni-Rig uses an already old COM architecture. Omni-Rig 1 has not been updated since 2019 and development of the incompatible Omni-Rig 2 protocl has stopped.
- More potential users for SDR Radio. FLRig is very popular, even with hams that don't use the full FL suite since it has a good interface to control many transceivers that lack a native Windows application.
From my perspective as a hobby programmer, it appears rather straight forward to implement support for the XML-RPC protocol used by FLRig. Some re-factoring may be needed but the upside is that it will be much easier to add other protocols in the future.
Ideally, support for e.g. DX Commander and hamlib can be added with little effort later. Then all users of the DX suite will be able to control their external radios easily. DX Commander uses its own TCP protocol.