Openhpsdr Zeus v0.8.0

OpenHPSDR Zeus v0.8.0 — the "Audio Suite" release

This is a big one. The headline feature — an in-process Audio Suite that lives right next to your radio's TX path — has been months in the making, and it ships today alongside a complete installer overhaul, a unified plugin system, and a wave of operator-facing polish from Brian (EI6LF), Ramon (EA5IUE / @rampa069), and the rest of the team.

If you've been running v0.7.x, read the upgrade notes below the What's New section. There's a clean-install step on every platform to avoid a left-over icon-name conflict from the v0.7.x bundles.

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✨ What's new in v0.8.0

🎚️ The Audio Suite — voice processing on the way out to your radio

📖 Full operator guide on the wiki: Audio Suite

A stack of small, focused audio plugins (gate, EQ, compressor, exciter, bass enhancer, reverb) that you arrange in your preferred order between your microphone and WDSP's TX stages.

• Live pre-MOX meters — every plugin's IN / OUT / GR meter animates while you talk, even with MOX off. Dial your dynamics, gates, and gain staging without keying the radio.
• Audition — toggle a button and hear the processed chain through your receive headphones / speakers. Important rule: if you mute receive audio, you mute audition too (intentional — keeps you from being surprised by a hot mic).
• Drag-and-drop chain order — open the Audio Suite floating window, grab any plugin tile, drop it where you want it. Signal flow really changes — not just metadata.
• A/B bypass on every block — instant comparison, no audio click.
• Settings stick — your dial-in survives a desktop restart (fixed a sneaky LiteDB bug that was silently re-inserting duplicate rows for the same setting).
• One-click install — "Download Audio Suite" button on TX Audio Tools grabs the bundled six plugins.

🆕 Two desktop icons on every platform — Zeus and Zeus Server

Same binary, two ways to launch:

• OpenHPSDR Zeus (the regular icon) — full native window. Radio backend runs in-process inside the same window. Closing the window stops Zeus completely. This is what most operators want.
• OpenHPSDR Zeus Server (the new server icon) — opens a small status window listing the URLs you can connect to from a browser, with a click-to-copy on each URL and a Stop Zeus button. Connect from this same machine at http://localhost:6060, or from your phone / tablet / another computer on the LAN at http://<this-machine>:6060. HTTPS uses a self-signed certificate (accept the browser warning once).

Headless service deployments — Raspberry Pi shacks, Docker containers, systemd units — are completely unaffected. The plain binary with no flag is byte-identical to v0.7.x's service mode.

🔌 Unified plugin system (Brian, EI6LF)

The whole plugin system was rebuilt from the contracts up:

• Zeus.Plugins.Contracts — clean interfaces (IBackendPlugin, IUiPlugin, IAudioPlugin).
• In-process VST3 hosting via vendored vst3sdk — no separate sidecar process.
• AudioPluginBridge sits on the WDSP TX seam.
• Browsable registry pointing at the official Kb2uka/openhpsdr-zeus-plugins repo.
• Frontend plugin runtime + hot-reloadable plugin panels (per-plugin tiles persist across layout reparses).

The RF2K-S amplifier integration was extracted from core into a plugin (behaviour unchanged) — proof point for the new plugin model.

📦 New installer experience

• Single binary on every platform — Brian's multi-phase rollup (OpenhpsdrZeus) hosts both desktop and service modes from one executable. Vendored miniaudio drives native RX sink + TX mic capture without a browser tab.
• Dual desktop icons — Windows / macOS / Linux all ship Zeus and Zeus Server icons (see above).
• Hidden Windows console — running OpenhpsdrZeus from the icon no longer flashes a stray console window.
• Auto-evicts legacy v0.7.x installs — the Windows installer detects an existing pre-rename install and offers to clean it up.
• Desktop session share over LAN HTTPS — a phone or tablet on the same network can pick up your desktop session if you walk away from the PC.

📻 Meters + radio polish (Brian, EI6LF)

• Rotator Dial panel — pure-compass rotator view.
• Rotator config persists server-side — frontend now trusts the backend status instead of clobbering it on connect.
• Analog meter improvements — radio-aware PO scale, bolder dial typography, 2× S-readout width, locked PO/SWR slots.
• Light theme polish — light-mode visibility fixes on meter arcs; theme preference saved in the DB; Add-Meter modal stays open while you build a panel.
• Rotator map — Alt+arrow zoom kept on the hero map; compass map is now interactive.

📊 TX meters (Ramon Martinez, EA5IUE / @rampa069)

• Smoothed-source SWR + per-mode trip thresholds — SWR meter axis is driven from a smoothed ADC (peak-hold stays for watts). MOX trips at 2.5:1 with a 300 ms grace window; TUN trips at 6:1 with a 500 ms grace. Eliminates spurious "high SWR" alarms from single-sample blips.

📱 Mobile + UX

• Tools drawer replaces the old mobile Settings tab — per-tool pages instead of one long list.

🛠️ TX audio + PureSignal fixes

• HL2 PureSignal now matches mi0bot's openhpsdr-thetis fork exactly — hw_peak 0.233 and no dance cooldown.
• NativeMicCapture gated behind TCI recency — kills the desktop dual-feed regression from v0.7.4 that briefly came back.

💾 Persistence fixes

• Drive % + TUN-drive % now persist correctly across server restart (no more frontend-clobbers-server-on-connect).
• Plugin settings persist correctly — fixed a LiteDB upsert-by-Id bug that was silently inserting new rows on every save.
• Restart-required modal now fires after any plugin install (single-plugin from the Plugins panel OR the Audio Suite bundle download), so you always get a clear "shut down + relaunch Zeus" reminder.

📚 Docs

• New wiki page: Audio Suite — workflow, audition rules, per-plugin reference, gain-staging guide.
• CODEOWNERS added — * @Kb2uka.

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⚠️ BEFORE YOU INSTALL — UNINSTALL v0.7.x FIRST ⚠️

THE ICONS WERE RENAMED IN v0.8.0 (from "Zeus" / "Zeus Server" to "OpenHPSDR Zeus" / "OpenHPSDR Zeus Server"). If you don't uninstall v0.7.x first, you'll end up with BOTH sets of icons on your desktop and in your application menu, which is confusing and can produce launcher conflicts.

macOS

1. Quit Zeus if it's running.
2. Open /Applications in Finder.
3. Drag Zeus.app and Zeus Server.app (the old, pre-rename ones) to the Trash.
4. If Finder refuses ("the file is in use"), open Terminal and run:

   sudo rm -rf "/Applications/Zeus.app" "/Applications/Zeus Server.app"

Windows

• Settings → Apps → search for "Zeus" → Uninstall.
• The v0.8.0 installer will also try to auto-detect and evict the old install during upgrade — but uninstalling first is the cleanest path.

Linux

• If you installed the tarball: rm -rf the old extract directory + remove the old .desktop entries from ~/.local/share/applications/.
• If you used the AppImage: just delete the old OpenhpsdrZeus-0.7.x-linux-x86_64.AppImage file.

Your saved settings stay — chain order, plugin settings, drive %, VFO, mode, filter, wallpaper, etc. all live in ~/Library/Application Support/Zeus/ (macOS) / %LOCALAPPDATA%\Zeus\ (Windows) / ~/.local/share/Zeus/ (Linux). Don't delete those unless you want a 100% blank slate.

⚠️ Known issue on Windows — OpenhpsdrZeus.exe in Task Manager

After you close the Zeus desktop window on Windows, OpenhpsdrZeus.exe may linger in Task Manager as a background process. It's safe to End Task it, and we'll fix this properly in a follow-up release. If you re-open Zeus while it's still in Task Manager, you may see a port-in-use error — End Task the stale process and try again.

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Downloads

Read the uninstall section above before installing.

Windows (x64 / ARM64)

• openhpsdr-zeus-0.8.0-win-x64-setup.exe
• openhpsdr-zeus-0.8.0-win-arm64-setup.exe

The installer creates Start Menu shortcuts for both OpenHPSDR Zeus (desktop window) and OpenHPSDR Zeus Server (backend + status window). Optional desktop-icon checkboxes for both — pick whichever icons you want on your desktop. ARM64 build is native for Surface Pro X / Snapdragon X Elite. .NET 10 runtime is bundled.

macOS (Apple Silicon)

• OpenhpsdrZeus-0.8.0-macos-arm64.dmg

Drag both OpenHPSDR Zeus.app and OpenHPSDR Zeus Server.app to Applications (or just OpenHPSDR Zeus.app if you only want the desktop window — Zeus Server.app is a small wrapper that requires Zeus.app to be installed).

IMPORTANT — after installing on macOS, open Terminal and run:

xattr -cr "/Applications/OpenHPSDR Zeus.app"
xattr -cr "/Applications/OpenHPSDR Zeus Server.app"

to clear macOS Gatekeeper's quarantine. Without this step, Gatekeeper will refuse to launch with a "damaged" or "unidentified developer" error. (Zeus isn't yet signed with an Apple Developer ID.) One-time per install.

Intel Mac builds are no longer published — the GitHub-hosted macos-13 runner queue is too slow. Build from source if you need one.

Linux (x64)

• openhpsdr-zeus-0.8.0-linux-x64.tar.gz — extract anywhere. Run ./install-icons.sh once to register both menu entries, then launch from your application menu, or invoke ./openhpsdr-zeus-desktop / ./openhpsdr-zeus-server / ./openhpsdr-zeus (headless) directly.
• OpenhpsdrZeus-0.8.0-linux-x86_64.AppImage — single-file desktop launcher.
• OpenhpsdrZeus-Server-0.8.0-linux-x86_64.AppImage — single-file server launcher (backend + status window with the LAN URLs).

Both AppImages require libwebkit2gtk-4.1-0 (Photino's webview):

Debian/Ubuntu:  sudo apt install libwebkit2gtk-4.1-0
Fedora:         sudo dnf install webkit2gtk4.1
Arch:           sudo pacman -S webkit2gtk-4.1

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Contributors

Huge thanks to @brianbruff (EI6LF) for the plugin-system rebuild, the single-binary + native-audio rollup, LAN-share-over-HTTPS, the rotator + mobile + light-theme polish, the HL2 PureSignal mi0bot alignment, the Windows console-hide + legacy-install evict, and the miniaudio CI build steps.

To @rampa069 (Ramon Martinez) for the smoothed-SWR + per-mode trip-threshold fix that was the cross-platform regression-risk evidence in this release, and for the docs path cleanup.

The Audio Suite plugin content, installer dual-icons, persistence fixes, and v0.2.0 plugin retrofits are KB2UKA's.

License

GNU GPL v2 or later. See LICENSE.

Full changelog

See CHANGELOG.md [0.8.0] and the develop-to-main diff.