mmng-ui 1.0.2

The textual user interface to multimon-ng.

mmng-ui

A TUI (text user interface) frontend for multimon-ng.

mmng-ui will listen on a chosen UDP port for raw streams from software like SDR++, use multimon-ng to decode it, and show you POCSAG messages in a wonderful text interface.

Table of contents

• mmng-ui
  • Table of contents
  • Purpose
  • Installation
  • How to use it
  • Supported Python versions

Purpose

Why not? I know there are other frontends out there, but I haevn't seen any for use in a text console.

I also wanted to learn both Rich and Textual.

Installation

The recommended way to install mmng-ui is to use pipx.

After getting pipx installed, simply run:

username@host:~$ pipx install mmng-ui

Please don't use pip system-wide.

You can of course also install it using classic virtualenvs.

How to use it

Run mmng-ui --help for options:

Options:
  -m, --mmng-binary TEXT  Path to multimon-ng binary
  --version               Show the version and exit.
  --help                  Show this message and exit.

Run mmng-ui, and you'll be greeted with this screen:

Notice in the status pane, it says "Receiver: idle" -- it is now listening for UDP packets sent to the default port of 8888.

Now go to your favourite SDR application, and send to where mmng-ui is running. Make sure it is the right sample rate that multimon-ng likes, 22050 Hz. It probably helps to send mono too.

Alpha POCSAG messages will soon display in the top pane. The bottom pane will show the raw output from multimon-ng, as well as any errors or issues with decoding.

The status panel shows any incoming connections. Receiver will transition between the following states:

Receiver state	Description
idle	No UDP traffic yet seen, or seen in 5 seconds
receiving	Actively receiving a decode from multimon-ng
waiting	Traffic is coming in, but nothing to be decoded

Just below the status panel is a sparkline -- this updates on each decode, and reflects character length of said decode.

Underneath the log window in another sparkline, and this shows messages per second, for the last minute.

The footer shows available keyboard choices to quit the app, show a help screen, and clear all logging panes.

The mouse will also work!

JSON mode

mmng-ui will attempt to auto-detect the output format from multimon-ng, and if it looks like JSON, it'll use it.

JSON output isn't yet in multimon-ng, but I have a working fork here.

Example screenshot

Here's what a screen full of decodes might look like:

Supported Python versions

mmng-ui supports Python 3.9 and newer.