Articles, notes and random thoughts on Software Development and Technology
Spent a few mins operating FT8, and PSKReporter is showing 2 very distinct bands of reception reports, at approx 1200 miles and 2400 miles to the East from my location in Davis, CA:
I’m guessing the first band is propagation with 1 hop and the second band on the East coast is the second hop. It very distinctly shows how in between these two areas there’s noticeable dead zones where I’m not being heard at all. Very interesting!
I’ve played around with Packet and Direwolf on the Raspberry Pi quite a bit, but every time I try and getting it working on Linux on a desktop I run into some differences in the config. From past attempts, I followed most of the steps I had followed before here.
The following steps are with a USB Rigblaster Plug n Play, connected to the dataport on my Icom 880h radio .
I installed and compiled Direwolf from source as before, and started it up with:
$ direwolf -t 0 -p
Dire Wolf version 1.5
Reading config file direwolf.conf
Audio device for both receive and transmit: plughw:0,0 (channel 0)
Channel 0: 1200 baud, AFSK 1200 & 2200 Hz, E+, 44100 sample rate.
Ready to accept AGW client application 0 on port 8000 …
Ready to accept KISS TCP client application 0 on port 8001 …
Virtual KISS TNC is available on /dev/pts/1
Created symlink /tmp/kisstnc -> /dev/pts/1
I installed the ax25 apps as in the previous article, and then added 1 line to /etc/ax25/ports:
1 KK6DCT-1 1200 255 2 2m packet
I then started kissattach:
$ sudo kissattach /dev/pts/1 1
/dev/pts/1 is the value from when Direwolf started, and port 1 is the line I added to the ports file.
From here I can connect to the local ag6qo-1 BBS, via the BERR37 node:
axcall 1 ag6qo-1 via berr37
I’ve soldered the header pins (rather poorly) on the Pi Zero:
… and attached the mmdvm board to the headers. I’d already setup Pi-Star on an SDCard using a Pi3, so I just moved the card across to the Pi Zero. Powered it up, and my hotspot running Pi-Star is up!
Now to move it into the case, and my Digital Voice hotspot is all done!
After setting up an SD Card with the Pi-Star image, booting it up and then hitting http://pi-star.local in a browser on my laptop, I used the default userid ‘pi-star’, password ‘raspberry’ to get to the dashboard page and set up the modes you want to operate. For this part of the setup I followed many of the existing guides and videos online, some of which I collected together here, but the best guide I found was this one by KE0FHS.
The OLED display only appears to be active when on wifi, and is not active when on a wired connection. I setup mine on a wired connection first and was fiddling with the different display settings. When I had setup the wifi though and the rebooted with only wifi, then the screen started working. This is not obvious, but I think I read comments elsewhere that this is the expected behavior.
Some mmdvm boards are configured with a tx/rx offset (from photos online, usually indicated with a sticker on the board), but mine apparently had zero offset (it also didn’t have a sticker), and from watching the board transmit using my SDRPlay, when it was receiving DSTAR traffic from the Reflector I set it on it was transmitting locally spot-on frequency. Pi-Star showed it on 438.800Mhz, and it was right on the money.
Setting up a DV/DR repeater memory on my Icom 880 radio with the correct settings was absolutely key to getting everything working. It’s been a few years since I’ve used DSTAR, and it’s a good job I kept some notes here as it would have take hours to work out this again. Key settings to get this working were:
Once I had the above settings configured on my radio, transmitting on my Icom 880 I saw myself popup on the REF001 activity last heard list, so looking good so far:
Just as I was typing this (8/14/18 12am local time) I heard JI3IBK (Op = Masa) call CQ on REF001 so I returned his call and we had a quick QSO, and confirmed my setup is good, audio quality is good, so I’m pleased it’s all setup and working good, and I just had my first DSTAR QSO via my mmdvm hotspot!
Next steps are to solder the headers onto my new Pi Zero and move the mmdvm board from my Pi3 across to the Zero, and then put it in the custom aluminum case, and then my hotspot will be all set!