Category: Amateur Radio

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Slides from RCARCS 7/3/18 meeting: Intro to FT8 Digital Mode

I presented an overview of the incredibly popular FT8 digital mode at the River City ARCS club meeting on 7/3/18.

Here’s a copy of my slides:

Instead of disassembling my HF station and taking it into the meeting, I tried something different and demo’d using the mode (to receive) using WebSDR, and to transmit using a remote station provided by www.remotehamradio.com . We operated the W1/Chaplain, CT station on the East coast, and worked 3 stations in Europe – HA1RB, DL2LDE and DG6YID during the meeting. From this East coast station the 40m section where FT8 is operated on 7.074Mhz was completely packed from edge to edge on the waterfall!

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My favorite Ham Radio apps on MacOS

I have a new MacBook Pro so have been setting up my most commonly used Ham Radio apps from scratch. Having tried various apps for digital modes and logging on the Mac, this time round I’m just installing the ones that I use most or found I preferred.

Here’s my run down of apps:

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Homebrew contest 1st place: Packet Radio Go-Kit with node.js Packet to Twitter bridge

Super excited (and rather surprised!) to win the 1st place prize in the Homebrew Contest at this month’s River City Amateur Radio Communications Society club meeting last night!

My entry was something I’ve been working on over the past few months on and off to get ready in time for this month’s contest. There were two parts to my entry:

1. A self-contained, portable 2m Packet Radio Go-Kit. I put this together using:

  • 10″ waterproof gear case (from MCM)
  • 2m HT radio
  • Raspberry Pi 3
  • 7″ touchscreen
  • a TNC-PI packet add-on board for the Pi, from Coastal Chipworks (which I assembled as a kit)
  • ax25 apps (for axlisten and axcall)

2. A Packet Radio to Twitter bridge (implemented using JavaScript on node.js). While the goals and benefits of a portable Packet radio kit are somewhat more obvious, writing an app that receives Packet Radio transmissions and then retransmits them as Tweets on Twitter doesn’t have many practical applications. The main motivation for this part of the project was that I thought it would be an interesting blend of old tech and new tech. The popularity of Packet Radio declined with the arrival of easy access dial-up information services and BBSes in the 80s and then access to the internet in the early 90s, so linking the two together seemed an interesting idea. Plus, it’s an interesting stepping stone and talking point from common-place tech used on our wireless devices today, with data communications enabled via Amateur Radio.

I put together a number of articles as I was assembling my project and working on the Packet to Twitter interface. If you’d like to read more, here’s links to my previous posts:

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River City Amateur Radio Communications Society weekly SSTV net (06/21/17)

The River City Amateur Radio Communications Society in Sacramento runs a weekly SSTV net Wednesdays at 9pm local time (following the 2m net on the 2m N6NA repeater, and the 10m net) – I’ve tried to receive the pictures before but on 2m simplex between most of the stations in Sacramento area and out to my QTH in Davis, it’s a bit far to get a good copy, and some of the stations I can’t copy at all.

This week we tried something different and ran the net on the club’s 440MHz repeater. This worked great for me as we’ve got great coverage from this repeater over Sacramento area and surrounding area.

This was my first time to actively check-in on the net so I had a few things to learn on the fly! First, Multiscan 3B, what seems like one of the most common SSTV apps for the Mac, doesn’t seem to run reliably on current OS X 10.12.x versions. Last time I tried to use it I didn’t have any issue, but with the most recent MacOS version it would only start up the first time after it was installed, and every other time it crashed.

 

The first couple of pictures I received I realized I was receiving through the built in mic, and wasn’t even receiving via my Rigblaster interface. Understandably these first few pics were pretty terrible:

Part way through the net I switched to installing MMSSTV on Windows 10 running under Parallels on my Mac. My connection to my radio is through a Rigblaster, so I had to attach the Rigblaster input and output USB device to my Windows 10 guest. Once I configured it to receive and send through my Rigblaster interface, now I was receiving great images from the other ops on the net, and managed to send and get good reports on a couple of pictures myself:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now I’ve got my config setup, I’m looking forward to our next SSTV net!

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