amateur radio – Page 19 – Kev's Development Toolbox

April 10, 2016

Amateur Radio related uses for your Raspberry Pi

Here’s a collection of Amateur Radio and other general radio related possible uses and ideas for using a Raspberry Pi. Some of these ideas could be used in connection with each other, or just solo.

This list is a collection of ideas for the basis of an upcoming presentation; more on that later. Right now, a collection of links for reference.

Simple:

as a simple/cheap Logging computer:
- CQRLog: https://www.cqrlog.com
- KLog: http://jaime.robles.es/klog/klog-intro/

Easy:

ADS-B aircraft transponder receiver (http://www.rtl-sdr.com/adsb-aircraft-radar-with-rtl-sdr/)

Slightly more involved:

APRS tracker (mobile APRS – ping beacon packets with location)
Software Defined Radio using RTL USB dongle and rtl-sdr (https://www.kevinhooke.com/2014/07/26/installing-rtl-sdr-and-dump1090-on-a-raspberry-pi-to-receive-ads-b-signals/)
CW progation beacon transmitter (http://hackaday.com/2013/01/25/raspberry-pi-used-as-a-beacon-transmitter/)
APRS i-gate (internet gateway for APRS data)
WSPR transmitter / WspryPi / TAPR Whispering Raspberries QRP Tx Shield

More involved:

Soundcard based Packet Packet TNC, using Direwolf: https://github.com/wb2osz/direwolf
Hardware Packet Radio using a TNC-Pi add on board
RadWav SDR transceiver add-on board $150: http://www.radwav.com/index.html
QTSDR – SDR transceiver (https://github.com/ha7ilm/qtcsdr)

Raspberry Pi with Adafruit PiTFT screen

Just followed the steps in the tutorial to get the modified kernel installed with support for Adafruit’s PiTFT and it all worked great.

What I’m going to be using it for is to monitor status output from Direwolf as it receives/sends packets, so will be running it in text mode, and ideally I want to get Direwolf and LinBPQ starting together at boot, and outputing to the console.

I’ve almost got the startup script working (following suggestions here), but I might take a look to see if I can redirect output to one of the virtual terminals and have that output to the screen (like discussed here). Some more things to take a look at 🙂

fbtext – this might be useful too.

February 25, 2016

Amateur Radio: 2m Packet Radio mobile / go kit

Tried something different today – tried some mobile / go-kit style packet radio on 2m:

Yaesu FT60 connected to a 2m/440cm mag mount antenna on my car
Rigblaster interface connected to a HP Mini
UZ7HO soundcard packet modem & terminal software

Connected to the local KBERR node on 145.05MHz, and then also AG6QO-1 / WINTBB via BERR37 on 144.37MHz while I was having lunch in Natomas.

February 7, 2016

Packet radio: Direwolf and pilinbpq

I’ve been playing around recently with setting up some packet radio software on the Raspberry Pi. The next thing I was interested in getting working was a BPQ32 node with BBS and Chat. G8BPQ’s instructions here are pretty easy to follow. What I got stuck on however was whether BPQ needed or used ax25, and apparently it doesn’t. So from the simplest direwolf and linbpq setup, you start direwolf, configure linbpq to point to Direwolf’s virtual kiss tnc serial port, and off you go.

I played around testing with 2 radios, one with Direwolf, linbpq and a Rigblaster connected to a Yaesu FT-60 HT, and the second, an Icom 880 connected with a Rigblaster Plug and Play to a desktop running Linux Mint, also using Direwolf. There was some random oddness wth connecting from one to the other, maybe because of the radios in close proximity, that turned out I just needed to increase default timeout settings. I set these both to the same in direwolf.conf and bpq32.cfg:

TXDELAY=300

TXTAIL=30

Once I’d added these (based on other suggested settings elsewhere in other people’s BPQ configs), then I was off and running. Looks good!