Going beyond

This past few months I have been deconstructing my ham station in preparation for reviving my saltwater fish experience and to clean up my overall shack. I had a lot of “projects” that I realized I just did not have the expertise to complete, nor did I really have the motivation to upgrade my test bench and skills in order to dive into them. I had an old tentec pm3a, a Heath twoer, and a Tentec century 21. All of which “worked” but needed serious TLC to get into optimal working order. In addition I had an old Icom 706 and a Yeasu FT-817 configured and actually working for satellites.

All those are gone (or going in the case of the Yeasu).  What’s left? I currently have a 2/70 groundplane mounted on the corner of my house for listening in to a little satellite stuff with my D72A ht, and also have a 2/70/23cm HT the Alinco DJG7 which will provide some entertainment from time to time.

What’s next? I’m leaning towards an sbitx v3 25 watt rig (is that QRP?). The very cool aspect is the ability to control remotely which will allow me to leave it setup by the fish tanks yet operate from my main computer. Very promising and looks like the direction I will head.

Keep plugging away, 73, KA2CZU

Xastir, FLRIG and miscellaneous ramblings

Been trying to casually hook up to the digital sats again, had some success one night using Xastir on my rpi 4. However, after switching things up for an unsuccessful attempt at Falconsat-3, I think I screwed up some setting somewhere such that I can monitor sat aprs traffic, but have not been able to get digipeated again :(

I suppose more to come when I get a chance.

Working fairly flawlessly, if with somewhat noisy images most of the time, I also have a noelec rtl-sdr running Raspberry-Noaa-v2 software for NOAA satellite image reception. It tweets out some images every day to my personal account and has been up and good for about a month, maybe more.

On my other Pi, an rpi 3, I have wsjtx setup with an xggcomm cable to my IC-706

Recently, I looked into KM4ACK's tutorial on getting winlink (ardop) running on an rpi. His Pi tutorials are fairly comprehensive and work, for the configurations he has.

Got ardop setup and installed, and he suggested downloading and building FLRIG for rig control. Following his directions I was successfully able to compile and install FLRIG.

HOWEVER, as is, the distro does not work for my radio / interface combo.  I have to reach out to the FLRIG author for more info.

The Raspberry Pi

I have a Pi 3 B+ that I'm going to try using as my shack "computer".

We'll see how it works out... while I was an expert in unix, it's been about 20 years since I did any serious work, other than minor "shell scripting" of various sorts (ksh mostly. lately a little bash).

So far, I've got a 32Gig SD card that boots up a later version of debian (? I think. I'm not up on the nuances of the various distros, images etc that one can load for linux generally, and the rpi specifically)

On that I've downloaded, and built, hamlib, flrig, wsjtx and gpredict.

WSJTX 2.2.1 runs, but am having trouble figuring out what ports it is using.

For this, I'd like to hook up my IC-706 using my xgcomms audio/cat cable that connects into the DNC port on the back of the rig.

Using this, WSJTX seems to "hear" when I choose a default audio port, but I've not figured out the vox, nor a rig interface, that will work.

More later as I work though this.

The good news is that the IC-706 is "up" again, and I actually copied some signals (WSJTX did decode some stations)..... I feel like the station is slowly coming to life after a long summer hiatus.