The Weather Channel

well not quite, but the Weather Pi.

I've got the raspberry-noaa-v2 distro up and running on my Raspberry Pi4.

Been going quite well for months, up until a few weeks ago when it just "stopped".

I thought possibly a hardware glitch or some corruption of the file system, perhaps a lightning strike or gamma rays? :)

At any rate, finally got around to checking it out and lo and behold it was a basic system admin issue: The downloads of weather images from the NOAA 15,18 or 19 satellites or the Russian METEOR satellite are processed via audio captures from a NOELEC RTL-SDR dongle at 137MHz. The wav files are then processed and converted to digital files via wxtoimg.  However, my scripts were saving all these raw audio files.  The poor little Pi 64Gig "file system" simply ran out of space.  So much that the OS could barely boot, took some quick interrupts of the boot process, disabling all crontab entries, removing the dongle... to get the OS up so that I could look at it, and finally (DUH!) so there was no more space. 

A little digging around found a .noaa-v2 environment variable called "DELETE_AUDIO"... which I've now set to "enabled" to hopefully remove the old files automatically, sparing me a headache a few months from now when this would inevitably happen again!

Three Down, Five to Go

Three Down, Five to Go

ok, of my original list of "things to do":

I have setup:

• my Raspberry Pi 3 B+ as the "shack computer", and have WSJT-X setup, as well as Gpredict, and TQSL (to upload LoTW entries for later sync to QRZ or N3FJP logs)
• a new Raspberry Pi 4, headless system, for Fox Telem data collection. I ran LMR 400 to the dual band ground plane and reception seems good enough to make an attempt at WX image reception again. For now, I'm letting FoxTelem run and collect data automatically when sats are above line of sight, per Nasa Keps managed by the program.

1. The TAPR controller project I've posted about before
2. Getting my Az - El system working at home
3. Getting on an AO-92 L/V pass with the Alinco DJ-G7T
4. Getting my packet system (yeah that) setup again for local APRS igating
5. Getting one or more of my wire antennas up
6. Getting on mode (K? 10mtr uplink to PSAT to PSK31 70CM downlink) working
7. Re-purposing my shack's win10 tablet to Linux for #4 and/or #6 above 
8. Get my WX sat receiver up again, RPi and my ground plane.

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.