Radio and rails...

I made my first QSO on the QMX+ on 30m today. It is a nice little QRP radio, the one I have has all bands from 160m to 6m. Getting it on the air is a bit of a fiddle, not caused by the radio itself. I have a very shorrt random wire antenna tuned by a Z-11Pro II tuner that works very well with the big radios but the QMX+ needs to be treated carefully. Tuning at full power is a bad idea because the tuner is going to hit some very high SWR figures and damage to the finals is a real risk. But there is more to this tale... First off, I wanted to run it from my old MacBook but no matter what I did it would never see any data from the radio - the QMX+ has CAT and audio along a single USB. CAT was working fine in wsjt-x but no audio of any description. So I loaded wsjt-x on the Mac Mini but it crashed every time I tried to set the radio up. Anyway, I wanted to use the rather neat iFTx app on the phone which does FT8 and FT4 and…

One of my Pi 4B systems runs an ADSB grabber for Flightradar24 *. A few weeks ago it lots the SD Card so I rebuilt it. That card had been in for some time but I didn't record when. Silly. Anyway, a few weeks went by and it lost the new one. Now, rebuilding is not a huge issue as I record every step in a file, so rebuilding takes maybe 30 minutes and I never bother to image the SD card because if I add a step then I would need to make a new image etc. So I rebuilt it again but this time I added the SDD which was originally the server Pi disk (thay was replace dby an actual mini PC with a spinning disk). The Pi was in a 3D printed case but the SDD was just resting behind it on top of one of the radios. Off to printables.com - there were a few models for Pi systems with SDDs but none of the vertical stack types would fit. Then I found one which has the Pi and SDD side by side and it works really well. The Pi has a PoE HAT and…

A new toy arrived today, a Lilygo T-Deck Plus - basically a T-Deck with GPS and a case. I flashed this with the latest relevant verison of MeshCom and configured it, and it all works nicely. Not sure yet how long the battery will last but having it all integrated like this means I can wander round the local area and gauge how far it can be received by my hub in the loft. This is all on 70cm, specifically 439.9125MHz. And here it is:

(MeshCom woes indeed but not MeshCom's fault!) As mentioned before I have been fiddling with a RAK setup and MeshCom. I had MeshCom running on both the RAK and a T-Beam device, the former connected by Ethernet adapter and running as Internet gateway, the latter by wifi and connecting to the gateway via RF. My aim was to run the RAK node in the loft connected to the 70cm collinear that is already up there and power it from one of the shack Netgear Ethernet switches. However, it has been running on the shack desk powered over USB because of the issue with the PoE board. Also, it was freezing at random intervals and so I have been using 'cu' to log the console debugging information to file to see if there was any error messages. The board would run like that form one or two days then freeze with no obvious cause - no errors, except twice it froze after a few APRS callsign error messages. Given this and given the plan to run it off a Netgear switch I planned to monitor it and use SNMP to toggle the PoE on the relevant port if it froze. That…

(updated / edited 16/Feb/2025) Having played with Meshtastic a little while ago I came across an amateur radio specific mesh, MeshCom (https://icssw.org/en/meshcom/). Aimed at 70cm operations and with callsigns required I thought this was a better way forward than Meshtastic which, in our area at least is (or was at the time anyway) entirely used for people asking if they can be heard. MeshCom will work on a variety of hardware similar to Meshtastic. I opted for a RAK setup because it has an Ethernet module and I personally prefer this over wifi connectivity. It also gives the possibility of powering the device using PoE which in turn makes it easy to remotely power cycle it. So, the RAK hardware duly arrived via Aliexpress and is easy to assemble, literally plug and play. I got the RAK 4631 RF module, 19007 base board, 13800 Ethernet interface and 19018 PoE module. Firmware is loaded by simply downloading the file from the MeshCom website, althogh it can be quite hard to find. Once that is done, the RAK module is set to appear as a USB disk by quickly clicking the reset button twice. The firmware is dragged across and the RAK…