Radio and rails...

The latest addition to the shack is a Connect Systems Inc CS7000-M17 Plus hand held radio. I got this because of interest in the M17 mode - see https://m17foundation.org/ generally for information. The radio came from KB Cubed in the US (https://www.kbcubed.com/), not solely because the price had been reduced but also they were able to ship to the UK whereas other suppliers could not, or as far as I found anyway. It comes with a USB programming lead that attaches to the side once a cover is removed. However, as it came with the M17 mode already installed I have not yet needed this. The radio, being the Plus model will also do DMR which means I may no longer need the MD380 but I have yet to try this out. As there is no M17 activity around here I also needed a hotspot. I run the excellent pi-star package for DMR and POCSAG but there is a future issue - the main branch of the MMDVM software will no longer support M17 and once pi-star updates my hotspot would cease to function. As there is a WPSD branch with M17 retained I decided to set up a hotspot…

My latest reorganisation is to set up a Raspberry Pi to connect various LoRa devices providing power and a console to each. I have four such devices, three of which were powered from a 12V PSU with a USB adapter plugged into the 'cigar lighter' socket, adn one was powered from the ADS-B feed in the loft which in turn is powered by the Pi that does the ADS-B feed. That powers the rtl-sdr dongle plus an LNA, both colocated with the collinear in the loft. The new setup consists of a 7-way USB hub with switchable power to each USB connector. This hub is connected to the USB 3 port on a Pi 4B. Five ports are in use, one for the radiosonde receiver, one for the TinyGS receiver, one for the 868MHz Meshtastic node in the loft, and one for the 70cm Meshcom node also in the loft. The latter two are fed via 15m USB leads. The fifth connection is not an active device - it is my illuminated shack sign! This gives several advantages. First, each device can be power cycled without needing to fiddle with the USB connectors. Second, each can have a console on…

As if I didn't already have sufficient Raspberry Pi systems around the house I set up one for SatNOGS (https://satnogs.org/). I already have a little LoRa device for TinyGS so why not add somehting else satellite-y? I mean, there was a spare port on the Cross Country Wireless multicoupler (and indeed there are still two spare ports now). Configuring it all was relatively straightforward although you do need to read the information on the wiki first. I am using an rtl-sdr V3 dongle which was sitting doing nothing so itis nice to actually use the thing. There is plenty of information on how to set things up and my station is running in test mode while I check it all out. With my compromised setup I did wonder if I would pick anything useful up but it does seem to. The results can be found at https://network.satnogs.org/observations/?station=4293 At the moment everything is spread about. The Pi needs boxing up and a place found on the shelf, pulus the USB and RF leads need tidying but otherwise it all seems to work ok. I have added a Minikits LNA to give a bit more oomph. When configuring the system you use…

The latest addition to the shack is this diminutive DX Patrol GPSDO v.3 that arrived today from the Amsat UK shop. I was looking for a general 10MHz source to replace the one I built from a kit that is rather deaf and came across the DX Patrol ones. At first I found one that was set to 10MHz with four outputs but fortunately the Amsat shop sells one with four independently configurable outputs. The advantage of that is I can use one of them for the QO100 setup (assuming I ever get that finished!) as well as having a general 10MHz output. Frequencies can be set from a built-in web front end and this is accessed directly via a built-in AP plus an in-screen QR code (handy!). Once connected you can then use the web interface to connect the GPSDO to your own wifi, which is what I have done. One of the displays tells you what IP address it has which is also handy when trying to find it. I have yet to connect the NMEA output to anything - the documentation details this and also the device can function as an NTP server so I might use…

Good copy of SAQ here this morning during their 100th annoversary broadcast at 09:00 UTC. The reception was via a YouLoop in the loft angled towards SAQ, an Airspy HF+ connected to the Mac via USB, and SDRpp on the Mac. The first picture is a screenshot with SAQ featuring, the display shifted and zoomed such that the 'loud' stations further up the band are out of the way. SDRpp has AGC turned off, bandwidth set to 200Hz and no attenuation. The morse was perfecly readable by ear. This second screenshot has the loud stations on screen as well as a comparison. There was a secod broadcast in the afternoon, with equally good reception but slightly more difficult on the ear.