Radio and rails...

My 'pigate' Pi is no more. Well, it still exists, but has been decommissioned. It has a story going back a few years. It began life as one of thre Pi systems in the blue metal box that has just been scrapped but was later moved to its own 3D printed box. It ran a varying number of packages, taking over the ADBS logger that was on a Pi in the loft and also running Hamclock and a decoder for our weather station. But recently the PoE HAT fan has been considerably annoying and Hamclock always seemed to push the load up. Enter a new (old) fanless PC. This is an eBay purchase, a Wyse 5060 made by Dell and arrived today. And it has a story of its own! First off it was sold as used with an un-activated Windows 10 on board but it appears to be new due to the packaging. The first step for this PC was to install Lubuntu 24.04 LTS but on powering it up it has a BIOS password set. Fortunately the password is known and available via the Web. It turns out the Wyse 5060 is a thin client aimed at having…

For some time now my pi-star node was in a fairly large blue box. Originaly this box had three Pi systems plus a 5V PSU but over the months two of those systems were either shut down or relocated to their own 3D printed box and powered via a PoE HAT. So the blue box, measuring some 240x110x190mm was pretty much empty. Since I built a M17 hotspot out of a Pi and a Nextion screen I found a 3D printable box specifically for the 3.2" Nextion. So I printed this and a second one for pi-star. This has saved quite a bit of shelf space. The case is not fully ideal because in the case of the pi-star node the Nextion is connected via a USB to TTL converter which sticks outside the case. The M17 node has a Zumspot USB radio which again sticks out the side. But it will make a good basis for designing a wider box that will encompass the USB bits.

You know the phrase 'memory like a sieve'? Well, that's mine. I just received a 3.2" Nextion display via Aliexpress which arrived after only a few days from China. This was to be a display for the M17 hotspot. But there were a few unexpected hurdles! First off, I could not remember the connections from the GPIO pins of the Pi to the Nextion. It's actually really easy, pins 4, 6, 8 and 10, but it took me an age to find that information on the web. Onthe Pi 4B the GPIO pins are numbered from the top (the opposite end from the USB and Ethernet connectors) with odd numbers on the left and even on the right. There are plenty of diagrams on the web. So pin 4, which is +5V is the second one down on the right, pin 6 is next down and 0v, then pin 8 which is transmitted data from the Pi, and pin 10 is received data to the Pi. The Nextion display came with a cable with a connector for the display. This has red for +ve, blue for data from the display, yellow for data to the display and black for 0V.

All good things come to an end - Hamshack Hotline has closed down and the first of four lights on my SIP phone has gone out. Sad. I had been using the service for some time and I actually purchased a Cisco SIP phone from eBay specifically for it. In the end my 4-line SIP phone had all its lights lit as I also got numbers for Freestar, Hams over IP, and CNET which I replaced with Amateurwire later on. The phone seemed to lock up once the service was switched off - no idea if that was actually the cause as I disabled the line after a reboot. I also remembered to remove Hamshack Hotline from my Groundwire app. Of course, being the first one I signed up to it is on the top of the four line buttons on the phone. Now I need to edit the config to move things about.

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…