IT changes

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 apps accessed across the network. But regardless it is a full PC, 265Gb SDD, 4Gb RAM and an AMD 64 bit quad core processor at 2.5Gbps, a decent upgrade from the Pi 4B of pigate.

Setting the thing up was relatively painless except the dump1090 and fr24feed setup failed twice so got deleted entirely and installed again. I missed something because after that it works fine.

I still need to finish the setup as temperature recording is very different to the Pi and to my Lenovo server. It is currently reporting 50°C via 'sensors'. 

This system actually replaces two Pi systems and potentially a third one. The other two are one Pi with a switchable USB hub that powers the little LoRa modules (radiosonde receiver and TinyGS station - it did have a Meshcom node on too but it keeps crashing), and one running SatNOGS. I see no reason why I can't move the SatNOGS stuff across later on.

Of course this PC has its own PSU - 19V - so it has taken up a wall socket whereas the Pi systems are all PoE powered. It is time I purchased a long power strip anyway.

The other change is the QRP Labs shack clock has been retired, which also meant the dedicated 5V linear PSU has also gobe. Since I got the DX Patrol GPSDO it became evident that the shackl clock does not tick right - what I mean is the display is about 1 second slow. Having multiple clocks is always an issue, but four of them agree with each other to the second so the delay on the shack clock has become a but of a nuissance. So clock-wise I have the DX Patrol showing UTC which, although the display is rather small is easy enough to see, hamclock, aslo UTC but of course needs the monitor switched on, plus the two hotspots both displaying local time. The latter two are not in my eye line when operating and the biggest display is, of course hamclock. Other than the DX Patrol all systems use NTP and set their time from my own GPS NTP server, also on a Pi. That will remain standalone.