Radio and rails...

After a brief expedition to Write Freely I have moved back to Wordpress. I had kept a copy of the old Wordpress site so actually moving was not that bad other than adding in 4 or 5 posts and associated images...

See, I built it! And it works. The 3D printed case needs a bit of tidying but is perfectly functional. All I need now is a radio to use it with plus probably re-use one of my spare Pi 3B cards to drive it.

Note to self... stop collecting bits for projects and start building instead! Just in, this PCB and chip for the TARPN NinoTNC. Described as a multi-speed, multi-protocol USB-KISS packet radio interface this comes as a very nicely made PCB and PIC plus a bill of parts complete with Mouser part numbers and a spreadsheet that loads into Mouser to make a complete order. This will be a fun build. The TARPN website also has full ordering and step by step construction details. Neat!

Messing around with packet today via the FT817 and Windows 10 PC. I'm getting used to two programs, WinRPR which supports Robust packet, and, of course, UZ7HO's SoundModem. There was a lot of APRS activity via RP on 10.1473MHz USB and it all decodes nicely in WinRPR. Then on to SoundModem on 14.105MHz LSB (Network105). There were a few more decodes since I took the screenshot. My next step is to find a client to tx APRS.

I have an allocation within 44net (aka AMPRnet) and so I set up a gateway based on a Raspberry Pi 4B – well, I had one unused one! My allocation is a /29, so 6 IP addresses. The Pi setup is the Pi 4, a PoE HAT, an Ethernet USB dongle for the second Ethernet interface, and a neat 3D printed case that I have used before and which has the height for the HAT. Software-wise it’s just Raspberry Pi OS, plus a daemon called ampr-ripd which listens for gateway announcements and sorts out routing tables. My link is to the IPIP mesh so I am not doing BGP or anything fancy. My initial experiment used the wifi interface and I could connect to 44net via the phone / wifi AP software running on the Pi. That worked ok but really I wanted to be able to connect a couple of systems and not bother with wifi. As I had an Ethernet dongle left over from the dismantled QO100 transceiver that did the job nicely. The plan is to connect this to a small network switch offering a couple of Ethernet ports to be used on 44net. So far, the…