Radio and rails...

Still sorting the shack out today, hopefully two more days and it’s done. Today’s task was to fit PoE HATs to the two Raspberry Pi systems that run things like Pi-Star, the ADSB grabber and HamClock. These were both Pi 3B’s which do not have the pins for PoE - the 3B+ or the 4 does. So, first off, strip the cards out of the box. Not too bad. The first Pi 4 and its HAT was easy but the Pi Star one has the RF board. Installing the PoE HAT does not leave any of the Pi 4’s pins protruding. Fortunately I had a small stock of extenders, in fact, just enough. Not the neatest of constructions but it works. One thing caught me out though. The Pi Star Pi gets a static IP address via DHCP. When it booted up it would not let me connect or get to the web interface. A scan of the network found it and only then did I remember that, of course changing the card means a new MAC address! Anyway, both cards now have their MAC addresses in pi-hole (even though the IP is static doing it that way makes pi-hole…

In between various large-ish DIY projects that need to be sorted over the summer I took time out to begin to rearrange the shack. I really want to site the radios next to the screens for ease of use but with the four monitors I have too little horizontal space. So I thought, if I had a longer support pole for one of the dual monitor stands I could put the other two above. I printed a test cylinder with a flange to see if I could make a coupling for the two poles and after using that to get the size right I printed a 100mm one. This coupled the two nicely but during test fitting the monitors it snapped. Serves me right - I had originally intended the 3D printed part to be a guide only with a metal clamp connecting the two support poles. Anyway, Amazon had extension poles which are a lot cheaper than a 4-monitor stand (Plan B was to buy a 4-screen stand) which arrived today. Here, then, are 4 monitors all nestled together - well, sort of: The Linux screens are across the top, Windows bottom left and Mac bottom right. I use…

SDRplay's SDRConnect was released as a preview a couple of days ago ( https://www.sdrplay.com/sdrconnect/ ). Like many others I expect I had been waiting a while for this, having heard about it maybe a year ago. So of course, new shiny... I had to install it. It failed to run on my Linux box but, being a fiddler that is probably down to my own config. So I installed it on a Pi 4B with a 64-bit version of Raspberry Pi OS (SDRConnect needs a 64-bit OS). I had a quick fiddle but running headless via VNC was too painful and I had lots of house stuff to do so too little time to trim things. Regrouping, SDRplay publish video guides on how to set things up. I prefer just textual documentation but their videos are generally good. I installed the s/w on my Mac mini and ran it up on the Pi as a server (--server flag) and it runs nicely with no GUI and just a textual status output. The software has a good look and feel and I can see me buying at least one other SDRplay device to add to my somewhat old now RSP2 as…

Five years+ on from retiring I no longer feel the need to tell the world my continuing story via the likes of Facebook. I actually only came to Facebook to find out what other people were saying, principally about my employer. I engaged a little with LinkedIn but never in any serious fashion and I deleted my LinkedIn presence a few months ago. As to Twitter, well, I think in all the years I held an account I sent five tweets. I deleted that account too since I moved to Mastodon. I have since deleted all my Facebook posts and all photos on Instagram and Facebook. I kept the accounts but will no longer engage with either, not even to post ‘likes’. From having my name at the bottom of several thousand web pages over three decades I reckon now it’s only on my own blog. Oh, and my Ph.D. thesis which is online. And I think that’s a good place to be.

While the house is more empty than usual I am getting on with numerous essential DIY tasks - pointing, plastering, boxing pipes in, fixing leaky radiator valves, installing LDF4-50A... the usual stuff.