Radio and rails...

Tidying up the whole shack make life easier to reach stuff but did not completely cure one issue, that of RF flying about the place and getting into things where it was not wanted. I tried 10m this morning and two things happened. First, it set off the house alarm. Second, wsjt-x would not hold a tx cycle or tuning. The autotune was happy but that acts quickly. Using wsjt-x's tuning for a few seconds, or transmitting a CQ and the FT450D would tx, then off, then try again etc. This has happened before. First off, yes there is RF in the shack and it's due to the rather naff antenna wire in the loft. I need to live with that until I get some wire in the air outside. And yes, I've been saying that for ages! But before it was really down to the mass of cables all entwined and those have been completely tidied up now. So I was rather annoyed that the same issue has returned. And then I discovered that my attempts to dust round the desk had moved the serial cable between the FT450D and the Signalink and it was now laid across the…

Recently the outside lights here decided to switch off at random intervals for no apparent reason. There are 5 different controllers, two being Zigbee bulbs and the others Zigbee switches. All use 2.4GHz. All had been running reliably for maybe a year. On/off cycles are controlled by scripts on the server as well as manually via an app. In each case whichever set of lights had gone out did report as being off and would turn back on via the app. Some days there was no issue, on others at least one would go off at some point. The Zigbee bulbs never failed, just the switches. There was no evidence of any commands being sent to turn the lights off, but there was the occasional error being reported. Rebooting the server made no difference. A power cycle of the server seems to have cured the issue so I am considering it likely to be the Zigbee transceiver itself. This is now nagging at me to figure out what happened and presumably it will reoccur some time in the future. Too many other things to sort out though!

It's surprising just how many things one gathers that need Ethernet. Having just made an NTP server out of a Raspberry Pi that took the last port in my 8+2 port PoE switch I needed more ports. The switch is a Netgear GS110TP, 8 Ethernet ports and up to two SFP modules for interlinking. So I have added a second GS110TP linked to the original one via a short fibre lead and two SFP transceivers. The house now has 4 Ethernet switches, all Netgear, making 48 Ethernet ports in total but not all in use, plus 3 wifi access points, Netgear again and all PoE powered. Actually I could have settled for a non-PoE switch as the additional one but this one came cheap, and new in box. All the switches and access points do SNMP too, centrally monitored using MRTG. Why? Because they can!

I decided to make my own Stratum 1 NTP server for the home. No, I don’t need the accuracy, but localising stuff like that is always interesting. So, I recently purchased an Uputronics GPS HAT from Pi Hut which is marked Raspberry Pi GPS+RTC Rev 6.4. It arrived next day along with some other bits. I also got another PoE HAT and already had a Pi 4. Raspbian installed on an SD card – this time I remembered to first set it up to work via ssh – and the Pi booted ok with the GPS board flashing it’s ‘time pulse’ LED once per second. I followed instructions on the web, in particular from the two websites shown at the bottom of this post. Initial setting up of the Pi involves the use of raspi-config to stop the serial port login shell but leaving the port enabled, and disabling serial getty and bluetooth. At this point, doing cat /dev/ttyAMA0 should return data from the GPS receiver but all I got was garbled characters. More on that later. The next step was to enable PPS support which involves modifications to /boot/config.txt and a module adding to /etc/modules, plus downloading pps-tools. Running…

I now have an RSPdx which arrived today and connected it in the loft to a discone which was already there. I changed the o/s on my Pi 4 that runs an ADS-B receiver to the 64-bit flavour, reinstalled FR24feeder and installed SDRconnect. Running it as a server it communicates very nicely with SDRconnect on the Mac Mini. It will be interesting to watch this software as it develops. One this was clear… the discone is useless! While I realise it is little use at HF it is pretty deaf thereafter. So I have moved the RSPdx down to the shack so it can be plugged into ‘proper’ antennas. It is currently pulling in 20m. Of course, my HF antenna is on a tuner so I need to tune it via one of the HF rigs and then swap leads to plug the SDR in, but that is not much of an issue because it is all done via the BNC patch panel. I also had it looking at 2m via the white stick in the loft. My old RSP2 is destined to go into the garage with a couple of VLF antennas as it is far too electrically noisy…