Radio and rails...

Up until now I've used generic QSL cards rather than an actual design. These served well as an M6 and a 2E but I always planned to design a card once I passed the full exam. So, one year on (no sense in rushing!) here it is: The basic design was done by one of my boys with the final layout and production carried out by fdsQSL who also produced my previous generic cards. The photo is my own, the logo as explained previously was basically why I chose RVB because the Morse fits the wheels. The rear has all the usual stuff including an area for 'Via' above the target callsign, both top right to hopefully make it easy for the bureau. I have only just got these and have yet to try one in the laser printer - which would make filling the details in easier. But given I hardly send any cards that is a lot of faff when a pen does just as well!

I only managed one almost decent image from the 1st December ISS SSTV event, the others being partial or very noisy. I am not bothering with the diplomas this time. When I checked most of them use a Google form that required me to log in (twice in one case), failed to submit and, in one case set 40 (!) cookies for the trouble.

Slowly coming together. Yesterday I decided to attack the front panel with a drill and mount the rotary encoder, switches and the little Arduino board which I programmed earlier. This is for tuning the Langstone. For some reason my drill press insists on making triangular holes - if I wanted a triangular hole I'd never manage of course. So I've resorted to making a smaller hole and using a round file. Anyway, everything went into place, although the Arduino board has no mounting holes so I've tie-wrapped a piece of plastic under it as an insulator and used a decent (hopefully!) sticky pad to secure the board inside the front panel. So far, so good. Here it is receiving the Allstar microHub... I need to sort the microphone out. The USB audio dongles seem to be constructed for stereo input so I wired the same to the front panel. Plugging the headset in gives no audio, presumably its all shorting out. I can make it work by 'adjusting' the plug (pulling it out until it works!) so I need to re-wire or make a little adapter. There are a couple of fans in the case and so far it seems…

After temporarily giving up making my own Allstar microhub I opted to purchase a ready made one from G7RPG. It arrived today and simply works - plugged into 12V and it fired up and announced the IP via radio (subsequently I grabbed the MAC address and gave it the IP I wanted it to have via DHCP). I ran an audio test on it fully expecting it to be perfect and it was indeed. So whatever I did when making mine is nothing by comparison. I shall investigate that at a later date but having a Pi in a box doing nothing has advantages as I am looking to make a GPS referenced NTP server.

I finally got round to putting my Allstarlink node together after looking at it sitting almost completed for a week. Poor thing. Anyway, it's now functioning but I want to add the LEDs. Software-wise it turned out a bit of a faff. I had already signed up and got a node number and set a password etc. My first attempt was via the Raspberry Pi image downloaded from the Allstar wiki. That seemed to go in just fine with a fairly easy setup and well scripted information on the wiki. All seemed ok except for when I wanted to install Allmon... the instructions for which began with the need to install git. That failed and so I did the usual update / upgrade cycle - which I really ought to have done right away as the image is quite old. After that, nothing worked. The USB interface was not working and so there was no radio functions. Power cycling did nothing. So I installed the hamvoip image. One nice thing about the Pi and similar thing is you change SD cards and this changes the o/s and everything. Hamvoip went in fine with a fairly automatic installation and after a…