Radio and rails...

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…

It really is taking me far too long to get this sorted out. But, finally some progress has been made... at least I now have a decent case and the screen mounted. So far, there is very little else in the case other than the Lime and Pluto, the screen, the Pi and a 12V to 5V converter. But at least there's plenty of space to add all the other necessary bits and pieces. The screen was the most awkward thing to mount as it is designed to fit easily into a plastic surround with the Pi directly behind. For that, the 4 mounting screws fit directly to the case. But here I want it in the front panel. My rather less than elegant solution was to get some 1/4" square aluminium bar, make holes for 4 M3 nuts and bolts and tighten these to become studs - these are in the horizontal pieces as shown in the pic. These were then epoxy glued to the front panel. Two more bars then take the screen, with spacers so the screen isn't pulled back too much when tightening. Anyway, elegant or not you can't see it from the front! Still to…