Radio, railways, stuff...

The PiBox is almost completed. It's taken far too long due to all sorts of silly things like having to get fans because a dry run indicated the poor little boards were getting a bit hot, having to get bolts for the fans because I had none long enough, and having to get a connector for the 1-wire (actually 3 wires!) lead from the central heating sensors. So, there is is. Two fans on the left, 5V PSU bottom right, gigabit Ethernet switch above that, then the Pi's: top is the PiStar with the DVMega board which has coax to the rear panel and then a dummy load, middle is the ASD-B and central heating monitor Pi, and the bottom is a general purpose one with various bits on such as rtl_tcp. The lower two boards have USB-A sockets on the rear of the case for the two SDR sticks, one for the ADS-B antenna and one to attach to a Discone for general use. But there is an issue. I had originally intended this to sit in the shack but those fans are just too annoying. Not loud, but constant. I suspect the box will end up in the loft. Or maybe a re-think. I may fiddle with running the fans from one (or two) of the Pi's and set up some temperature control to turn them on and off. It may even be that I am rather too 'sensitive' to the temperature range as others seem happy running their boards a lot hotter than I do mine.

Well I passed the full licence exam a couple of weeks ago now. The RSGB were particularly quick with things as Ofcom knew the Tuesday after my Friday exam, meaning I could chose a callsign, and the pass certificate arrived from the RSGB in the post the next day. Here are a few notes while I remember in case they are useful to anyone. YMMV of course and different things work for different people, you need to do what works for you. As you should know by now you need two cameras, the one on the laptop (or attached to a PC if that’s what you use) showing your face, plus another off to the side looking across. I used a MacBook and an iPhone as second camera. Positioning the phone was something I had thought out but got wrong on the day. I borrowed a phone stand for this but it proved impossible to get the angle right. This second camera needs to look across at you and the keyboard and screen and I ended up propping the phone against the stand having placed the stand on its side. It only fell over once which made me jump as I was deeply concentrating! The Internet proved a bit of an issue as well due to some pauses. What would have helped was for me to make two WebEx calls to a friend to see what issues there might be. Also, having thought it through putting the phone on 4G could have made a difference, but there is only on bar of 4G in the room I was using. Anyway, I dashed out before the start of the test and grabbed a long Ethernet cable and plugged the MacBook in but there were still some short pauses, fortunately not sufficient to worry the invigilator. Being mid-afternoon and approaching dusk I closed the curtains and put the lights on, put a sign on the door saying 'keep out', had two calculators (just in case), a table light, both the Mac and phone on charge, and a glass of water and two cough sweets. But that's just me! However, I think it worth considering your environment - a view out to the street might be distracting, as might the sun if it tracks across and ends up in your eyes. The TestReach software works well. You log in with the supplied credentials and can run through a demonstration beforehand. Do so, it shows you what to press etc. For the exam we started a WebEx conference 5 minutes beforehand and I used the phone to sweep the room. The invigilator then gave me the code to get into the test and I was away. I took time on each question, answered the ones I was sure of, and put an answer for and marked for review those I was not so sure about or didn’t know. Doing this meant that had I run out of time there would at least be an…

I had an idea that my RSP2 SDR could sit in the loft driven by a Pi in the shack. The Pi in question had DireWolf and a DVB-T stick watching APRS traffic. Ideal, I though. Hmmm. I really thought this would be easy and a web search suggested that it should all work, my plan being to use the Pi to serve the SDR remotely from one of the laptops.  My first attempt was to install a fresh Raspberry Pi OS and install SoapySDR and SoapySDRPlay. However, various bits of SoapySDR failed to compile due to some things not being found, even though I followed the instructions to the letter. A web search found only two identical but unanswered questions, so no help there. More searches. SDRPlay have a useful looking image for the Pi where it will run in a number of modes, including soapy remote. This seemed just what I wanted. It all went in and the Pi throws open port 1234 which web searches indicated as the right thing for it to do. However, SDRPlay refuses to play whatever I try. I have again followed what instructions I can find regarding remote operation, some of which point to the SoapySDR package so I downloaded those onto the Windows laptop. Again, no go. Trying a different mode results in - nothing. There was also a claim that SDR Console will see a remote SDRPlay but it won’t for me and given my setup works really well for the Pluto / QO100 transceiver I have no intention fiddling with that further. CubicSDR made promises as it at least mentioned Soapy Remote but will not find the Pi. Stuffing bits in by hand results in nothing. Trying different modes in the SDRPlay Pi image yielded nothing further. There seems no way to progress, so I have, for now at least given up and gone back to using the good old DVB-T dongle which at least has a simple plugin that works for data bits like APRS via DireWolf. At least it works. Now, I’ve been fiddling about with software all my career and I would / should be able to figure this out. But thinking as a beginner all it would lead to is frustration. If this kind of facility is viable then more thought needs to go into documentation, simple step-by-step guides with problem solutions, and simple one-click installations rather than sending the user chasing around the globe finding bits that end up not working. Yes, I know the software is all provided as-is and someone has spent a lot of effort in building each bit for free. And yes, if I make the time to figure it out I will produce such a guide,  but don’t hold your breath as many other projects are calling for attention. There is light at the end of the tunnel though (and it's not just someone with a torch bringing more work!) - using the guide at https://www.2m0sql.com/2012/10/10/remote-sdr-using-raspberry-pi-rtl_tcp/ and SDR# on…