Amateur radio ⁽²⁵⁰⁾

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…

I have, more or less finished the shack reorganisation which took 4 days! There are still some audio leads to sort out and I plan to do some woodwork to mount the two HF transceivers together. But here it is... It does surprise me how I created space out of the previous mess of wires. Now the radios and PCs are all in reach of each other, test gear is all in one place, and the Creed 75 teleprinter has joined the shack (pity it is not yet working...) Of the 4 screens, the top two are on a Linux PC, the bottom left is Windows 10 and the bottom right is on a Mac mini. A bit of very useful software called 'barrier' allows theMac keyboard, mouse and trackpad to control all three systems. All audio is connected through a mixer (or will be once I add a couple more leads) which also provides inputs to the computers. Now to mess it all up again... how long do you think?

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…