Amateur radio ⁽²⁵⁶⁾

Made some useful progress on packet radio today. I managed to access a node in Scotland and one near the south coast on 40m, 300 baud. This was using QtSoundModem on the Linux box connected to the FT450D via a Signalink, fed into the random length wire in the loft. Access was via EasyTerm running on the Windows PC at first, but then I managed to compile QtTermTCP so ran that on the Linux box instead. A bit of fun but it proves the possibility of using 40m to interconnect where there is currently no VHF or UHF paths here. Fingers crossed once I get some wire and metal in the air things will only improve.

So... that time of year again! Where did the last 63 go... Currently all my antennas are in the loft and this is something I have wanted to address for far too long. So 2024 is going to see some actual metal outdoors. First on the list is the collinear for GB7RVB. The plan there is to use a TK bracket and put it up on a mast so it is just above the roofline. The issue I will have here is our house is silhouetted against the backdrop of far away hills and I just know there will be complaints. But as we do not have an external TV antenna there are many oversized examples around where people have clearly been done over by unscrupulous installers. We can see Emley Moor mast to the south plus at least two repeaters and our 6 element or so TV antenna in the loft provides perfectly good signal strengths so why the large 'digital' antennas? Anyway, they cannot really whinge at me for a collinear given all that metalwork along the rooflines. That's my defence anyway! Depending on complaints, or hopefully the lack thereof it will probably get a coup, of feet…

I've been doing the '12 days of QRZ' again this year and managed to get the award yesterday - I started two day late as I forgot about the award. So far I had endorsements for 80m, 40m, 30m and 20m, and today I added 17m and 10m. A couple of log entries were the same stations over two or three days, I'm not actually stalking you! It's fun and frustrating at the same time, logging, sending to QRZ and LoTW and hoping for a match. A few 60m QSOs from yesterday were from stations that had previously logged to LoTW and now are not... but never mind. Just one more day for 60m and 15m to get 12 days in each and the associated endorsements. The award updates automatically once you get sufficient days and go to the awards page again, Now then, 12m. I did not realise last year, nor this year that it is included, as are all bands. You need to go to the bottom of the awards check page and click on 'all bands'. So this year I added 3 days (so far) of 12m, 9 to go. I've never heard anything on 160m, the…

Well. Further to my previous post where all hope seemed to have gone out of the window I finally made progress today, but not the way I set out to. First off, I pulled a Raspberry Pi 4 from another project and sat the CaribouLite HAT on it. Next was a fresh installation of DragonOS. But this time it did open the ssh port - I've no idea why it did not before and note I am being unscientific here as I changed the Pi, but I am not going backwards. Then, time for install.sh... All seemed to go well but the software failed to compile completely. Searching on the errors I added #include to two source files, cariboulite/software/libcariboulite/src/CaribouLiteCpp.cpp and cariboulite/software/libcariboulite/src/CaribouLite.hpp. Stripping out all the 'apt's and 'depmod' from install.sh and running it again and the software compilation completed! I had already added and commented out the necessary lines in /boot/firmware/config.txt so a reboot was all that was needed to kick it into life. The driver was loaded - lsmod|smi showed this and also /proc/device-tree/hat now exists, both precursors to success according to the notes and YouTube videos. Running sudo SoapySDRUtils --find showed the card, and, finally (!), running SoapySDRServer…

I came across this via a post someone made somewhere - actually it might have been an email on a group. Anyway, with a tx/rx range top to 6GHz I thought, why not? It arrived quite quickly from Crowd Supply via Mouser with Crowd Supply charging the VAT but no other taxes on arrival. I duly mounted it on a spare Raspberry Pi 3B with a fresh Bookworm 64 bit OS and followed the installation instructions at https://github.com/cariboulabs/cariboulite but I always got various errors and never got to a working system. The errors were mainly surrounding the SMI driver and the kernel headers. There seemed no way round this one, and thus no working system. Following on from another complaint I downloaded and installed DragonOS, a 64 bit variant with lots of SDR utilities built in. Once installed, although the developer stated that ssh is available from first boot and does not need the usual empty ssh file it is not - the system does not open port 22 but does open the vnc port so I then had to find out which of my desktop systems has a vnc viewer as I never use it. When I found one…