Tag: Amateur Radio

Nextion 3.5 screen for Hotspots

I’ve used Pi-star now for around a year and a half. The first screen I used with the Zumspot was a 0.96″ OLED screen (I thought it was awesome!) but after a while I started seeing other amateur radio guys were using the Nextion screen/s These are an amazing piece of equipment they run on 5v and have many uses, the main one I’ll be using is the NX4832K035_011 this is the advance type. Basically the only difference between the two (normal & advanced) is the on board memory, RTC and GPIO available for use with external items (not used for MMDVM)

As you can see above there are six screens! I used a sheet of 400x400x8mm polycarbonate (plexiglass) and cut it down to make it match the border (25mm) There is still enough space to get access to the micro SD card for updating the screen code.

Here’s the finished product in place, I’ll need to do a bit of cable management as it’s bit untidy but overall I’m happy with the end result.

Yaesu FTM-7250D

New radio day (well two days ago) I’ve been lucky enough to have been bought (birthday) the Yaesu FTM-7250D to replace the Yaesu FT-90R that has been in the car for almost as long as I’ve owned it! So far I’m impressed with the radio and its operation is almost identical to the Yaesu FT-70D hand-held.

Radio Features:

  • System Fusion-II Compatible
  • Operates Advanced C4FM Digital and Conventional FM modes
  • AMS (Automatic Mode Select) function automatically recognizes the signal as C4FM digital or conventional FM
  • Sophisticated Digital-Group-ID (DG-ID) Operation
  • Digital-Group-ID (DG-ID) Memory Feature : Up to 10 DG-ID pairs with alpha-numeric tags
  • True 50 Watts (VHF and UHF) Stable High-Power Transmitter with FACC
  • * FACC: Funnel Air-Convection Conductor (Wind Tunnel)
  • High Stability ±2.5 ppm TCXO Included
  • 3W Powerful & Clear Audio with Front Speaker
  • AMS with Multi-colored large LED Mode-Indicator Effortless FM and C4FM Operation – 225 Memory Channels with Alpha-numeric tags (maximum 8 characters)
  • Wideband Receive for 108MHz – 579.995MHz (108 – 137MHz: Airband)
  • Weather Broadcast Reception
  • Severe Weather Alert Feature
  • Easily connect with the WIRES-X linking system (Not support operation of WIRES-X Node Station)
  • Keyboard entry of operating frequencies from the microphone – CTCSS and DCS Encode/Decode, with split Tone – Versatile Scan features : VFO scan, Preferential Memory scan, Programmable memory scan and Dual watch

It’s early days, but would I recommend this radio? Yes I would, because for the price ($399AUD) you’re getting a dual band & dual mode (FM & C4FM) radio.

MMDVM Hotspot with ZUMspot Pi

So I’ve entered the relatively new digital modes (for me anyway) of DMR & YSF. This requires either a digital repeater or personal hotspot to access. The popular way to do this is with a software suite called MMDVM and currently there’s two Raspberry Pi images available that take care of having to build everything yourself. The first is PiStar and the other is by KB5RAB

I’m using the Pi-star image as it’s headless (meaning it doesn’t require a keyboard & monitor to run)and uses a webui to configure and uses a read-only file system once everything is loaded, whereas the KB5RAB is a full Raspbian desktop.  As you can see from the pictures I’m using a Raspberry Pi2 and the ZUMSpot Pi and a dual colour OLED.

When portable I have 10000 (mAh) 5v power pack that is about the same size as the case I’m using for the Pi2, so a few rubber bands double looped holds it all together rather nicely! The ZUMSpot Pi hat is the perfect size for fitting the OLED screen inside the case using some double sided foam tape stuck to the HDMI socket and the very top edge of OLED is resting on the CPU heat sink. Initially I was going to attach the I2C ribbon cable to the bottom of the Raspberry Pi, but if I ever want to swap the ZUMSpot out I’d be without the OLED so instead I attached it to the ZUMSpot hat.

 

Finally links to items…

Pi-Star by Andy Taylor

ZUMSpot Pi by Bruce Given

Generic OLED screen

Generic Nextion screen

 

Meadowbank Fire activates Cambridge IMT

I got a phone call at around 17:45 to ask me what I had planned for the evening! I was just a little non committal at first, but after I phoned the contact from the IMT the picture was looking pretty grim so I put aside my reluctance and headed to Cambridge.

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This is the site of the fire…

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This is the temporary radio room…

The TFS details of this fire can be found at http://fire.tas.gov.au/

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T2TAS First Birthday

Oh I overlooked T2TAS first birthday!

Back in December 2010 I applied to become part of the T2 server network. It’s now just a little over a year since then and for me I believe that it was a good decision to pursue. At the time of applying there was only two T2 servers located in Australia, they being T2AUST & T2SYDNEY. Now just a year on and there’s now 5. This has certainly improved the user experience within AU as this provides some more redundancy to the network.

Status pages can be viewed on…

T2TAS IPv4

T2TAS IPv6

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TinyTrak4 & Bluetooth

I was recently contacted by Byon (the developer of the TinyTrak) asking me if I was a user of APRSdroid. As I have an Android phone (HTC Desire A8183) I certainly do use APRSdroid! so I was asked to test out a serial bluetooth device for use with the TinyTrak4.

Here’s an image is of the TT4BT (the name as appears via Bluetooth) The unit draws power from the TinyTrak4 including voltage pass through so you can supply power for your GPS. For my testing I’m using the Byonics GPS2, the Bluetooth adapter is using the HC-05 module, I’m not going to cover the specifics of this module, but to say that Byon has set it for a serial speed of 19200 baud (factory default is 9600 baud) You won’t be needing to make any adjustments to this module!

The setup within APRSdroid is fairly straight forward, The only thing I altered was the channel number used from no entry (auto detect) to channel 1 although because of only having the one device this wasn’t essential. Included below is a rough pictorial guide on how to set up APRSdroid with Bluetooth.

The settings required for your TinyTrak4 (using firmware 0.67) is to simply set AMODE to KISS and ABAUD to 19200 baud. As you will be using APRSdroid to generate your position you’re not required to have a GPS connected to your TinyTrak4 (as APRSdroid is using your phones internal one!)

You can contact the author of APRSdroid via GitHub or on the IRC channel #aprsdroid on the FreeNode network.

Further details on the TinyTrak4 you can contact Byon on the following link

 I’ve purposely kept this brief as there are other resources that cover the specifics of these two devices from their respective developers, I didn’t see the need to recreate their content! 😉

TinyTrak4 & Bluetooth

I was recently contacted by Byon (the developer of the TinyTrak) asking me if I was a user of APRSdroid. As I have an Android phone (HTC Desire A8183) I certainly do use APRSdroid! so I was asked to test out a serial bluetooth device for use with the TinyTrak4.

Here’s an image is of the TT4BT (the name as appears via Bluetooth) The unit draws power from the TinyTrak4 including voltage pass through so you can supply power for your GPS. For my testing I’m using the Byonics GPS2, the Bluetooth adapter is using the HC-05 module, I’m not going to cover the specifics of this module, but to say that Byon has set it for a serial speed of 19200 baud (factory default is 9600 baud) You won’t be needing to make any adjustments to this module!

The setup within APRSdroid is fairly straight forward, The only thing I altered was the channel number used from no entry (auto detect) to channel 1 although because of only having the one device this wasn’t essential. Included below is a rough pictorial guide on how to set up APRSdroid with Bluetooth.

The settings required for your TinyTrak4 (using firmware 0.67) is to simply set AMODE to KISS and ABAUD to 19200 baud. As you will be using APRSdroid to generate your position you’re not required to have a GPS connected to your TinyTrak4 (as APRSdroid is using your phones internal one!)

You can contact the author of APRSdroid via GitHub or on the IRC channel #aprsdroid on the FreeNode network.

Further details on the TinyTrak4 you can contact Byon on the following link

 I’ve purposely kept this brief as there are other resources that cover the specifics of these two devices from their respective developers, I didn’t see the need to recreate their content! 😉

Images in posts?

I’ve just noticed that most of the images that should be visible within posts appear as broken links!  All the images are on the server, there seems to be something wrong within WordPress, or mySQL.

At first I thought no problem, that’s an easy fix…  No its not! as this will require me to edit every post and relink the files. Now having just on two and s half years of blog posts, that would be rather time consuming!

So for the moment, broken image links it is until I either find a semi/fully automated way of fixing the problem it’s going to remain.  😐

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IPv6/4 Dual Stack With Billion 7404VGOX

I’ve just enabled IPv6 on my ADSL router (Billion 7404VGOX) So I just need to find out if the IPv6 assigned to me is dynamic or static because if it’s static I can then enable routing for my T2TAS APRS server.

I’ve only been trying to get this working for around 3 months! Amazing what you can achieve in the early hours of the morning!

Now to hunt for IPv6 only sites! 😉
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