I had an old Icom ID-880H lying around. The ID-880H has something many radios lack, a Data port! That gave me an excuse to buy another Masters Communications Radio Adapter kit! The DRA-50 is very similar to the RA-35/RA-42 interfaces that I’ve used before. The DRA series of adapters are designed to be used in Digital / Packet applications specifically. The main difference that appealed to me was the MiniDIN6 jack which mean that I could use a straight through “PS2” MiniDIN6 cable to connect to my ID-880H without having to build yet another interface cable.
Building the kit was fun. The surface mounted CM119A audio chip was pre-soldered to the board and the rest of the components were all through-hole parts. It took about an hour and a half to assemble. There were a lot of tiny 1/8th Watt resistors of various values so it’s helpful if you know the resistor color code. I first sorted all of the parts by type and value using a repurposed gift box.
Once assembled, I set the jumpers for my application, plugged it into a Libre single board computer that I had previous set up with Debian and Dire Wolf and bingo, it worked straight away. All I had to do was set the receive and transmit audio levels.
I set up YAAC (Yet Another APRS Client) on Mac OS/X (it also runs on Windows, and Linux) and pointed it at the KISS TNC over TCP/IP.
I merged two of my previous 3D printed case designs into one that had a space for the RPI3/Libre Computer board and a space for the DRA-50 USB audio adapter board. Having the two boxes combined made the whole thing more manageable.
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