NJ6N’s Amateur Radio & Electronics Blog
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Using a TNC to send an APRS Beacon
It’s SOARAs 50th Anniversary and I wanted to send out a Beacon on APRS to let folks know about our special operating event at Gilleran Park in Mission Viejo on May 18th and 19th, 2024. There are many ways to do this and I chose to use a Kantronics KPC3+ TNC and handie-talkie. Most TNCs…
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All-In-One-Cable Interface with svxLink
I recently saw a video by Hayden, VK7HH on his Ham Radio DX Youtube channel about a new “All In One Cable” (AIOC) computer <=> radio interface. I found a HackADay article about it that was very interesting as well. The AIOC is an STM32 based microcontroller that emulates a sound card and provides a…
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Kenwood RC-D710
A long time ago, 2009 or so, Ham Radio Outlet was offering the RC-D710 control head and TNC for a very reasonable price. This is the identical control head used on the Kenwood TM-D710 mobile transceiver. It includes a built-in Terminal Node Controller (TNC) and APRS software. I bought one thinking I could use it…
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Fun with Meshtastic®
“Meshtastic® is a project that enables you to use inexpensive LoRa radios as a long range off-grid communication platform in areas without existing or reliable communications infrastructure. This project is 100% community driven and open source!” I’m not sure where I first heard about this new technology called LoRa or “Long Range” and Meshtastic but…
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mini USB Power Box
portable USB power from 12VDC Recently, my brother told me about a problem he had with a USB power adapter that was causing a lot of RFI on VHF in his mobile setup. It’s not hard to imagine how inexpensive 12V to USB adapters could cut corners and cause interference. I found some higher quality…
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Raspberry Pi Pico W
Background I’ve built a few projects in the past using the Arduino platform. Arduino uses a variant of the C++ programming language which works well for microcontroller projects. I built my Ham Clock using a version of the Espressif ESP8266 from Adafruit called the “Feather HUZZAH” and became interested in this platform as well. The…
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Adding Five-Band LPF to the U3S
Some time ago I build the Ultimate 3S QRSS/WSPR transmitter from QRP Labs. It came with one low pass filter. I chose the 10meter LPF because I was originally thinking of using the beacon transmitter for the SOARA K6LLL 10 meter CW beacon and the U3S is a great fit for that job. Once I…
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OpenWebRX+ on AtomicPi
OpenWebRX is a software defined radio (SDR) web application that enables users to listen to analog and digital signals received by an attached SDR device through their web browser. As the name implies, it is a receive only application. I had recently acquired a great single board computer to run this on. OpenWebRX can demodulate/decode…
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SweetPotatoPi?
I’m not sure what you might want to call it, but my goal was to learn what the component parts of the very popular suite of Digital Voice applications that make up “Pi-Star” were, and how they interacted with each other. I wanted to use non-Raspberry Pi hardware since Raspberry Pi hardware is scarce and…
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Using BF888S UHF Radio w/ svxLink
Continuing my experimentation with cheap radios to create svxLink nodes, my next victim is the BaoFeng BF888S. For about $25 including tax you can acquire two BF-888s radios with accessories. These radios are incredibly cheaply made but should be suitable to use for a low power analog node. They are UHF and cover 400-470 MHz…
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