NJ6N’s Amateur Radio & Electronics Blog
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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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Inexpensive SvxLink Node
I wanted to build the most inexpensive SvxLink “node” or “station” I could using off-the-shelf parts. I bought an inexpensive BaoFeng “S9Plus” (it says “UV-S9X3” on the side) radio on Amazon for $28. For the computer system, I used a Raspberry Pi 4 that I already had, however, I also found a Raspberry Pi B+…
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A 19″ rack rail case for Masters Communications RA-xx Radio Adapters
We’ve got a couple of these interfaces installed at our repeater sites and one is also providing a remote SvxLink/EchoLink node for our Santiago Site via link radios. There are already 3D printed cases available for these adapters but none that I’ve seen have any mounting tabs. I designed a case that has a row…
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Fun with the “ECM” motor in my Forced Air Unit
In 2009, I had my furnace replaced with a new high efficiency furnace with air conditioning by a local HVAC contractor. In 2011, I noticed the smell of smoke through the registers. Shortly after that, I noticed the compressor was still running while there was no air coming out of the registers! I called the…
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