NJ6N’s Amateur Radio & Electronics Blog
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SvxLink Powered Pi Zero Communicator
Summary: For about $30 US, you can have a Raspberry Pi based EchoLink/SvxLink node. All it takes is a Raspberry Pi Zero, Zero 2, 3, etc. and and Pi Audio Hat. With a little more work, you can use an inexpensive USB Audio dongle for the audio interface. I recently acquired some new Raspberry Pi…
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Fun with Djspot
Darren, G7LWT sent me a Djspot FM transceiver board for the Raspberry Pi to experiment with. The board is used to create an FM “hotspot” that provides access to other svxlink or EchoLink nodes via the Internet. You can use an HT to communicate through the hotspot on a simplex FM channel. DTMF codes control…
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San Clemente Repeater Upgrades
At the SOARA San Clemente repeater site, the ACC RC-850 repeater controller has been replaced with an Audio Test Solutions (Formerly Link Communications) RLC-4 controller. By standardizing on RLC controllers, we have simplified our ongoing maintenance. The common platform will also allow us to standardize repeater commands for our users. The EchoIRLP Echolink/IRLP node computer…
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SOARA Temple Hill Repeater Upgrades
As reported in a previous blog post, SOARA has acquired new repeater radios and a new 6-port RLC-Club Deluxe II repeater controller for the Temple Hill site. Last Friday, August 6th, they were installed. The new Bridgecom CS-540 440 and BCR-220 220 repeater radios are installed and connected to the new RLC-Club Deluxe II 6-port…
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Powerwerx SS-30DV repair
We had some exciting fireworks at our annual SOARA Field Day this year! One of our generators had a failed regulation circuit and presented 160 VAC at the output. The victim of the high voltage spike was Dana, K6NR’s Powerwerx SS-30DV switching power supply. Powerwerx does not repair them or provide schematics, but they do…
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The Generac Generator Saga
Many years ago, Howard, KG6GI (SK) purchased a Generac 7550 EXL generator for his own use, but also as a backup for SOARA, should we ever need it. One year during field day, the primary generator failed and we were left to run on batteries that were quickly being depleted. Howard enlisted my help to…
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Temple Hill Repeater Site Upgrades
SOARA has seven repeaters at the Temple Hill repeater site in Laguna Beach. Four of them are D-STAR digital repeaters. There are D-STAR modules for 2m, 440, and 1.2 GHz Digital Voice (DV) and one for 23cm Digital Data (DD). The three analog repeaters are on 2m, 220, and 440. An svxLink node provides EchoLink…
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Bridgecom/ComLink CS-540V Transmitter Repair
I was recently enlisted to set up a “new old stock” CS-540V repeater for use by a local ham radio club. The repeater was pristine and had obviously never been used. I was able to obtain a copy of the programming software from the manufacturer, even though the repeater was over 14 years old. Using…
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svxTalkie
I’ve been toying with the idea of building a walkie talkie based on the svxLink software and Raspberry Pi Zero W platform. I found a really nice audio board that has two microphones, a headphone jack and speaker output that implements the I²S (Inter-IC Sound) digital audio interface standard. FWIW, it’s pronounced “eye squared S”.…
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SVXLink Interfaces
I’ve been running the svxLink application written by Tobias, SM0SVX for some time now. I installed it on our local VHF repeater back in 2018 using a Raspberry Pi 3B+, and an audio/PTT isolation board. I’ve been looking for new, improved or simplified interfaces to interconnect svxLink with repeater controllers and simplex node radios. Some…
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