NJ6N’s Amateur Radio & Electronics Blog

  • Kenwood TM-742 Backlight Repair – with LEDs!

    Kenwood TM-742 Backlight Repair – with LEDs!

    Kenwood TM-x42 tri-band mobile radios have six 6.3 volt incandescent bulbs arranged in three pairs of two bulbs each to light up the display. Eventually the bulbs burn out and since they’re wired in series, they go out in pairs. I recently replaced the backlight bulbs in a friends TM-642 with white LEDs. I used…

  • Fun with OpenRepeater / SvxLink

    Fun with OpenRepeater / SvxLink

    In the Summer of 2017, I built an EchoLink “link node” using a Raspberry Pi 2 Single Board Computer, 900MHz quad-core ARM cortex A7, 1GB RAM, 10/100 Ethernet. The software is called “SvxLink” named after the call sign of the author, Tobias, SM0SVX. Information about the svxLink application can be found on Github at: http://www.svxlink.org…

  • Fun with Digital Voice Dongles and Multi-Mode MMDVM Hotspots

    Fun with Digital Voice Dongles and Multi-Mode MMDVM Hotspots

    Quite a long time ago, Robin, AA4RC gave me a DV Dongle that he had recently developed. It was amazing! It enabled something that wasn’t possible before. With the DV Dongle connected to my Mac, I could monitor the activity on remote D-STAR gateways and talk to folks on the world-wide the D-STAR system without…

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