Projects

It's not all about history, but I'll tell more about the past eventually. Havnig retired from full time work as the Covid pandemic started in 2020 I've been catching up on years of neglected hobbies. I've long been wanting to get back into Amateur Radio and 2025 proved to be the year. I'm finally in a location where I can put up a few antennas and when I talked about putting up an HF vertical my wife's immediate response was "where can we put it, and I'll clear some space for it"! That gave me the big push to start over.

Things I wanted to do were/are:

• AX.25/packet radio
• HF, probably data modes
• MMDVM and/or AllStar node

I've already made a start with some of these.

I made contact with the local packet BBS (GB7ESC) sysop and with his help I've set up a LinBPQ node on a Raspberry Pi with a link on 2m into the BBS node. This is currently working with a USB sound card, Direwolf and a handheld, so not ideal.

Myself and the sysop (Alan - G0WDA) are interested in doing more, so we currently have a project underway to build a 9600 baud (or maybe 19200 baud) link between us on 70cm. This isn't really essential because we're only about a mile away from each other, but we're doing it to further our knowledge. I've built two NinoTNCs and had them connected back to back at the audio level and managed to send traffic through them. Alan and I both have 9600 baud capable 70cms transceivers so the next step is to put the TNCs on air.

I've made more progress with HF. I've got my 20+ year old Icom IC-7400 back in action and have an 80m-6m vertical antenna installed in the garden. So far I've been using FT8 and some FT4 and have made almost 900 contacts so far, with 89 (not all confirmed) DXCC countries so far. I'm enjoying myself immensely with data modes, but once the shack is properly sorted out I'm sure I'll get back onto SSB too.

I've also made progress with digital and analogue nodes on VHF/UHF. I have a tiny MMDVM node which uses a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W and RF hat running WPSD, that allows me to have local access into the digital networks. I'm also nearly finished building an AllStar node, again using a Raspberry Pi and a USB interface to the RF and audio processing. I'm pretty sure it's working so the next step is to connect into some talk groups to check if anyone can actually hear me.

I'll use the blog to keep track of my progress with these, and other, radio projects.