3464km in Three and a Half Days

This week I took the opportunity to help a friend drive his new car back to Darwin from the Gold Coast. The car has been modified to accommodate wheel chair access for his son and the easiest option was to get this modification performed in QLD.

We put some long days in, with the longest being 1100km.  It has started me thinking about a driving holiday in QLD at some stage in the future, where we could travel at a more leisurely pace.

APRS provided by my inReach Mini 2.

The Morphing of Projects (if they stay within reach)

Nothing stays the same.  This is the case for my Remote Station which has now morphed into a remote receive only HF & VHF iGate. After acquiring an SDRPlay RSP 1, I have now removed the IC-7300 and replaced it with the  RSP 1.  So now the remote consists of the NUC, the preexisting RTL-SDR and the SDRPlay RSP 1. This allows me to run APRS iGates on 30m and 40m using the RSP 1, and 2m terrestrial (145.175Mhz) and 2m satellite (145.825Mhz) using the RTL-SDR. 

Dealing with audio from the two devices created some challenges, however these were overcome as the DireWolf APRS software can accept UDP connections. I am using SDRuno for the HF side, running two virtual receivers, piping the audio via a virtual audio cable using the left and right channels for the 30m and 40m audio, respectively.  I am using the SDR++ software for the RTL-SDR,  as this allows for UDP audio streams. This software can also run multiple virtual receivers (to separate UDP ports).  Problem solved!

 

The DireWolf software is a very remarkable piece of software, which just seems to work without fail for years at a time.  I have used it mainly on a Raspberry Pi running Linux for probably over a decade. It seems just as stable on Windows 10.  Given that APRS on HF is using SSB DireWolf has the ability to setup multiple receiver pairs with filtering. This can be seen in the screenshot below.

It seems that the processes can only handle so much as I needed to reduce the number of receive pairs on the 40m side.  Nonetheless, this is still impressive.

The 2m side is working well, having received signals from both land and satellite sources. And the HF side works on the test-bench. One thing that is still required is the setting of audio and receiver gain levels, however I think I am getting close.

That's it for now.

Cheers

Links

• https://www.sdrplay.com/
• https://www.sdrpp.org/
• https://github.com/wb2osz/direwolf
• https://vb-audio.com/Cable/

 

The VOICE

Spoiler alert, this is not Amateur Radio related.

It is not every day that you get asked to be a guest contributor to the blog of an internationally respected theologian and author, but that is what happen to me a few weeks back.  Given the Voice Referendum in Australia is just weeks away, I have posted my thoughts on it here. Keep in mind that this was originally written with a specific readership in mind.  Nonetheless, I trust you find the article stimulating.
 

https://brianharrisauthor.com/the-voice/

QRP from Hooker Creek

A brief play with the radio from Community with just one15m SSB contact into VK4. I was not able to make it back into Darwin, so I may try a different antenna configuration next time.  

Iridium Sat tracking back from the Central Desert region

My vocation has many aspects to it, and one of them takes me to the Central Desert region about five times a year. My inReach Mini 2 beaconed every 20 minutes for the whole 880km tripback to Darwin. A long day! The inreach2aprs code running on a pi at home reliably posted the data from the Garmin feed to aprs.fi.

Click in image to enlarge.