Sunday, March 24, 2013

Ham Radio Presentation, Raspberry Pi and WSPR

Hello out there.  It seems that I have slowed down sufficiently on the job search to play a little this afternoon with radio related stuff.  I had an opportunity last Monday to give a talk on Ham Radio to the Community Club in Ocean Shores Washington.  Pretty high level stuff, but had a number of hams in the room as well as about 20 mostly retired folks from the Ocean Shores Community.  It was a lot of fun and seemed to be well received by the audience.

I was also asked to visit the high school and meet with a group of students and talk about aviation and software.  I met with the students in the morning and gave my talk around noon to the community club.  All-in-all a very nice day for me.

I have been busy in the screen print shop, but this afternoon decided to play around a little with the Raspberry Pi machine and get it up and running on WSPR.  It really was a non-event as the work all seems to have been done for me by others.

I booted Debian Linux off an SD card and found that I could not connect to my wireless network as the Netgear Ethernet bridge I am using had not been reconfigured to use my updated network settings.  Once I got that sorted out, the Pi booted up and internet access was now working.

I updated the Debian release to the latest stable and installed Git as well as updated my gcc release.  I then cloned the WSPR code from github and built it on the Raspberry Pi machine.  It is now up and running and transmitting on 10.140.200.  I am able to hear it on my Grundig G6 portable receiver and it seems to decode fine using Joe Taylor's fine WSPR software.


So not terribly earth-shattering news from KO7M, but it is fun to get back to doing something with ham radio again.  My buddy Eldon seems to be having trouble with this as he is complaining of AC hum issues, so I think I will take my setup with me and go pay him a visit.