A more mature view of the Raspberry Pi EchoIRLP node.  I’m still looking for a more ideal solution, but in the mean time, this gets it off my bench and into the rack with the repeater gear.

I decided that this past weekend I was going to get the PiRLP project going.  The picture above is the benched, but working result.  The black box on the left is the Raspberry Pi.  The circuit board in the middle is the IRLP interface board.  And the various jumper cables are connections going to my Arcom RC210 repeater controller.  I’ve since cleaned up the install and made some of the connections permanent as I’m mounting it to a rack shelf.

The initial install of IRLP and EchoIRLP went fairly well.  However I discovered that at some point in the EchoIRLP install, my tbd.conf file was overwritten as a zero-byte file, which prevented the Echolink portion from working.  Upon each launch the software would complain about missing directives from the file.  It took four starts via /home/irlp/custom/rc.irlp in order to get a working file.

I also discovered a number of issues with files being in the wrong location or named with the wrong case.  Each situation was fixed with a symlink, but still a bit of a pain to have to track down.

As of now, both NF9K repeaters (70cm and 33cm) are linked to the K3HTK 33cm repeater in Noblesville, IN.  I’m still observing behavior and tracking down causes of oddities, but it is running.  I’m quite happy to be on the brink of putting the old XP laptop and the AMI2 interface to pasture.

Well, it was January and it was winter in Indiana.  I think we can all agree on that.

The in-climate weather hasn’t done much for my HF antenna situation.  I have this shiny new launcher to play with and short of a couple of test fires, no real progress has been made in getting my end-fed matchbox back up in the air.  At the end of the day, I really have no excuse for not getting on the air as I have two attic-mounted dipoles, but I prefer my external one by far.  Now that football season is over, I’ll have more time to play on the weekends.

January found me still playing with various repeater projects.  I have acquired a second TKR-820 that I’m in the process of tuning up to drive a 100W amp.  The machine is online now, but I neglected to tune the receive sensitivity while I had to hooked up to my service monitor and then promptly went out of town for the weekend.  So I’ll be rectifying that situation this evening when I get home.  I’m also roughing out plans to build a low-profile repeater for the Boy Scouts out of surplus gear I have laying around.

I also acquired  a Vertex VXR-7000, but will be looking to off-load that particular machine.  It throws a carrier on whatever the programmed output frequency is.  I’ve confirmed this behavior with several repeater owners.  The common theory is that the exciter is continually operating in a low power mode as many repeater do and that radiation is coupling with the internal wiring to get outside of the shielding.  We’ve configure with at least one machine via an RF mV meter that the carrier is not coming from the TX line.  The mysterious part of it is some units exhibit this behavior and some do not.  But since this machine lives at my house it is significantly annoying enough to make it unusable for my needs.  The 33cm Quantar is up and running and waiting on a break in the weather for an antenna installation.

I had my first official outing with the WD9BSA group in January.  Randy Biggs (K7BSA) and I manned the ham radio booth during the University of Scouting.  Our purpose was to demonstrate how Amateur Radio could benefit a a troop and to further awareness of the WD9BSA station.  We had some hardware on display including a few HT’s and a Yaesu FT-847 as well as a few QSL cards.  I did not have the honor of being a scout, so this was a bit new to me, but I spent a Saturday representing a hobby that I love and had a great time doing it.

In addition to my general efforts with WD9BSA, I also joined their VE team.  Our testing session on 2/8/14 will be my first outing with them and I’m looking forward to it.  Given that there are two other VE sessions in the city on the 8th and, as I write this, we have ten registered participants it looks be a good time.

I was able to spark interest in an 8th grader over the weekend in regards to computers, amateur radio and electronics.  I’ve planted a few seeds and embarked into a gentleman’s agreement.  More on that next month.

I was in the ham radio, “Shack,” on the computer, when I caught mention of a recent silent key with the suffix of CTQ. I only knew of one guy with that suffix, so a visit to QRZ and a google search confirmed that Stan Kidwell of Brownsburg passed away on the 26th. I used to talk to him every morning on the way to work on DSTAR and we tried, albeit unsuccessfully, to meet at last year’s Indianapolis Ham Fest. Thoughts and prayers are with his family.

I think I’m finally to the point of being able to say I’ve completed my first conversion of a 900MHz Maxtrac.  The radio originally started out as a trunking multi-channel (talkgroup) radio.  I replaced the trunking PROM with a conventional PROM and went through the process of blanking the radio and re-aligning it.  Details on the process are available here.

The only part of the alignment I was unable to complete was the TX deviation as I had no way to inject audio with the programming cable (non-RIB) that I’m using.  I’ve got a schematic and I think I can build a jig to allow me to inject the audio, so I’ll revisit that soon.  I also have a few more of these radios to convert.  I did not replace the filters as part of this operation.  I do have some 915MHz ceramic filters that I was able to track down in the UK, but I’m trying to use those sparingly.

After I’d completed the re-alignment process, I ran the radio on my bench for a day or so and even made a couple of QSOs.  Then I took it out to install it in a buddy’s car, and I had no receive.  Brought it back to the bench and the problem was still here.  On the suggestion of a fellow Ham, I cracked it open and checked the steering voltages for RX/TX.  Sure enough, they were low.  So I went though the process to bring up the voltages outlined here.

I buttoned the radio back up, including putting the cover back on the VCO, and the radio would neither transmit or receive.  At this point, I opened it back up again and checked the steering voltage.  It was 8.88VDC on either RX or TX, which is WAY to high. So I cracked up on the VCO again, and removed some of my silver circuit ink.  I can only surmise that when I was heating the VCO case to replace the cover, some of the silver “ink” flowed a little bit and raised the voltages.  I found that the steering line voltage is extremely sensitive to even the most minute amount of “ink.”  After playing around with it a while, I was able to get the voltages in line for both RX and TX.  So I reassembled the radio AGAIN, and so far so good.

The club for which I serve as President has adopted a new name and a new call sign.  Originally the club was named after a common employer, but was forced to change the name due to conflicts with the marketing department.  Then after I left the employer back in April of 2013, it was decided that the club should not be associated with the former employer or any other employer.

So with that, The Naptown Amateur Group (Callsign N9AG) was born.  Check out our website here: www.n9ag.org.

Since returning from vacation, I’ve been busy trying to get the shack back in order and get my work area functional again.  I picked up (and built) a new Kobalt Bench, and now have it in the shack.  I’m still trying to figure out where or how I’m going to place my test equipment so that I can use/access all of it.  Once I get things put together, I’ll post some pictures.

The mobile installation worked great during our trip to Gatlinburg.  I mostly worked PSK31 and JT65 while mobile.  I’ll tell you that keeping a lengthy QSO going while traveling down the road can be tricky, but a lot of fun.  I logged contacts throughout central Europe and a few state-side contacts as well.

Due to the location of our suite, my Antenna situation was extremely limited and exhibited poor performance.  So the only real operating I was able to do was during the trip down and up.

All in all, I’ll call my first venture into mobile HF a success and a lot of fun.  I’m going to work on figuring out a more permanent antenna mount and getting rid of the mag-mount I’m using now.  I also need to install a couple more NMO mounts to support he APRS radio, etc.