With the solar minimum ahead things get boring more and more on 11 meter. So, what we gonna do with the time? Start a new project!
Did you miss an activation lately due to short openings caused by poor radio conditions? Well that’s history now.
A little budget and some reading to dig into Debian is enough to build your TRX remote control and to have QSOs with your home rig from wherever you are.
Prerequisites:
Hardware:
- Raspberry Pi (I bought the latest version, which is a 3 B+)
- A fast microSD card
- A power supply
- A case for the RasPi
The above is available as starter kit at Amazon as well.
- A cable to connect the RasPi with the radio for CAT control (the type depends on your radio, for my FT-891 I needed a USB 2.0 A-B cable)
- In case your TRX has no internal sound card:
- An USB sound card with speaker/out and mic/in
- A cable to connect the sound card to the data socket of your TRX
For the initial setup of the RasPi you’ll need a display (the RasPi has a HDMI socket), a keyboard (either USB or Bluetooth with USB Bluetooth dongle) and an USB mouse, if your keyboard doesn’t have a touchpad.
If your budget allows, you might buy the original 7 inch touch display for the RasPi and the corresponding case. However for the initial setup you’ll need a keyboard and touchpad or mouse anyways.
The advantage of this small computer is, that it needs almost no power. You can have it on 24/7 365 days a year. I read in another blog, power costs would total at about 10 EUR/ year. This is something to keep in mind, as any other standard desktop requires much more power.
Connectivity:
- You’ll need a fairly fast DSL connection and either good WLAN reception or a LAN connection in your shack. The RasPi has a LAN socket and build in WLAN.
- Your DSL connection shall contain at lease one VoIP landline telephone number. My DSL package contains 3, of which I only needed 2 until now, one for the classic telephone the other for my virtual fax.
- To make long lasting calls from abroad (most commonly from your mobile), your mobile phone contract shall include free calls to domestic phone numbers.
- Depending on the way You want to control the RasPi (e.g. through a VNC viewer or through a web interface) you shall have at least a 3G, better 4G (LTE) connection with your mobile phone.
Software:
- Raspbian OS (based on Debian)
- FLRig (and dependencies, namely FLTK-Dev)
- LinPhone (or a similar VoIP soft phone)
In my next posts I’ll provide links to tutorials on or explain how to setup Raspbian, install LinPhone, build FLRig from source, etc..