W8EMV - Whiskey Eight Echo Mike Victor

RCA Radiotron tube art

I once had one of these tubes in this box, it got lost - I regret that.

See VinylSavor for a longer story about this box art. Image used with permission.

http://vinylsavor.blogspot.com/2011/08/tube-box-art-part-1-rca.html

Ball Smacker Radio eSQL "talk" from 2025-03-21

(embed a Flickr post because uploads to Typepad are failing)

First explorations of Meshtastic and some plans for bicycle portable operations

The ARROW presentation by Blake KE8SQU on Meshtastic prompted me to start exploring this LoRa-based radio protocol which operates in the 915 MHz ISM (unlicensed) band.

https://meshtastic.org

I ordered a Meshtastic radio from Rokland, their "WisMesh Pocket v2". This radio is designed as a ready-to-go portable device with a little screen, case that holds a battery, a little antenna, and generally speaking enough working parts that I should be able to turn it on and go try it out. I'll write more about it and link to it appropriately based on how well I am able to make it work.

When it arrives my initial plan is to work this into my Ann Arbor "Bike Every Park" parks challenge - throw the node in a backpack, stop at a city park, see if there's coverage there, try to make a QSO, make a suitable note, move on.

First park to try is Burns Park near my house which I know is near the node that W9TNC runs - it should be easy. From there I will start mapping out the radio terrain. My expectations are that the tops of parking structures will be good locations for 915 MHz operations, as they seem to be also for VHF/UHF. But what I don't know quite yet is what the density of stations is - the "Meshmap" suggests "not very dense" so far.

https://meshmap.net

The other thing I want to do is get a node running at home running FrozenBBS, a message board for Meshtastic.

https://github.com/kstrauser/frozenbbs

This is going to take a little more work on the hardware side; as the author writes

I have a RAK4631 radio with a RAK13800 Ethernet module, with the BBS code running on a Raspberry Pi 4 next to it. I went through a lot of false starts making this work.

The rationale for making my first node a portable one (rather than a fixed station at home) is that with the bicycle operations I can do a nice survey of the vicinity and see what is out there that could work and get a better intuitive sense for what 915 MHz propagation is like with altitude and trees figuring in. At worst, if reception is bad but I know who has a node running I can just ride close enough to be within line of sight!

Ethernet interference on 125 MHz and on 2 meters?

I'm seeing a bunch of birdies on my 2 meter radio receivers. On the Airspy HF+ SDR it looks like a bunch of bright lines. On the roll-up J-pole antenna the overall noise floor is high (S7 or even S9) which makes working simplex stations very hard, as I discovered at the last simulated repeater failure test for our weekly ARPSC net.

I was able to make a contact with Steve N8AR via the South Lyon N8SL repeater from Ann Arbor. He could hear me just fine with my Kenwood sending, but I didn't hear him on that rig. So I tuned up the Airspy receiver to hear him.

I think I figured out some of it - I have a lot of ethernet ports on a switch in the attic, and I'm seeing a very strong signal on 125 MHz which am pretty sure is gigabit ethernet modulation leaking out of the unshielded (cheap) ethernet cables.

There is also noise at home on the AM band very distinctly in front of our house under the overhead lines. Ah, city life. I will bring my radios to the park in the summertime and not have these problems.

Looks like Andy G7UHN has some suggestions with ferrite cores

http://alloutput.com/amateur-radio/ethernet-rfi-noise-reduction/

based on this presentation from Joel W5ZN

https://w5zn.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Noise-The-Grim-Reaper-of-Weak-Signal-Reception.pdf

Wes N8QM had a tip for inexpensive EMF sniffers, which can be used to measure field strength. I see some of them are specially designed for ghost hunting too (!)

Ball Smacker Radio "close" eQSL from 2025-03-01 0200 UTC on 6960 AM

Received S5-S7 and enjoyable quality with some fading on the "misdr2" KiwiSDR in Northfield Township, Michigan (just north of Ann Arbor) which has a 100 foot loop antenna. My much smaller indoor loop antenna has a lot more noise on the 43 meter band and though I could see the signal on the waterfall the audio quality was not enough to enjoy. I was listening on 6960 kHz AM in the 43 meter band.

Theme tonight was "close", and the eQSL matches that referencing asteroid 2024 YR4 https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/asteroids/2024-yr4/

Ball Smacker Radio transmits from somewhere in the northeastern US. https://ballsmacker.net

Brandmeister changes may require renumbering your DMR ID and reprogramming your DMR radio

This change tripped up a couple of hams in the ARROW club. From Brandmeister's weblog:

https://news.brandmeister.network/important-message-for-brandmeister-usa-hams-using-a-radio-id-starting-with-1/

Important message for Brandmeister USA hams using a Radio ID starting with 1

IDs are issued by Radioid.net, if you have an ID starting with 1, you need to log into your RadioID account and open a ticket requesting that your ID number be replaced with one starting with 3.

Getting a reassigned 3-series DMR ID from https://radioid.net is not hard, but you do need to reprogram your radio. Until you renumber you'll be able to listen to the Brandmeister network, but not transmit. That particular failure might be surprising! Some radios are easier to reprogram than others which can add to the hassle.

The back story on this is that the "1" number space is reserved for "test networks", whereas "3" signifies North America and the Caribbean. And while DMR in 2018 was experimental enough that you could probably make a case for having some stations in the experimental number space, by now the world wants you to sort out where you are and number yourself accordingly.

"ITU E.212 : The international identification plan for public networks and subscriptions" is the underlying standard. DMR IDs are assigned along those principles so that there's a global numbering plan that has at least the top level number space already divvied up along international lines.

DMR hotspot running "pi-star" with read-only filesystem at boot gets in the way of Tailscale

The hardware is a Pi Zero (the very slow original one) with an MMDVM hat, all tucked away nicely in a case with a little display. I bought it from Radioddity in 2020. It works right now with the Pi-Star software, running version 4.1.8 with a 20240307 date. The operating system is old (based on Debian 10 "Buster").

It stays up for a long time and works without incident for 100+ days at a time. When I reboot it, I have a few issues.

I'm running Tailscale on the device for remote access. Tailscale wants to have a read/write filesystem to keep logs and manage keys. Pi-Star wants the whole SD card to be read only to avoid disk wear. Those two desires are in conflict.

The thing I do right now after a reboot is to log in on the local interface (without Tailscale) and run the rpi-rw command which makes the file systems writable. Then I can manually bring Tailscale up. This takes a minute every three months, which is tolerable but not ideal. It would be much less ideal if I didn't have local LAN access to the device, e.g. if it were in some far-away place in a hut on the side of the road. But it's not, the hotspot is in the attic.

I could spend some time manually adjusting the Pi-Star configuration, following these instructions from VK3ERW: Pi-Star How To: make file system Read/Write (RW). "Note: Some of the files modified in this procedure may be overwritten during future Pi-Star upgrades."

I could add a systemd unit that would run the rpi-rw as a "oneshot" command as a prerequisite to starting the Tailscale service, or as a "drop-in" modifier to Tailscale. If I'm doing a "drop-in", the command systemctl edit tailscaled is the mechanism for doing that edit. I see informative discussion at https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues/5399 . My tolerance for doing systemd hacking comes and goes, and this is likely to take more than a minute every three months to do, but it would be a suitable place to learn.

I could switch from Pi-Star to WPSD, which has a nicer dashboard but doesn't run on my Pi Zero hardware. (I'd need a faster Zero like the 2W.) WPSD has stopped running in read-only mode since an update in 2023. https://w0chp.radio/wpsd/

The solution for now is log in, manually reconfigure, and write this blog post describing my other options. Future me will need to decide whether to spend money on this, or time hacking systemd, or just ignore the problem and push it down the road 100 days.

First QSO on 220 MHz!

The ARROW club https://w8rp.org has a new 220 MHz repeater online in Ann Arbor, linked to the club's 2 meter repeater. After some extensive testing and configuration by Jay WB8TKL, it debuted at the ARROW AMPteam outing on Monday, December 16, 2024. Nine hardy souls checked in from the club's field outing to Hunt Park on the 220 side of the linked repeater system.

At that time I had a 220 MHz radio (my tri-band BTECH UV-5X3) tuned through a VFO to the 224.38 MHz output of the repeater, and I was able to listen to the net just fine. But that radio didn't have the right 220 antenna on it and it's a bit of a fuss to program this Baofeng style radio from the front panel, so at that point I just was listening.

It turns out that a little bit of shopping in the attic found the box where the 220 antenna lives, and a little bit of research got the radio programmed correctly, and another box yielded a CHIRP cable to dial in the frequencies into a saved channel correctly.

Better yet, I made my first crossband QSO on 220 this afternoon! I talked to Kevin KF8CTY, a new ham who was testing out a new 2 meter rig in his truck.

220 gear is not anywhere near as common as 2m or 70cm equipment, but the low-end gear is not expensive. Radioddity sells a UV-5RX3 tri-band transceiver (less than $30 in 2024) with two antennas, one for 2m/70cm and one for 220. The BTECH UV-5X3 is a very similar radio but features USB-C charging (less than $70).

For a base station, some suggestions from club members: Alinco DR-CS25t (220 MHz monoband, 50 watts, about $250); Radioddity QB25 (2m/70cm/220 Mhz, 25 watts, about $120).

Comet makes an antenna, the Comet CX-333, about 10 feet tall (about $185). For your HT, the tri-band Nagoya NA-320A (about $20) should cover your needs.

I suppose the next challenge here is to get some simplex frequencies tested out! (You'll want to schedule those connections.) 223.50 MHz is the national simplex calling frequency on 1.25 meters.

W8RP Ann Arbor is two linked systems, one on 146.96- (2 meters) and one on 224.38- (1.25 meters). The repeater is located at Wolverine Tower near I-94 and State Street and has good coverage throughout Wasthenaw County. I don't honestly know what the propagation footprint is for the 220 side, that will have to yield to further experimentation.

(updated 2024-12-27 with more equipment options).

2025 ARROW PIO

Happy to report that I will be on the ARROW W8RP board for 2025 as Public Information Officer - board elections were tonight. Thanks to Ralph AA8RK who did the job in 2024.

ARROW is a big club (100+ dues-paying members) and there's quite a diverse set of interests represented throughout the hobby, I hope to help out.

https://w8rp.org

Listening to FT8 with OpenWebRX+

My Thanksgiving 2024 radio project has been to set up an FT8 listening operation.

I have OpenWebRX+ running an automated decode of FT8 signals on 40 meters, feeding pskreporter. The hardware is a Youloop antenna, an Airspy HF+ Discovery SDR, and a Pi 400 server.

So far in less than a week I've heard transmissions from 60 countries.

A next challenge is to sort out a receive schedule. 40 meters is great at night but not much use during the day. The OpenWebRX+ scheduler also lets me set a "greyline" (sunrise/sunset) operation. So there's more tweaking to be done, to predict what part of the bands I should be listening to when.

For analysis of the logs, I am leaning on pskreporter's export of data in ADIF format, and then turning to the "ADIF Multitool" command line tool at https://github.com/flwyd/adif-multitool to dump that data back on in CSV files so that I can use csvkit https://github.com/wireservice/csvkit to explore.

One thing missing from all of this is an organized way to turn grid squares into geo data like states or counties. I suspect that some callbook management software has this task tackled already, but I'm not unearthing any command line tools for it.

Two week archives of community radio station shows

I am certain that I am missing dozens of these, but here's a sample of radio stations (primarily community and freeform stations) that are organized primarily around shows and that have an archive of those shows (typically two weeks) online for on-demand listening.

If you can't tune into your favorite show, either because it's out of market or at the wrong time, this is a place to start looking around.

My favorites

• WCBN Ann Arbor: https://floyd.wcbn.org/listen/indexbyn.html
• WWOZ New Orleans: https://www.wwoz.org/about-wwozs-two-week-demand-archive

Others that I have found

• WDIY Lehigh Valley PA: https://www.wdiy.org/two-week-music-show-archive
• WDCB Chicago (Jazz): https://wdcb.org/archive
• WGDR Central Vermont: http://archive.wgdr.org
• WUMB Boston (weekend programming): http://50.241.124.209:8080/cgi-bin/archive/archive1.pl
• KHEN Salida, Colorado: https://archive.khen.org
• KMUN Astoria, Oregon: https://kmun.org/archives/
• KSQD Santa Cruz California: https://ksqd.org/two-week-archive/
• KUPR Placitas New Mexico: https://www.kupr.org/archives.html

Thanks to WCBN's archive of Brian Tomsic's "Train to Skaville" show for the accompanying music for this search.