For those of you who use Raspberry Pi’s in your home environment, I’m curious as to what you use them for. What applications are you running on them? Do you have your Pi’s setup in a cluster?
For those of you who use Raspberry Pi’s in your home environment, I’m curious as to what you use them for. What applications are you running on them? Do you have your Pi’s setup in a cluster?
One 3B+ runs my network services - things I need to stay up if I restart the production server. Another one has a specialist role - IP gateway into the ham radio AllstarLink network - connected to a 70cm radio with a modified USB sound dongle.
Interesting! Which dongle did you mod to connect it to the radio?
A mate did that bit - CM108 I think.
What do you do with your ham radio? I mean, besides the enjoyment of getting licensed and learning how to use one, what do you do with it?
lol - great question. I was very excited at the start and did things like talk to a guy in Spain with 5W and a long bit of wire out in the bush, talked to people 400 km away by pointing a handheld antenna directly at a satellite as it passed overhead, received images directly from the amateur station on the ISS, met a heap of smart old guys who were doing interesting things with radio - designing antennas, setting up repeater networks etc. I went in a couple of competitions (in ham radio this is usually about how many contacts you can make over a time period). But ultimately, it turns out I like interesting technical problems, learning things, and buying stuff I don’t need off the internet - more than chatting to people I don’t know. So now I’m more into Linux and self-hosting which scratches a lot of those same itches.
I still have a short range radio in the car and a couple of handheld radios. With these I can key into that Raspberry Pi, have the audio travel over the internet and pop out anywhere in the world there’s another AllStar point and go over the air to radios there, but I’ve sold all my HF gear (that allows you to talk direct to anywhere without infrastructure).
It is an interesting, and quite diverse hobby, and there’s a lot of cheap Chinese radios, and a bottom tier license in most countries that’s easy to obtain (for example without learning Morse code). I’d recommend it to people interested in tech stuff. It’s a hobby that might not exist in 50 years - a lot of the radio spectrum allocated to ham radio in the old days was considered worthless, but now governments regard that as a valuable public asset that can be sold to telecommunication companies. Also there’s growing interference from digital gadgets and wireless devices that requires innovative solutions to overcome.
This is exactly why I’ve never taken a legitimate look into the hobby. I think I’ll keep admiring from afar until I find a good use for it
This concept makes sense but I always assumed ham radio was just about audio. That’s pretty cool
You probably know about this already but just in case, since you have an interest in radio and you have experience with antennas, you might have a cool project that could benefit from LoRa. There’s a few open source projects that incorporate the tech to make sensors for crops or messaging friends at festivals when cell towers are overloaded
I’ll check it out, I can probably buy some stuff and add it to my half finished projects pile :-D
Digital modes is one of the big growth areas in the hobby, along with the revolution of SDR