Category Archives: Homebrewing

Articles and other information related to Homebrewing, station building, kit building, and other custom Ham Radio projects.

CW and QRP, General, Homebrewing, Newsletter, Youth Activities

Student Kit Build at World Academy

Aya KC1JEB, Tom AB1NS, Mike K1WVO, and Fred AB1OC recently hosted a Morse Tutor kit build for students at World Academy. World Academy was a HAB-3 School and the student kit build is one of several follow-on activities that we’ve been doing there.

Aya KC1JEB and Tom AB1NS Mentoring Student Kit Build
Aya KC1JEB and Tom AB1NS Mentoring Students at World Academy

We built a total of 16 kits over two sessions with the students at the school and had a lot of fun in the process!

Mike K1WVO Mentoring Students at World Academy Kit Build
Mike K1WVO Mentoring Students at World Academy

Thanks to the excellent mentoring by Aya, Tom, Mike, and their teacher Gisele, all of the kits have been completed and are working!

Gisele Mentoring Students at World Academy Kit Build
Gisele Mentoring Students at World Academy

In addition to mentoring the students, Gisele also built a kit of her own and got it working!

Fred AB1OC Mentoring Students at World Academy Kit Build
Fred AB1OC Mentoring Students at World Academy

Our next session with the students will be to help them learn the Morse Code and begin practicing with their kits. We are also planning a Morse Code competition using the kits similar to the ones we have done in the past.

This project has been great fun for all involved and we have provided the kits free of charge thanks to the support from our generous donors as part of our ongoing fundraising campaign.

Fred, AB1OC

Antennas, Featured, General, Homebrewing, Newsletter, Space, Station Equipment

Raspberry Pi Satellite Tracker Interface How To

Source: Raspberry Pi Satellite Tracker Interface How To

We have received several requests to share the image and construction details for the Raspberry Pi Satellite Tracker Interface. We use the Sat Tracker interface with MacDoppler as part our Portable Satellite Stations. The Sat Tracker described in the article uses a Raspberry Pi Computer with a touch screen interface to interface MacDoppler to Green Heron Engineering RT-21 Rotator Controller(s). You can read about how to build your own Sat Tracker Interface via the link above.

Fred, AB1OC

Featured, General, Homebrewing, Newsletter, Station Equipment

Small Software Defined Radios – Part 2: Software

Small software defined radios have never been more affordable. Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) makes integrating one of these radios into your shack easy. This article is a follow-on to the SMALL SOFTWARE DEFINED RADIOS ~ PART 1 article on hardware published last month.

Basic Tuner and Pan Adaptor

Most of us will use one of these SDRs with our computer (instead of creating a Raspberry Pi or other small computer for a dedicated solution). This section will give you some ideas for your Macintosh, LINUX, or Windows PC. There are many offerings for each of these application areas. I can only cover a  few here.

CubicSDR is a cross-platform and open-source software-defined radio application. This runs on Macs, LINUX, and Windows (both 32 and 64-bit versions). A screenshot for this application appears at the top of this article. The software supports about a dozen types of radios including the little RTL-SDR radio mentioned in the other article.

With CubicSDR you can see a spectrum view of a frequency range and listen in on the signals tuning with frequency, bandwidth, and modulation type (FM, AM, etc.). This is a great program to try if you are new to SDRs.

GQRX

Gqrx SDR is an open software application for SDRs that is available for LINUX and MacOS X. If you want to run on a Raspberry Pi this is a good place to start.

Watching Airplanes

One of the really fun things that can be done with these inexpensive SDRs is tracking aircraft data. FlightAware has a package that can be installed on a simple Raspberry Pi computer that will not only monitor transmitted data on 1090 MHz, but will also upload that data to the FlightAware servers. This crowdsourced data is then used to drive their Apps. Piaware produces a display like the above (this is a screenshot from my setup). This is a standalone project that can be completed for less than $100.

There is a version of this called dump1090 that is open source and the original program that FlightAware enhanced. The RTL-SDR website has a write-up for this using Windows. Macintosh users can visit Black Cat Systems for Cocoa1090.

Just the tip of the iceberg

These programs are a great place to start, but there are many more offerings available. My advice is to get things working with something simple, then try one of the more elaborate programs.

I hope to see everybody at the December 11, 2018 Tech Night where we’ll apply all this to radios you bring. See you there!

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