Tag Archives: Software

Activities, Education and Training, Featured, General, Newsletter, On The Air

CQ All Hams – Join Us For Online Meetings and Tech Nights!

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CQ CQ All Hams! We will open our Membership Meetings and Tech Nights for April and May to include our Internet Subscribers and all Hams in North America.

CQ All Hams

We will hold our meetings online during April and May via Zoom! You are invited to join us online for these meetings.

We have some excellent speakers planned for our April and May meetings and they will share live presentations and conduct Q&A online. The Nashua Area Radio Society will also be conducting an after-meeting net on 40m after our April and May Meetings and Tech Nights.

Our Online Meetings in April and May

Nashua Area Radio Society April Regular Meeting

CQ All Hams - Jim Idelson, K1IR
Jim Idelson, K1IR

Nashua Area Radio Society Regular Meeting, April 7th, 7 pm Eastern – Our speaker will be Jim Idelson K1IR who will talk about Tower Safety. Join Our Zoom Meeting

Nashua Area Radio Society April Tech Night

AB1OC By The Tower
Fred Kemmerer, AB1OC

Nashua Area Radio Society Tech Night, April 14th, 7 pm Eastern – Fred Kemmerer, AB1OC will provide a how-to presentation on How to Get Started in 2m EME (Moon Bounce) Communications. Fred will also share some details on a high-performance EME station that he is building. Join Our Zoom Meeting

Nashua Area Radio Society May Regular Meeting

CQ All Hams - Bob Heil, K9EID
Bob Heil, K9EID

Nashua Area Radio Society Regular Meeting, May 5th, 7 pm Eastern – Our speaker will be Dr. Bob Heil, K9EID. More to come on Bob’s Presentation

Nashua Area Radio Society May Tech Night

Operating Digital 2
Anita Kemmerer, AB1QB Using N1MM+ at Field Day

Nashua Area Radio Society Tech Night, May 12th, 7 pm Eastern – Anita Kemmerer, AB1QB and Fred Kemmerer, AB1OC will provide a how-to presentation on Getting Started with the N1MM+ Contest Logger.

All you need to join one of our meetings is to click on the Join Our Zoom Meeting link above for the meeting that you want to Join.

We suggest that you join our meetings online at least 15 minutes before the scheduled start times.

Join Us for Our After Meeting Nets on 40m


Abby Finchum, AB1BY – A NARS Net Control Operator Running a Special Event

CQ All Hams! The Nashua Area Radio Society will hold our new after meeting nets on or around 7.260 MHz LSB. We will post an update on the final frequency here just before our nets begin. We hope that these nets will give our members and guests a chance to communicate and socialize with each other. Folks who join us for the preceding online meetings will also be able to monitor the after meeting nets via the online share.

We will also be live streaming video and audio from our nets to the Nashua Area Radio Society Facebook page.

Featured, General, Newsletter, Space, Station Equipment

Adding L-Band (24 cm) to Our Satellite SDR System

We’ve recently received our L24TX Transmit Converter from Down East Microwave. The unit is compact, simple, and produces up to 25W output in the satellite section of the 23 cm band (1260 MHz – 1270 MHz, actually 24 cm). The L24TX is a transmit-only device that is intended to enable L-band uplinks for Satellite use. This article is about our most recent project which involved integrating the L24TX into our Flex Satellite SDR System to enable L-Band Satellite operation  …

Source: Satellite Station 4.0 Part 10 – Adding 23 cm To Our Satellite SDR

We are making progress on our project to enable remote Satellite operation via the Internet. The latest step is the addition of L-band (24 cm) uplink support to our Flex Satellite SDR System.

L-Band Satellite SDR
L-Band 24 cm Transmit Converter

We’ve also made some good progress on custom software to link MacDoppler and our Flex Radio Satellite System via the Internet.

The article in the link above shares information about how to go about adding Transverters and Band Transmit Converters to a Flex SDR. the step needed to configure the Flex SmartSDR software, as well as links, cover other aspects for our Satellite System 4.0 Project are included.

You can read the latest updates about this project via the link above.

Fred, AB1OC

Education and Training, Featured, General, Newsletter, Youth Activities

A Raspberry Pi Video Player for Expo Displays

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We are continuing to provide our Ham Radio Youth Expo displays at local Hamfests. We are always looking to simplify to delivery of our Ham Expos displays.

Raspberry Pi Video Player
Youth Expo Kits and Computers Display

Dave, K1DLM recently suggested a great simplification idea. His idea is to replace the multitude of Laptop Computers that we’ve been using to display videos at our Expos with Raspberry Pi Computers. I wanted to share how we went about building our Raspberry Pi Video Players so that others might have the information needed to duplicate what we did for other applications.

Raspberry Pi Video Players

Raspberry Pi Video Player
Completed Raspberry Pi Video Players

We’ve been using a total of 8 laptop computers as part of our Ham Expo displays and most of these only play video content. Many of these computers can be replaced with a simple and compact Raspberry Pi Computer.

Raspberry Pi Player Close-up

The image above shows a closeup view of one of the completed Raspberry Pi Video Players. All that is required to use our new players is to connect the player to an HDMI display. Power is provided via a small USB power supply.

Raspberry Pi Video Player Display

The players produce a very nice display on an HDMI monitor. We also connect the players to a small USB powered speaker to provide audio.

Player Hardware and Packaging

Our video players are relatively inexpensive and easy to build. Here’s a bill of materials:

The parts cost a total of about $60 new on Amazon. Fortunately, we had most of the parts required on hand except for the cases which significantly reduced the overall cost of the project.

Raspberry Pi 3 B+

The current build of the Raspian OS includes a copy of the VLC Media Player which we use to play our videos. Playing high-resolution videos does stress the capabilities for the Model 3B+ that we are using and a few of our videos needed to be downscaled to 720p resolution to play smoothly. The downscaling was done using QuickTime Player on a Mac. Our monitors are 27 in or smaller and there was no noticeable loss of video quality at 720p resolution.

Case, Power Supply, Fan, and Heatsinks

The processing load associated with continuously playing videos causes the Raspberry Pi to generate a good bit of heat. To deal with this and also to provide a nice case for our players, we chose an enclosure package which includes a fan and heatsinks. The package also includes the required USB power supply with an on-off switch.

Player Software

RPi Desktop via VNC

We enabled the Raspberry Pi VNC Server on our Video Players to provide keyboard and mouse access via Windows and Mac computers. This allows a single PC to configure and start the VLC players on all 7 of our Video Players used in our Ham Expo Display. We use the RealVNC connect client on the controlling PC to access our Raspberry Pi  Video Players.

Raspberry Pi File Sharing on a Windows PC via Samba

We also installed the Samba file sharing package on our Video Players. Samba allows a Windows or Mac PC to access the drive on the Players to load our videos.

The Model 3B+ provides both wired and WiFi access and we use the wired connection for loading our videos because it is much faster than WiFi. The Raspberry Pi’s WiFi connection is great for VNC access to start out players at our Expos.

Planned Use Of Our Players

The Raspberry Pi video players create an inexpensive and easy to use System for playing videos as part of our Ham Expo Displays. We will be using them for the first time at our Ham Expo Display at HamXpostion at Boxboro in September.

The resulting Raspberry Pi are very capable systems and I expect that we will find other applications for them as we go forward.

Fred, AB1OC

Radio Amateurs Developing Skills Worldwide