2018-09-14

Raspberry Pi SBCs and FT8.

Several years ago I purchased the second version of the Raspberry Pi (RPi) single board computer, a low powered PC costing about $35.-.

I did a few experiments with that one, and it has been in the drawer since I moved back to DK.
A few days ago a friend came here, and we pulled out the old RPi, and played a little, just with the command line interface.

The later V2 and 3 versions have much more power, having quad core processors, and the 3B+ having a 64 bit processor and a higher clock frequency than any of its predecessors.

I have a few RPi2s lying around unopened, and now I ordered (locally) two RPi3B+s.
As far as I know, the RPI2s can run the WSJT-X program, so one of the first experiments will be getting that program up and running on a RPi2, possibly running it from another screen (PC) via VNC. We shall see if the model 2 can support that, but I suspect it can.

Some time ago I purchased some single frequency QRP transceivers (superhet) running on USB on the JT65 frequencies, on 15, 20 and 40m. Since those differ from the from the JT65 frequencies by 2kHz on those bands I think it is possible to modify them by pulling the LO crystal. We shall see how that goes.The idea is mounting those small TRXs together with a couple of RPis, so full monitoring of all those bands simultaneously is possible without occupying a full HF TRX for just that purpose.

If the crystal pulling gets too tricky, e.g. insufficient frequency stability, I have some Si5351 boards with up to 3 frequency outputs between 8KHz and 160MHz.

Maybe getting some simple receivers up and running on other bands, releasing other TRXs for more general use.

We shall see, but first RPi setup and testing with one of the small TRXs. In the beginning just monitoring.
For the old 5 bands (10-15-20-40-80) I have a low hanging dipole, so a simple frequency multiplexer should not be too difficult to construct. I already purchased some toroid cores which should be good for winding the filter coils

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