TNC-Pi 2 + Raspberry Pi 2 + LCDProc

It has been a while my igate was down because of lightning strike and I have never got a chance to bring it alive again. It was few months back when I was bored and ordered a couple of TNC-Pi 2 from tnc-x.com. The kits arrived a couple of week later and had it assembled them in no time (the first kit was up and running on the same day I received the kits).

The first kit during assembly period (pardon my soldering skill):

The first kit done:

In operation, couldn't find a good case to put them in, so for now, this is the best I could do :)

Software wise, I'm running the latest Debian Jessie on Raspi 2, with the latest aprx, lcdproc and weewx. I've wrote a simple python code to read the aprs-rf.log file and pass it over to lcdproc to display it on a 20x4 LCD. This LCD is from my previous project that has been abandoned. Everything seems to work great so far.

My first python code (pardon the coding style), can be found here.
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B_kYO6BlPebVcldWTVdoaS13OVE

DV4 Mini + Raspberry Pi + Yaesu Fusion

Finally, thanks to Wireless Holdings LLC, my DV4 Mini dongle arrived yesterday by post. Mr postman was trying to deliver a day earlier but I wasn't in. So, yah, I got it a day late.

I ordered mine along with the little antenna which is good within the area of my house.

As per my previous post, I've prepared my Raspberry Pi 2 with the required software. With the help from Gary (KE2YK), I managed to have everything installed in no time. Since I bought my Raspberry Pi 2 with a TFT touch screen from aliexpress and there is no way to use the images prepared by others, I need to start from scratch. The hardest part is probably to get the correct mono version installed. BTW, I'm using Raspbian's Jessie distribution.

(Note: the aliexpress vendor sent me the wrong TFT screen and not as per my order, I couldn't really mount the raspi at the back of the 5" LCD display).

I've went on air this morning, first time QSO on dv4mini + yaesu fusion with James (WA2UMP) from NY. The quality is quite good. I've the raspi connected wirelessly to my Huwaei 3G dongle.

My next move probably will be having a DMR HT to test the DMR system. I wish that we could move forward with the digital voice thingy but with too many standards adopted by the manufacturers, this probably will not be an easy thing to do. A chicken and egg situation, nobody will adopt digital if the infrastructure is not available and nobody want to invest on the infrastructure if there is nobody going to use it.

Raspberry Pi + svxlink = Low power echolink node

What is the easiest way to get echolink node up and running on raspberry pi? Surely, get a premade image which has everything inside. I've created one image which can fit into 2GB SD card for this, just follow the following steps to get it up and running:

For hardware, you need to have the following:

• Raspberry Pi for sure, with a minimum 4GB SD card
• A USB echolink interface, can be commercially sourced or DIY. There are many DIY schematics out there that you could follow.  
• Here is the configuration on how to get the things working together, courtesy of svxlink.de website:

For software:

1. Download the following prepared image from google drive, it is based on raspbian-2015-02-16 image and has pre-installed svxlink-14.08. raspi-wheezy-svxlink.img.zip
2. Unzip the file and copy it to your SD card using the following instructions that can be found here.
3. Boot up the RasPi, if you do not have an HDMI monitor, you may want to access the RasPi from your terminal emulator (putty or the like), connect the RasPi to your router via CAT5 cable. 
4. To find the IP address of your RasPi, just go to your router status and look for the hostname raspberrypi. 
5. Use SSH connection, logon to the RasPi using the default username/password which should be: pi/raspberry
6. If you've bigger SD card then the 4GB image, you may want to use fullest capacity of the SD card, run the raspi-config command as sudo:
• $ sudo raspi-config
• Choose the first option to expand rootfs. Exit when done.
7. Edit the following config files for svxlink (command):
• $ sudo nano /etc/svxlink/svxlink.d/ModuleEchoLink.conf (edit the callsign - use sysop -L callsign, password, sysop, location and description)
• $ sudo nano /etc/svxlink/svxlink.conf (edit the callsign), if you're using echolink interface that uses VOX, just leave the others as is. Edit the APRS info too as required.
8. To tune the mic/speaker, use alsamixer:
• $ sudo alsamixer (use the up/arrow to tune the volume, right/left to move between speaker and mic sliders). 
• If the slider has MM underneath them, it means that they're muted, press 'M' to unmute.
9. You should be done with the configuration, you may run the svxlink now to test it out.
• $ sudo svxlink
10. Your node should appear in the echolink now. Try to use your PC or android client to connect to your node and see if it is working. You may need to configure your router to allow echolink to work, use port forwarding and forward the UDP port 5198-5199 and TCP port 5200 to your RasPi IP address.
11. If everything is working as expected and you want to run svxlink as a service, follow the steps here. The link to auto start the server has been vanished, so the best to do an autostart of the svxlink is by running the following command (if the /etc/init.d/svxlink is not present, copy the script over from the source under distribution/debian/etc/init.d/):
• $ update-rc.d svxlink defaults