MMDVM ZUM Board - Arrived!

It actually arrived a couple of week ago and I haven't got time to play around with it since I don't have any repeater right now to work on. The package reached me via priority mail from Germany and it comes with a user manual, a USB cable, and MMDVM ZUM board attached to an Arduino DUE board.

My intention is to have this MMDVM ZUM board connected to the Yaesu DR-1X spare repeater for experimenting and if this works well, we could have it installed at one of the repeater site in Klang Valley. This will incite more digital users to be on the air and for those who're starting up, they might want to go further a bit then the normal TYT/Boefeng cheapo HTs and invest on DMR or Yaesu Fusion sets instead.

Will see how it goes! BTW, I'm really enjoying the DMR now. I'm monitoring Brandmiester TG91 most of the time and I've managed to have few QSOs there and the latest was with VK4GO, Art. Art was here in Malaysia many years back and he seems to be very well into this new digital radio stuff.

TYT MD-380 + DV4 Mini = DMR hotspot at home

So I saw the TYT MD-380 on sale in lazada for RM450 (- 10% discount from Maybank) = RM405 in total. Didn't think long before I click the buy it now button. I've bought few things from lazada which were delivered from overseas and never got taxed or hold by customs. So, why not give it a go. The local TYT distributor charges double the price for the same thing!

Anyway, its a bit hard for me to understand all the terminologies used in the DMR. Watch the youtube video on how to set up the MD-380 and connect it through the DV4 Mini dongle and managed to have it working last night. With all the DMR jargons that I need to understand, I successfully connected to a talk group 3100 (US Wide), going through Brandmeister, TG4999 and went to BM's website to connect me to TG3100. I've no idea if this is the best way to do it.

While monitoring the QSOs this morning, suddenly I heard my callsign called up on the radio. It was Charles, WB2LMA calling me. Sorry, I've no idea how to find who is active on the TG, but yah, had my first QSO on DMR through the DV4M hotspot on TG3100. Thanks Charles for calling me on the TG.

Revert Smartforms / Sapscript editor from MS-Word

I have no idea if this is ECC 6 only feature but I've just upgraded my Office to 2016 and when I get into the smartforms, I couldn't display the text normally. It has an informational text saying "Use the full screen text editor". To change this back to the normal text editor, just run RSCPSETEDITOR ABAP and untick the SAPScript & Smartforms from the selection and activate. This will revert back your default editor.

JT65-HF HB9HQX + Microkeyer II + TS-590SG

I had a hard time to get this things configured, the most problematic was to get the PTT port recognised. It was in fact a small thing, in the JT65-HF HB9HQX, there is a verify COM Port. I unticked this and wallah, my PTT is working.

For my reference and probably others too in the future, here are the configurations that I have to make this thing working:

Microkeyer II configuration:

JT65-HF HB9HQX configuration:

And on my TS-590SG:

Menu 67 - 38400

Menu 69 - ACC2

Menu 70 - FRONT

Menu 73 - 4 

Menu 74 - 4

Displaying aprx-rf log onto 4x20 LCD display

Received a request on a short how-to to get the aprs packet shown in the 20x4 LCD display. The way I have for my setup are the following:

1. Raspberry Pi 3 (Raspberry Pi 2 will work, but below that, you need to have different kind of connection for the GPIO).
2. 20x4 LCD HD44780 or compatible screen.
3. Install lcdproc package ($ sudo apt-get install lcdproc)
4. A modified HD44780 driver,

I'm using the following diagram for my LCD connection to the GPIO lines. Ignore the temp sensor connection.

*Connection diagram taken from rototron.info website.

The how-to to get the LCD working can be found on the http://www.rototron.info/lcdproc-tutorial-for-raspberry-pi/ too.

A modified HD44780 driver can be found down below along with my python code.

Or download or compile your own following the thread in the following forum link:

https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=44&t=100066

This modified driver need to be moved into /usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/lcdproc/ directory and replacing the driver that comes with the lcdproc package.

Add the correct configuration (if missing) from your /etc/LCDd.conf. I've the following:

[server]

DriverPath=/usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/lcdproc/

NextScreenKey=Right

PrevScreenKey=Left

ReportToSyslog=yes

ToggleRotateKey=Enter

Driver=hd44780
ServerScreen=no

[hd44780]

ConnectionType=raspberrypi

Size=20x4

Done with the above, you can test your LCD setup if it is working correctly, run the LCD and lcdproc daemon:

$ sudo /etc/init.d/LCDd start
$ sudo /etc/init.d/lcdproc start

The above should bring up your LCD alive and show the cpu information etc if everything set correctly. You can enable or disable what to be displayed in configuration file /etc/lcdproc.conf. For me, I've disabled most of them except the cpu information.

Now, you've got the LCD working. Great, now the fun part to code a simple python script so that it will read the aprx log file and display the last line into the LCD screen. You need at least a Python 2.7 which I believe should be installed as default. You also need few more packages, namely the aprslib (to parse APRS packets), lcdproc (for displaying to LCD) and LatLon (for calculating distance).

To install the lastest aprslib python package, please refer to the following website:

https://pypi.python.org/pypi/aprslib

To install the latest lcdproc package, you can refer to the official website:

https://github.com/jinglemansweep/lcdproc

And lastly the LatLon package can be found here:

https://pypi.python.org/pypi/LatLon/1.0.2

My lovely looking python coding, modified driver and startup script to get everything to appear on LCD screen can be found here:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B_kYO6BlPebVdjR4QUJuVkM2dG8

To run the above python code, just run it against the aprx-rf.log, example:

$python aprx_lcd.py /var/log/aprx-rf.log

I have it running as a daemon by creating a startup script in /etc/init.d/. Sample can be found in the above file in my google drive.

Have fun!

9M2MI IOTA/ILLW 2016 DXpedition

A bit late in posting this entry. I was one of the crew members that went for the IOTA/ILLW 2016 DXpedition at Pulau Undan.

Here is the video made by my friend, 9W2SBD (also one of the crew). Enjoy!

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