The Idea

Most ham stations are a pile of separate boxes. A radio for this, a hotspot for that, a laptop running one more thing. Each does its job well, and none of them talk to each other.

The idea behind this build was to put the connective tissue in one place. One small computer, always on, that lets the different ways a station talks cross over: analog voice to digital voice, one mesh network to another, radio to email, the field back to home. Not a new radio. The wiring between the radios already on the bench.

This series is the story of building that, roughly in the order it happened, including the nights things did not work. If you want the whole map at once, the architecture is written up on its own: One Pi, Every Mode. If you would rather take it a chapter at a time, stay here.

Why one box

Two reasons, and they shaped everything after.

The first is simple: bridges only work when the things they bridge are in the same place at the same time. Put the analog node, the digital stack, the mesh radios, and the mail client on one always-on machine, and the cross-connections become possible at all. Spread them across four devices and they stay four islands.

The second is resilience, which matters more the farther you get from the house. The internet paths are good when they are there. The radio paths keep working when they are not. A report can go out over radio email with no internet. A command can come back over mesh with no cell signal. The goal was a station with no single thing that, when it fails, takes everything else down with it.

What is ahead

The build went in roughly this order, and so does the series:

• Voice first. Bridging the analog node to System Fusion and DMR, and the vocoder problem that nearly stopped it.
• Programming the radios. One handheld had no usable software, so it got reverse-engineered.
• The console. A web dashboard to see and drive the whole station.
• Going to mesh. Two LoRa networks, a command gateway, and an assistant you can reach from a handheld.
• Into the field. Taking it out of range and finding out what actually works.

Each one earned at least one hard lesson. The next chapter starts with voice.

The Field Station: Series index