Blog
Builds, tutorials, theory, and field notes from the network.
Click to Listen
Adding click-a-signal-to-listen to the occupancy heatmap, with one dongle and a privilege boundary worth the care.
PLL Not Locked
A dead SDR, a black waterfall, and the disciplined way to find out it was the dongle and not everything else.
SDR as the Station's Ears
What is next for the station: software-defined radio as a dedicated listening and situational-awareness layer, feeding the pages and the mesh that are already …
Command and Control From Out of Range
Reaching a home station from the field when there's no RF path. Direct LoRa failed because the local mesh is sparse, so the command gateway was bridged to MQTT …
Where Am I, and How Far From the Station
A field command that answers location from the node's own GPS: grid square, nearest town, and the distance and bearing back to the station. Plus the wrong-grid …
Bridging Two Meshes
Relaying chat between Meshtastic and MeshCore at the station, so an operator on one network can talk to an operator on the other. Each line is tagged with where …
A Pocket Elmer on the Mesh
An intelligent assistant you can reach from a LoRa handheld with no internet at the radio. Send a short question on a private mesh channel and a one-line answer …
One Pi, Every Mode
A single Raspberry Pi that ties together most of the ways a ham station talks: analog and digital voice, two mesh networks, packet, and email over radio. One …
Building the Station Console
A web console to see and drive the whole station. The centerpiece is a live routing map that shows, at a glance, where a signal is flowing and where it dies. …
Editing Privileged Configs From a Web UI, Safely
The station console can view, edit, back up, and restore the station's root-owned config files from a browser. Doing that without handing a web app root came …
A Propagation Display That Runs on the Pi
A HamClock-style propagation page for the station console: solar numbers, color-coded band conditions, a grey-line world map drawn on the Pi itself, and live …
Email Over Radio, Built In
Winlink moves email over radio with no internet. The station runs it and the console wraps it, so you can read and send from the dashboard, and a field report …
A Field Command Gateway for the Mesh
A small bot on the station that answers short commands sent from the field over LoRa mesh or APRS: weather, grid, a situation report, nearby repeaters, a …
Reverse-Engineering a Cheap DMR Handheld
Programming a Cotre CO06D with no real software for it meant talking straight to the radio's debug port and mapping its memory by hand. The best bug turned out …
Analog to Fusion to DMR on One Pi
Bridging an analog AllStar node to digital voice, Fusion first and then DMR, on a single Pi with no hardware vocoder. The hard part was the AMBE encoder, and …
Keying a Radio Off a Serial Line
The node software keys push-to-talk one way; the audio interface keys it another. Bridging that gap took a small daemon that holds the serial line, keys on …