N3BKV’s Ham Radio Hacks

  If you’re running a remote station, digital voice system or any kind of modern connected ham infrastructure, your internet link is no longer “just internet” — it’s part of your station. Starlink Mini gives you portable, high-availability connectivity, but out of the box it’s still a black box. You can see “online/offline,” but you can’t easily observe performance, uptime, obstruction trends or state changes in a way that integrates with the rest of your telemetry systems. That’s exactly what the starlink-mini-mqtt-node-red-1 project solves. This project creates a bridge between Starlink Mini, MQTT and Node-RED, allowing you to treat your satellite link like any other piece of instrumented infrastructure in your shack. What It Does The system polls Starlink Mini status data and publishes it into MQTT topics that can be consumed by: - Node-RED - Home Assistant - Grafana - InfluxDB - Custom automation workflows Once it’s in MQTT, it becomes part of your normal telemetry pipeline. Ty...

If you’ve ever needed a reliable and inexpensive way to control AC gear remotely (power supplies, network equipment, etc) here is a simple solution for you. It will give you simple on/off control of a 15A outlet (with status) that integrates cleanly with an existing Node-RED setup. Recently I needed exactly that for a remote station I was building where I wanted to utilize an old Raspberry Pi 3B I had sitting in a drawer unused. I also wanted:      • A real AC outlet      • Enough current capacity for a piece of radio gear      • Local control (with minimal cloud dependency once set up)      • Something that works on armv7 / 32-bit Pi OS      • No Home Assistant or Matter complexity Here’s the solution that worked and why it’s a good fit for other hams.   The Hardware: TP-Link Tapo P125M The TP-Link Tapo P125M is a compact smart plug with a built-in AC outlet that is under $10 per unit. It supports...

  Recently a blog reader, Will WY7WL reached out about putting his Allstar node on to 44Net.  He was running into issues with connectivity to his node since it was behind CGNAT and wanted to see if he could adapt the 44net-cloud-wireguard-rpi script I had on Github for his application.  As I began testing it for him, I saw several things that needed to be customized to make the script work with the HamVoIP software, including making sure the software was at a current version, employing iptables for better compatibility and tweaking firewall settings to support Supermon.  So, I have created a special script to support this Allstar HamVoIP that handles everything soup to nuts and it is located at https://github.com/n3bkv/hamvoip-wireguard/blob/main/setup_hamvoip_wireguard.sh I also have an ASL3 version that Will help me test (since I do not run ASL on any of my own nodes).  That is available at - https://github.com/n3bkv/asl3-wireguard/blob/main/asl3-wg-setup.sh W...

  Have you ever wanted to search the FCC database outside the shack on a POTA or at Field Day? It's easy when you have cell coverage, but what if you are in the middle of nowhere? Or what if you want to see all the amateurs around you, search by last name or even who have a callsign like yours? K3NG's has come up with a powerful command line tool called HamDB that let's you have the entire FCC database available locally on your Raspberry Pi.  One thing I thought was missing was an easy to use UI, so I have put something together called HamDB GUI . With it you can search by call, name, zip code or callsign wildcard, right in your web browser. It's easy to get installed and up and running. All you need is a Raspberry Pi 3B or better and a 32GB SD card. If you are looking to power you Raspberry Pi in the field there are a number of <$10 converters like this one on Amazon that will allow you to run the Pi off 12 volts easily.  First you'll need to setup your Pi....