N3BKV’s Ham Radio Hacks

If you're like me, Raspberry Pis have a way of multiplying around the ham shack. What starts as a simple project eventually becomes a collection of little computers running everything from weather stations and remote radio interfaces to MQTT brokers, Node-RED dashboards, network monitoring and assorted ham radio applications. They're inexpensive, consume very little power and can run for months without attention. Until something goes wrong. A failed microSD card, a corrupted filesystem or an failed software update can turn a perfectly functioning Raspberry Pi into a weekend recovery project. I've been looking for a convenient way to back up my Raspberry Pis while they're still running, without shutting them down and removing their SD cards.  I also have 4-Rpis running remotely at sites between 50 and 150 miles away that I only backup when I am onsite which is very infrequently. That led me to develop Pi Image Manager, a free, open-source macOS application that backs up ...

  ShackClock 1.0 An All-in-One Ham Radio Shack Dashboard I've always liked the idea behind HamClock and the various commercial world-map displays aimed at ham radio operators. Put a big screen in the shack, leave it running and at a glance you can see propagation information, DX activity, satellites, weather, UTC and whatever else is useful that day. But I also wanted something I could customize. Every product I looked at had different features and displays but I wanted something that could do everything I wanted on one screen, so I wrote what I call ShackClock. ShackClock is a full screen amateur radio dashboard I built around Node-RED, Leaflet, Docker and a collection of public APIs. It will run on a Mac, Raspberry Pi or pretty much anything that can run Docker and a web browser. It is easy to setup and does not require a dedicated computer. One Screen Instead of Ten Browser Tabs At the center of ShackClock is a full-screen satellite map. The base map comes from Esri and then Sha...

  Have you ever wondered where the plane or helicopter overhead is coming from, where it is going or who operates it? I found myself logging into my SkyAware monitor several times a week to look up that information. The problem was that it only showed what was overhead at that moment and logging in took a minute or two each time. I knew there had to be a better way to see this information quickly and to keep a historical record of all the aircraft traffic I had observed. One of the fun side effects of running a local ADS-B receiver with dump1090-fa on a Pi with an RTL-SDR dongle, is that you end up with a constant stream of aircraft telemetry sitting on your Pi. aircraft.json updates every second or two with hex codes, positions, altitudes, speeds and it's all there waiting to be analyzed and not just sent to Flightaware. Recently, I learned about JetClock which is a slick, commercial desk clock that shows you the aircraft passing overhead with airline, route, photos and all kinds ...

  There is a special kind of magic in a blinking cursor. Before social networks, web forums, Slack, Discord and group chats, there were bulletin board systems. You dialed in, waited for CONNECT, logged in with a handle, read the bulletins, checked your private mail, posted a message and logged off with the unmistakable finality of: NO CARRIER For radio amateurs, that world never really disappeared. Packet BBS systems, club bulletin boards, mailbox nodes, Winlink-style messaging, APRS bulletins, repeater status pages and remote station dashboards all come from the same basic idea: low-bandwidth, text-first, asynchronous communication. That is the spirit behind CBBS_PI — a vintage CBBS-style BBS emulator built in Python for a modern Raspberry Pi, Mac, Linux box or Docker host. It is part nostalgia project and part platform for experimentation. What It Is CBBS_PI is a text-mode bulletin board system that recreates the feel of early BBS systems. It supports local terminal access, Telne...