N3BKV’s Ham Radio Hacks

  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...

  Bridging WaveNode Power Meter Data into Thetis One of the fun things about modern ham radio is that so much of the station is now software-defined it's not just the radio, but the amplifiers, power meters, rotators, dashboards, remote control systems and logging tools around it. That also creates a familiar problem: all the pieces know useful things, but they do not always speak the same language. This project started from a simple question: Can Thetis display WaveNode RF power and SWR data the same way some stations use TelePost LP-100A meter data? The short answer is: maybe and this project is an experimental bridge to help test exactly that. The Problem Thetis already has a Multi Meter I/O feature that can accept external meter data. Many hams have used this with the TelePost LP-100A, where meter information is sent into Thetis over the network. WaveNode systems, on the other hand, can publish useful station telemetry such as: Forward power Reflected power SWR In my station, ...