Omnia SDR

Few weeks ago I learned about the Omnia SDR project, which is a newly released softrock type transceiver kit. It has an on-board USB audio codec, which I consider to be a significant advantage, making it suitable to be used with embedded linux computer boards that do not have a good on-board audio codec. However, for me the Omnia SDR will form the basis for a remote controlled SDR transceiver, which I think will be a natural continuation of my remote rig project.

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DIY remote kit for the IC-706 part 8: Improved audio client and server

In my last update I have posted a live demo of the IC-706 remote setup. This setup was using a gstreamer-based audio client and server, taking advantage of state of the art audio codec called Opus. This setup was working fine over reliable network connections; however, as soon as I got on a mobile network the simple gstreamer pipelines were no longer sufficient. So it was time to write a simple audio client and server pair that are better suited to handle network dropouts.

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DIY remote kit for the IC-706 part 7: First on-air test

Good news folks: I have had my remote controlled IC-706 on the air and it works! So far I have only tested the receiver and on the LAN, but I still consider it to be a significant milestone because it was the first time I had the controls and the audio work together with a good antenna connected to the radio.

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DIY remote kit for the IC-706 part 6: A simple audio server and client

It has been a few weeks since my last update about the IC-706 remote rig project so here is a new one.

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DIY remote kit for the IC-706 part 5: Power on / off sequences

In my previous post I described how I solved the power connections for the radio and the front panel when they are physically separated from each other. In this post I will explain the software part of the power on / off procedure.

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DIY remote kit for the IC-706 part 4: Here come the Beaglebones

Last night I reached a significant milestone in this DIY remoterig project for the IC-706: I had the radio and the front panel talk to each other through a pair of Beaglebones and without any PC in the loop and without any wires between the boards for transferring power and discrete signals.

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DIY remote kit for the IC-706 part 3: Keep-alive emulation

Yesterday I have implemented emulation of keep-alive messages on server side. This means that the keep-alive messages sent by the front panel roughly every 100 ms are no longer sent over the network; instead, they are generated in the servers main loop with 150 ms interval.

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