Amateur radio, space technology and other geeky stuff by Alexandru Csete
Articles and blogs about radio receivers and transmitters. Both commercial off the shelf radios and home made DIY experiments by Alexandru Csete OZ9AEC.
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.
First RF signal all the way through the mcHF. Now it’s time to read through all the mods and have the radio tuned up 🙂
Every now and then, I get a good idea that makes my life easier. I let the pictures speak for themselves 🙂
Few weeks ago I have decided to resume building my mcHF kit. I have made good progress with the RF board and today I have tested the low-pass and band-pass filters.
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.
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.
It has been a few weeks since my last update about the IC-706 remote rig project so here is a new one.
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.
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.
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.