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Essex radio amateur George Smart M1GEO has managed to get the ham radio weak-signal software WSPR running on his Raspberry Pi.
WSPR
stands for Weak Signal Propagation Reporter and is designed for sending
and receiving low-power transmissions to test propagation paths on the
MF and HF bands.
Details of how George M1GEO managed to get WSPR working on the Raspberry Pi computer board are on his website - http://www.george-smart.co.uk/wiki/RaspberryPi_WSPR
The GB3LV IRLP/Echolink node, located in Enfield, north London, is now powered by a tiny Raspberry Pi computer running a reduced version of Linux Debian and a version 3 IRLP interface.
This reduces the energy and physical footprint of the node dramatically.
This development over the past 3 months, has only been possible because of a great deal of work done by Dave Cameron, VE7LTD.
The link transmitter is a Yaesu FT-7100.
The Raspberry Pi computer cost about £25 and needs a PSU (just a phone charger), cables and SD card operating system. The node requires no screen, mouse or keyboard when running.
A rugged Android smartphones that incorporate 400-470 MHz walkie-talkies has been announced at CES, Las Vegas
The device, planned for launch later this year, has a suggested retail price of $320 US or ¥1,999.
There are three phones in the range, starting with the Runbo (like Rambo?) X1 IP67-certified featurephone cum walkie-talkie, which packs a 2-inch 176 × 144 display, a 0.3-megapixel front-facing camera, a laser pointer, quad-band GSM plus 800MHz CDMA cellular radios, 400 to 470MHz range for the software-configurable walkie-talkie (parts of the spectrum may require a licence, depending on your country), a surprisingly loud speaker and a 2,200mAh battery. This will be available for ¥980 or about $160 on Taobao online store (the Chinese equivalent of eBay) in the next couple of days, and we've been told that there will also be a variant with GPS added.
Next in the range are two brick-sized vanilla Android 4.0.4 devices. The phone pictured in the middle is the Runbo X5, a device featuring a 1GHz dual-core Cortex-A9 MTK6577 chipset, 1GB RAM, 4GB storage, microSD expansion, a4.3-inch 800 x 480 IPS display, an app-triggered laser pointer, an eight-megapixel main camera, a 0.3-megapixel front camera, a super loud speaker (again) and amassive removable 3,800mAh battery. Included is a 400 to 470MHz walkie-talkie radio (up to 10km range; with detachable antenna), along with the additional 850/1900/2100 WCDMA radio, two SIM slots (WCDMA plus GSM), WiFi, Bluetooth 3.0 and GPS. These specs are the same for the Runbo X3 on the left, except for the smaller 3.5-inch 800 x 480 IPS panel to make space for the QWERTY keyboard below it.
Read the Engadget story - http://www.engadget.com/2013/01/15/runbo-x5-x3-x1/
Runbo on Taobao - http://item.taobao.com/item.htm?id=21335404340&spm=2014.12317209.0.0
The ICQ Amateur / Ham Radio Podcast is a fortnightly amateur/ham radio podcast covering news and technical features from the US, UK and around the world.
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