Friday, July 29, 2016

SDR Limits

From the linked article:
The key feature of the LimeSDR, and all boards derived from Lime Micro’s tech is the LMS7002M. It’s a Field Programmable RF transceiver with coverage from 100kHz to 3.8GHz, a programmable IF filtering from 600kHz to 80MHz, and — this one is important — on-chip reconfigurable ‘signal processing’ and a fast USB 3.0 interface to a computer.

APRS: Xastir and Raspberry Pi

WZØW's Xastir on the Raspberry Pi:
"A while back I got interested in APRS. My only 2m radios were a Kenwood TM281A in my car, and a dual band HT. Neither had TNC capabilities built in, though, so the first order of business was to get a TNC that I could use on one or both of these radios. I had seen an article by Jerry Clement, VE6AB, in the May 2015 issue of QST about a bluetooth-capable TNC fromMobilinkd that works well with HT tranceivers and APRSDroid on Android smartphones. I decided to give it a try, and it worked well, as advertised. 
Then I started wondering, if I used a Bluetooth USB adapter on a Raspberry Pi, could I use Xastir to set up APRS on my base station. The punchline of the story is yes, I could."

Die Hard Reloaded

La Plus Ca Change

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Thursday, July 28, 2016

Digital Voice on VHF/UHF

"I've been living in a bit of an alternate reality, thanks to shooting video at the ARRL/TAPR Digital Communications Conferences and at some of the more esoteric forums at Dayton and other hamfests. In that universe - actually more of a future than a present - we don't have to choose which closed system we want to buy into. We don't have to carry three or four handhelds around to cover all the modes, and hope our belt is strong enough to keep our pants up (and guaranteeing a feature spot on HamSexy). We can operate a single radio that can run all the DV modes, along with analog FM. 
That radio doesn't exist today, but it will."