Ham Radio - HamPI, possibly the best general ham radio image for the raspberry pi.

[Music] hello youtubers and fellow hams well today we're going to take a look at a really cool little raspberry pi distribution called hampi i've got it running here on my little raspberry pi and we're going to have a good look at it here in a moment what is it well the raspberry pi as you know or should know is a very small computer based on the arm processor the same processor that's present in your cellular phones and tablets and soon most macs the raspberry pi is really small i've shown it in the previous video and i'm sure that you've seen it but it has uh hdmi video out memory um usb ports ethernet port wireless bluetooth you know all the things that you'd use in a regular computer laptop or whatever um but now with the pi4 it's really become quite powerful it's uh got a very nice quad core fast cpu and you can get it with up to eight gig of memory which is the model that i got uh in fact i've been using it as my desktop computer for the past week just to get a good feel for it and it's it's quite good quite good and it's very popular with hams a lot of people are using them as a small shack computer or maybe even in portable or mobile use because of its low power draw it draws somewhere around six to seven hundred milliamps nominal when it's idle uh at five volts uh so uh yeah it's uh it's a low power use machine um using it as my desktop it's actually drawing only about 65 or so of the power that my laptop draws under similar conditions so i'm going to be using it as my desktop for a lot of things being now that i'm on solar and off-grid quite often so it's it's great for that but once you get it um if you're a ham then you've got to go find software you've got to go find and install you know like fl digi wsjtx the various programs you might use logging software other things like intel antenna modeling software and such which is a bit of a chore uh over on the x86 side of things there was a neat distribution called skywave linux that i looked at a few years ago unfortunately the recent version looks like it was built uh by a programmer for programmers it's it's just was not very friendly i couldn't even get it to work under a virtual machine to evaluate it well there is something similar that's been done on the raspberry pi by a ham named dave slaughter his call sign is w3 djs i hope i pronounced your last name right dave and he put together a a raspberry pi image called ham pie now what ham pie is is he took the official raspbian uh desktop os that that the raspberry pi foundation puts out which is based on debian linux and he installed pretty much all of the useful amateur radio software it's just loaded right out of the box everything is there you don't have to do anything let's uh let's take a look at it here so here we are i have ham pi running on my raspberry pi 4 which is sitting right over here on this whizzy little display that i showed in the previous video um i'll put a link to that video in the description below if you want to check out my desktop setup for raspberry pi uh ham pi as i said is based on the standard raspbian desktop let's uh zoom in and take a look at it shall we so uh after you burn the image and boot up your pie you go through the standard raspbian setup stuff where it asks you a few questions configures the system connects to your wireless network and so on the same thing you would go through when can when booting just regular old raspbian upon reboot we are dropped onto the hampi desktop now all the regular utilities and software are present all the things that you normally use on raspbian are here under the menu programming utilities education has something called smart sim which i think is a circuit simulator i haven't actually looked at it the libre office office suite the chromium web browser an email client and vnc viewer is configured out of the box so if you're going to run your raspberry pi headless and remotely access it you can do that pulse audio volume control a simple screen recorder i added for for capturing the screen you're watching right now the vlc media player document viewer image viewer document viewer is a pdf viewer image viewer is a picture viewer xplanet i think is a planetarium program flame shot is something i installed for taking screenshots a few games if you get bored you know it's the standard stuff that you see on a raspberry pi uh raspy and installation where it gets different is when we get down here to this ham radio menu and holy cow look at this dave has got installed in this image literally every decent linux ham radio application if if it's good it's for ham radio and it runs on linux it's in here it's ready to go and look how he's organized this menu with these category menus up near the top this is beautiful you might be aware of skywave linux over on the x86 machines in fact i did a review of it a few years back it was pretty nice it was a linux distribution for your desktop or laptop that had a lot of amateur radio software pre-configured it was pretty nicely done unfortunately the recent version kind of looks like it was done by a programmer for programmers it's just not that friendly to new users or people that are new to linux this this is what skywave should be and the skywave guys i know i'm probably talking to speaking to deaf ears but take a look at this this is what you should be striving for here this makes it easy for new users to just sit down and dive right in they don't have to figure anything out we have a menu paradigm like they're used to seeing on desktops and look at how he has organized these menus categories antenna analyzer and underneath there we see neck to see an xnet 2c which are a text based version and a graphical version of the nec antenna analyzing modeling program aprs stuff direwolf x aster already there ready to go calculators a smith chart calculator i didn't even know that existed voa cap gui voice of america capture perhaps maybe it captures the streaming over the internet from voice of america i'm just guessing i haven't looked at it yet dratz i think is a d-star client for linux that lets you do some some stuff with the icoms d-star network the fl digi suite pretty much all of the fl programs are in here fldg fl cluster fl log fl rig they're all in there ready to go several logging programs i like xlog myself because it's very simple but you've got cqr log which is in k log which are both pretty nice and more full featured and trusted qsl which is a the utility for uploading to logbook of the world already installed morse code cw we've got some cw decoding and training utilities uh three other psk programs if fldg is not enough for you sdr now this is cool not only do we have cubic sdr and gqrx uh quick sdr angel cute sdr but the two main ones cubic sdr and gqrx i tried them both out with my airspy hf plus i didn't have to install anything i plugged in my air spy and it just worked dave has installed all of the soapy sdr modules that are available for the different hardware that's out there the only one that i would be curious about that i couldn't personally test is the sdr play i sold my sdr play a while back because i got tired of trying to make it work under each new linux distribution it just was too much work and i i was failing more than i was succeeding with it and i just got tired of dealing with it and that's why i went to the air spy the air spy hf plus much more friendly to linux and in this case i didn't have to install anything i just plugged it in loaded cubic sdr and boom it worked right off the bat the same with gqrx so most of the common sdr hardware that's out there is probably already supported by this distribution thumbs up dave good job i i dig that a training fcc exam ham exam qrq if you're studying for your license this would also be an interesting place to start you've got the some study programs there for linux already built in weak signal modes a js8 call wsjtx again already installed all you have to do is enter your call sign and configure them for your radio but they're there and ready to go um i captured a screen of me decoding some ft8 with wsjtx as you can see worked fine i did some psk31 with fl digi worked fine everything that i've tried has worked uh chirp the um popular software for programming radios free dv the digital video or digital voice mode digital voice mode for hf already installed and ready to go ready to go g predict the excellent satellite tracking program and pass prediction program ready to go g-rig is another remote radio control program ham clock ham clock it's a really nice little utility that displays all kinds of information in a little window let me uh in fact let me go ahead and launch it i've already configured it with my call sign and my location it has to determine whether or not it can see the network there it goes and if you wanted to run ham clock and just leave it up there in the corner of your screen and you could easily see how many sun spots there are the a index the the solar disk image tons of information in here tons of information the gray line ham clock is a really really nice thing uh this is kind of popular with people that want to put it just on a display up on the wall you know put like a raspberry pi uh zero uh behind the display just leave it up on the wall displaying this information pulling it across the network a pretty handy little program well here it is you can just leave it in a window uh what else do we have in here um ham facts for doing facsimile qsstv for doing slow scan television qtel the echolink client for linux already installed and a few other things here some of these things i don't recognize i haven't seen before and if you're wondering what some of these programs are well let me close the ham clock for a moment here over here on the side we see handpie readme.doc i'll go ahead and open that and you'll see that dave has created a little greeting file come on there we go uh but in this in this file we have a list let's uh zoom in on that a little bit there we go that's got to be better for you guys um he has created a list of all of the installed programs and a description of what they are so if there's something in the menu that you're not sure of like qtel what's q-tel well it's an echolink client um what's uh what's bluedv well it's a client for d-star and dmr oops i was trying to highlight something that move it um oh voa cap is an hf propagation prediction program so see i had that wrong just by guessing so yeah he's got a list here of all of the installed amateur radio software look at all this with a description of what each of them are beautifully done this is this is this is nice dave this is really nice and very very helpful so yeah there's that in that readme file um he has a little ula a license uh file um and some other information here that you should read so yeah handpie is a great starting point if you're interested in raspberry pi especially if you're interested in raspberry pi and amateur radio this is the image to start with you can download it i'll put a link to his uh his site on the in the description below i think it's somewhere around two gig or maybe a little more to download it's compressed it decompresses to a 12 gig 12 gig image so you would want probably at a minimum a 32 gig micro sd card for this image it's quite large but that's because there's a lot of stuff in there it's a great great place to start great place to start everything you'd need for ham radio is well not everything you'd need for ham radio everything good for linux for ham radio is already in there and ready to go good job dave i'm impressed so that's ham pie if you're at if you're a ham radio op and you are at all interested in playing around with the raspberry pi i think this is definitely the best place to start as i've said and shown right out of the box you get all the amateur radio software the best of the amateur radio software available for linux installed and ready to go all you have to do is configuration you know put in your call sign connected to your radio and so on but everything's there along with all the regular utilities of the raspbian desktop office applications web browser so on and so forth it's a complete package it's easy it's well laid out very well put together my hat's off to dave i know he put a ton of work into this project and it is just a beautiful result i'm very very happy with with what i've seen here so i hope you found that useful and we'll see you in the next video thanks for watching if you enjoyed the video don't forget to give it a thumbs up also if you're not already a subscriber click to subscribe join us on the facebook channel for discussion about the videos and if you'd like to help support this channel please click to support me on my patreon page

Channel: Kevin Loughin

Views: 31,908

Keywords: kb9rlw, diy, linux, PI, amateur radio

Id: vrN55ZwZikQ

Length: 15min 31sec (931 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 26 2020