Portable Raspberry Pi 4 Amateur Radio Station

how's it going everybody thanks for tuning into the ham radio crash course I had so much fun doing the Raspberry Pi for video and the portable Shack and getting things set up there that I knew I would make a follow-on video going through the components that are in my portable Shack went out in the field running qrp and today is that day let's go to the tabletop so before we kick this off with going over the hardware and the gear I wanted to give you the goal that I had when I put it together and that goal was specifically being able to interface with the radio with any given device and that is what led me to the Raspberry Pi and that's what allows me to be able to use any kind of tablet including an iPad to interface with the radio and operate on digital modes out in the field okay so currently this is what I throw in my bag a battery bank which you can replace this with any battery bank and there's ways to go around this which we'll talk about a bit the accessory kit for doing digital modes and the Raspberry Pi and then the yellow craft kx2 which lives in this bag this bag has all the other things that you need for single sideband or most Morse code or whatnot so really you don't need that you could forego this bag which again just has the mic and other assorted gear and cabling but you don't need if you want to go in the field of digital all you need is the K x2 which I'm using and this could be any radio that you can interface via cat control and sound and some kind of battery bank so okay X twos the radio I generally find that the K x2 has a really easy interface for connecting to a computer there are three cables that you have to employ that it's in this box but pretty easy and keep in mind I've worked digital modes on qrp radios and other HF radios to the tune of about a dozen or so so so far this is one of the easier radios and setting up so your mileage will vary battery bank this is the thin Anker power I believe this is a one thousand milliamp sorry 10,000 milliamp is that right yeah yeah 10,000 milliamp hour anchor battery bank I got it because it was thin that was the primary reason you can go with a big fat one if you want there's some other options if you get a buck converter that can convert DC to something that the Raspberry Pi will work off of you can use the power from the radio and get it in there if you're using an external battery bank or something like that like an extended tx2 battery pack which I recommend the kx2 has a lithium-ion battery pack and this is generally what I run the radio off of both the internal battery and then I bring a backup battery just in case so in the box this little Pelican box this is pretty much all you need to get everything running so two audio audio cables the mic and the speaker cable that go into your Raspberry Pi this is a USBC cable to power the Raspberry Pi for now I've got a couple of these these are USB a2a extenders so I'll show this off in a second but basically on the concept behind this and here's another one the Raspberry Pi 4 which lives in this aluminum case I'll post the link in the description Amazon for this by the way this has fans Raspberry Pi force can get kind of hot although we're not pushing it that hard you still would like to have cooling depending on how you're deploying this if you're like on doing a soda activation or you're somewhere with a lot of Sun it'd be nice to have fans just to keep the cooling up anyway billet aluminum for the case and you still have access to the g io ports which is good and then a USB sound card I have the older Sabourin model USB sound card they have a new more a new version and as a plastic black body works the same and kind of a key item the GP GLONASS dongle this is what makes the Raspberry Pi get accurate time when doing ft8 you need that it's pretty much required for the kit but anyway so let me talk a little bit about the USB cables are the USB connections so if you just took the two dongles and stack them up bunch of on each other and threw it in there the problem you'd get is that they're too close everything is too close and and you won't you won't get you'll bend the ports out or you'll your your dongles will be cocked it's it's not a it's not a good look it's not good for the cables so I add these little extenders to keep the ports clear and uncluttered because if you stack them right on top of each other it's no problem you got good clearance there now I wasn't completely honest there is one extra cable you need and that's the cable that goes to the kx2 this is your USB serial conversion cable that plugs into the device that does also fit in here which is normally living there but I had a different activation I was doing so it wasn't there initially anyway so this is the primary the primary layout this is all you need to be able to work digital modes with a KX to really any radio that has a non USB interface for audio and cat control this is going to be your cat control cable and then you've got the two audio cables and the sound card to do microphone and speaker and then you have the GLONASS GPS which gives you accurate time source to your Raspberry Pi and this is what it looks like all set up [Music] and then of course feed the whole thing with whichever antenna you'd like and now you've got the Raspberry Pi running it will identify or pick up any devices you have connected which in this case is the USB connections for both the radio the syrah sound card and the GPS now the downside with the kx2 and you could split out the audio here you're not going to hear the speaker on this it doesn't have a way to output both speaker while working the digital mode and and also to the internal speaker in the device there's probably a way around that if somebody knows how to do that post in the description but to be honest I haven't had a problem with it because I just um I just have the audio show on wsj TX or whichever digital mode I'm using and you know it's fine in that sense so the cool thing about this setup is once you're on the Wi-Fi for the Raspberry Pi once you have it set up configured and correctly you can just be and see directly into the desktop and now you're on the Raspberry Pi so from there you can run something like wsj TX or you can try to come on there you go so starting this up it shows about 25% is the processor load now remember Raspberry Pi not the fastest thing in the world but it does work and that's pretty much how you have that running this is not going to be a video on the different applications you can run and with the Raspberry Pi all I'll point you for the stream that I did if you want to follow along in that sense but this is it running we're connected to the Raspberry Pi right now and that's all there is to it so the hardware for this is very inexpensive really if you think about it the most expensive part of this is going to be the kx2 but you don't have to use this right here you can use any radio as long as you can feed it with cat control and audio to run your digital mode the only things you have to buy or are these devices and probably the second most expensive thing is the Raspberry Pi which is still relatively inexpensive you can find these for $50 about for the fully loaded Raspberry Pi 4 with the 4 gigs of RAM and then you have a $9 dongle for GPS seven dollars for the sound card and then the accessory cables and the battery bank you probably already have one of these so you don't even really need that anyway that's all there is to it to get this set up it's very easy to run and works really well when you're out in the field all right we got a reply from wd5 grw a second see if we can get the finish the contact here he's a plus 10 to me don't touch don't touch anything the table Hey we completed the contact I wrap this video up in front of the green screen anyway if you enjoyed this video give me a thumbs up it kind of shows me that you guys like the content and you appreciate what's going out there I do a lot of this for you guys to hopefully help get the idea out there on which you can do with amateur radio and the fun you can have so if you like this kind of stuff or this was helpful post in the comments below reminder on the thumbs up and if you haven't already please subscribe because I do videos like this once a week and I do a live stream also once a week so hope you check it out alright I'll talk to you later see ya

Channel: Ham Radio Crash Course

Views: 99,951

Keywords: ham radio, Ham radio crash course, how to get your technician license, what to do with ham radio, having fun with ham radio, how to run a ham radio net, ham radio stopped a traffic ticket, hoshnasi, icom ic-7300, introduction to ham radio, ham radio basics, amateur radio, amateur radio antenna, ham radio antenna, operating HF, qrp antenna, hf radio antenna, the hf bands are dead, calling cq on hf, ham radio review, amateur radio review

Id: 2dN4hos5_6M

Length: 10min 22sec (622 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 27 2019