Raspberry Pi Must Have Accessories for Ham Radio Digital Modes Operators

welcome back guys this is Jason km4 ACK today let's take a few minutes to discuss what's the must-have accessories for your Raspberry Pi stick around and we'll get right to it hey guys real quick before we get going I've gotta give a shout out to these three gentlemen they're my latest patrons over on patreon if you'd like to help support the channel I'll leave a link to patreon down in the description below all right so a common email I get is somebody just getting into the Raspberry Pi game with their ham radio and they'll send an email in going hey yeah I know I need a pie what else do I need to go with that so I kind of have a almost a canned response that I send back out depending on what they want to do with it so that'll depend a little bit on what kind of accessories you might want to get but today I just wanted to go over a few of those now if you're doing the Raspberry Pi for if that's when you're going to pick up I would definitely recommend getting a case that includes a fan you might can get away without it but I find that the fan keeps it quite a bit cooler now if you're going to go with an the older Raspberry Pi they didn't tend to run as high but the new Pi fours do run a little bit warm so I'd grab a case and gasps I'll leave links to everything down in the description below so that if you want to pick up something that you see in this video you can go down there and find a link to it now another thing you're going to need is a good supply of SD cards i buy these six eight ten at a time that's a little overkill for most people but I would recommend picking up two of them and the reason I say that is I like to have one card in the pie that I'm working with and then another one that just serves as my backup so that's definitely something you'll need like I said I recommend a couple of them to go along with that you'll need something some sort of hard reader now this one is USB and then we can plug in the microSD card over here on the side this little guy will help you in a couple of ways when you're flashing your image from your Windows machine onto the card or from your Mac onto the card you can use this and then you can also use the same device plugged into the back of the Raspberry Pi when it's time to do a back up now to go along with your PI you may or may not have a sound card already so you're gonna need some sort of sound card interface to get your get your audio out of your Raspberry Pi and into your radio there's a lot of different ones on the market it kind of depends on the way you want to go and what you want to do one of the easiest probably by far to use it's also the most expensive is the signal link built-in Vox so it's fairly easy to configure you don't have to worry about doing hardware PTT or something like that so that's probably the easiest to go with something else is a little bit less expensive I don't think they have cables out there for every particular radio and that's the wolfie link sound card so it also has built-in Vox but I don't think it supports near the number of radios that the signaling dies it does support my yaesu 857 and if I remember right these are like 60 maybe 70 bucks so roughly half the price of a signal link now if you're really really adventurous and you want to learn a bit more about hardware control from the PI to the radio and you want to go full-blown rig control you can look at a sound card like this so this is just a little bitty inexpensive USB sound card I just did a video on this and this particular cable but you will need some sort of sound card interface with your Raspberry Pi depending on what you want to do and how much you're willing to learn and how much you're willing to investigate it set up and running kind of depend on what your which one you're gonna choose if I was just getting started I think I would recommend the signal link just for the ease of setup now let's get let's go a little bit further that kind of covers the basics if you want to use it in your in your Shack you can just hook up a monitor keyboard mouse you're ready to go kind of assuming you have those laying around obviously if you don't you're going to need to pick those up with your PI as well but what about those guys that want to go out and do parks on the air activation you want to use this maybe it filled a you want to do some sort of filled deployment with your PI well I recommend a few more things in those cases first the Raspberry Pi doesn't have a real-time clock built-in so you either need to add a real-time clock or another tum source if you're out in the field away from the internet now when I say it doesn't have a real-time clock built in what that means is if you shut the PI down and you bring the PI back up an hour later well it's going to have the same time on it that it had when you shut it down unless it has a time source to update from so when you're in the shack that time source is the Internet when you're out in the field you don't have an internet connection you need something else I highly recommend these little GPS devices they're only about seven bucks maybe eight works great with a PI super compact and I've had great success with these not only outside but also indoors and I don't have a metal roof so that's a little bit of an advantage but I have no trouble getting this guy to pick up a signal and get a lock on the satellites even when indoors now something else you're gonna need if you're out in the field is you're gonna have to figure out what kind of monitor you monitor keyboard mouse setup you want to run when you're out there I typically run mine headless meaning I don't have anything connected to it when I'm in the field the PI serves a hot spot that I can connect to and I'll try to remember to leave a link to that video right up at the top if I forget you can search easy as pie hot spot on my channel and you should be able to locate that video but what that means is the pie generates a hot spot and I can use another wireless device to connect to it when I'm in the field now I typically use an iPad Mini so I take the iPad Mini use its Wireless to connect to the PI and then I can see the PI's screen right on the iPad Mini and also use the keyboard on the Mini and move my finger around on the screen to control the mouse and for short quick deployments that works pretty good with things like JSA call but for something like Phil day I like to go one step beyond that and that's where I like to add almost a full-size keyboard so this is a foldout bluetooth keyboard that I can lay on the table in front of the iPads and prop the iPad up so I can see the screen of the Raspberry Pi and then this connects to it over Bluetooth and it makes it a lot easier to do data input with js8 call or FLD G or something like that sending emails it's just a little bit quicker to use than the keyboard on the iPad screen now something else you're going to need to consider if you're going out into the field is how are you going to power that Raspberry Pi so there's a couple of different options you can drag along some sort of power inverter and plug an AC wall wart up into the power inverter and then plug it into your pie guys I like to run things off of 12 volts when I'm in the field so what I found was these buck converters now I've got a few different styles of these but basically you've got an input on this side which is 12 volts and then you've got two USB ports on this side I like this one and I do use it still from time to time I like it because it could power the pie off of one side and then maybe recharge the iPad Mini or even a cell phone off of the other side so this works really well something else that I've done on a few of my PI's is these little bitty buck converters I mean these things are tiny tiny tiny small enough that you can put power poles off of one side and then a couple of other wires off of the other side and tuck this whole thing inside of your pie just have the just to have the power pole hanging out of your pie and the other side of it would connect up to the GPIO pins so that's another kind of slick way you can do things you just wrap it in some heat shrink tuck all of it up inside the case of your Raspberry Pi either way either one of these it allows you to run your PI off of 12 volts basically so these will drop that power down to 5 volts something that's safe for the PI and you can go ahead and just run off of the battery leave that wall wart at the house all right guys well there you have it that's probably my top recommendations if you're just getting into the Raspberry Pi game for your ham radio it's gonna depend on what you want to do do you want to just plug it up in the shack and run from there you're gonna take the thing and go out portable with it that's going to kind of determine what you need to go with your PI alright I hope you found this one helpful we will see you guys on the next video until then 7:3

Channel: KM4ACK

Views: 31,307

Keywords: ham, ham radio, emcomm, ares, raspberry pi keyboard, raspberry pi accessories, raspberry pi, signalink usb, wolphilink, raspberry pi 12 volt, raspberry pi projects for beginners, raspberry pi 2019, wolphilink ft8, wolphilink interface, signalink usb ft-857d, raspberry pi ham radio

Id: 0uDY_LjDDKo

Length: 10min 33sec (633 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 20 2019