Category: Raspberry Pi

I built a Stratum 1 NTP Time Server

This is something I’ve been considering doing for years and following a recent conversation with a good friend, I looked into it again and found this guide which was posted back in July 2023. In my box of stuff, I found I had a couple of GPS modules, one Adafruit and one of exactly the […]

How to set up a HamClock for your shack

I appreciate that the last post here was about the HamClock and I said I wouldn’t be providing a guide to building one but I’ve been asked by a few people if I can write some instructions, showing what’s needed from start to end so I’ve decided to do it. This is a long guide […]

HamClock

For some years I’d been aware of HamClock and around April last year I decided to investigate further and built one using an old Raspberry Pi 3B that I had spare.If you’ve never heard of HamClock, it’s described on the authors page thus: “HamClock is a kiosk-style application that provides real time space weather, radio […]

How to build a shack clock using a Raspberry Pi and a 7″ Touch Display.

Raspberry Pi shack clock

A few weeks ago I bought the official Raspberry Pi 7″ touchscreen display for a project which sadly didn’t work as intended, this left me with the unused display and a case. I started thinking about things I could use it for and settled on a shack clock. Long term readers of my site will […]

Why you might want to try using my DX Cluster

DX Spider

Telnet: dxspider.co.uk:7300 There are many DX Cluster nodes out there and to be fair, they’re all very similar. They all connect into the same network and they all offer pretty much the same services. I make no claims that my node is better than any others but it does have a lot going for it […]

MMDVM Hotspot and the new Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W

A short while ago, the new Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W was announced. The original Pi Zero and the Zero W are widely used in MMDVM based hotspots and the new Zero 2 W is a direct, drop in replacement. The most obvious question is whether you need to replace your Pi Zero with a […]

I’ve got a new weather station

Anemometer on my dipole centre post

In early 2012 I bought a cheap weather station from a major UK amateur radio supplier. It lasted a few months before failing. They replaced the broken parts, it failed again a while later and they replaced the parts again. When it failed for the third time, I got fed up with it so I […]

How to update and upgrade your Pi-Star based hotspot

PI-Star SSH logged in

There are a couple of methods of updating a Pi-Star based MMDVM hotspot, one upgrades Pi-Star itself and the other method does a full operating system update as well as Pi-Star. The Pi itself automatically runs a process overnight that updates the host file and various other things but this is how to do a […]

A quick tip for your hotspots

With all the hotspots I have in the house for various modes, I decided to do something about the RF. They all run very low power but they’re only for me to use and I didn’t want the RF escaping the house. I bought a few tiny little dummy loads from eBay and replaced the […]

How to set up a Yaesu System Fusion reflector (YSFReflector)

NOTE – 22nd April 2023I have provided a new version of install.sh, if you have had problems with a ysfreflector.ini error, please start the install again from the first ‘sudo wget’ command. Over the last four or five years I’ve been a regular user of two digital voice modes, D-STAR and DMR. I don’t particularly […]