AmateurRadio.com

Over at Make, they’ve posted an interesting project showing you how to convert your $35 Raspberry Pi into a wide coverage FM transmitter.

This simple hack turns your Raspberry Pi into a powerful FM transmitter! It has enough range to cover your home, DIY drive-in movie, a high school ball game, or even a bike parade (depending on the stragglers).

The hack, called PiFM, uses hardware meant to generate spread spectrum clock signals and outputs them as RF energy on the Raspberry Pi’s GPIO (general purpose input/output) pins. The original creators report getting a range of 50m through heavy walls and multiple rooms.

Luckily, they include this helpful warning:

The Raspberry Pi’s broadcast frequency can range between 1Mhz and 250Mhz, which may interfere with government bands. We advise that you limit your transmissions to the standard FM band of 87.5MHz–108.0MHz (see Step 3) and always choose a frequency that’s not already in use, to avoid interference with licensed broadcasters.

Good advice, don’t you think? :-/

One of the things I try to do is monitor the National Simplex Calling Frequency for 2 meter FM: 146.52 MHz, especially when mobile. It is fun to see who might show up on 2m simplex: SOTA operators, hikers, mobile stations, campers, etc. See these two posts on operating ideas: A Simple Wilderness Protocol: 146.52 MHz and The Use of 146.52 MHz.

It is also fun to say hello to another ham when you pass them on the highway. While you may see their call letter license plates or notice their mobile antenna, you may not know what frequency they are monitoring. The Noise Blankers Radio Club has solved this problem — just put this sticker on your vehicle.

After poking around cafepress.com, I found some additional options for indicating your radio frequency:

The 2meter SSB calling frequency:

The APRS frequency:

And there’s this magnet for your refrigerator:

If you don’t like any of these, cafepress.com makes it easy to create your own. Go for it!

73, Bob K0NR

Behold the new Wouxun KG-UV8D. While rumors of an upgraded Wouxun HT have been out for awhile, we have received confirmation from several sources that the KG-UV8D 144/440 version will be available in the United States in late March, 2014. Though no vendor would confirm specific pricing, one source indicated that it will have a street price of less than $150.

According to Wouxun, features will include a large color screen, true dual receive, full-duplex operation (ham sats!) with cross-band repeat, and FCC Part 90 approval (FCC ID: WVTWOUXUN07). Wouxun has yet to publish full specs on their website.

Based on the wild success of the previous Wouxun models, I suspect this radio will sell briskly (especially at the sub-$150 price point). I do hope that Wouxun has addressed the loss of programming issue seen occasionally in some of the earlier versions.

As soon as we get our hands on one, we’ll provide you with a more thorough review of its features. I suspect we’ll also see great reviews from Brick and Jason KC5HWB. It looks like a fun little radio.

Update:

Brick has posted on his blog that BuyTwoWayRadios.com will be selling the KG-UV8D for $139.99 (with free  shipping) and will be taking pre-orders beginning Tuesday.

Looking for something to do Friday night? We will be conducting another live stream test while we shoot episode 64 of AmateurLogic.TV.
Streaming begins at 7:00 PM CST Friday, March 7th.

You can watch it here:
NOTE: This show went great. Thanks to all who watched live and participated in the chat room. Look for it to be posted around Wednesday March 12th.

First I received only PA4PS. He must have a good antenna I suppose. Suddenly propagation was very good. VK6XLR was rolling in with 10 watts (40dB) with report -20 dB. In return he reported me with -23 dB. Almost a QSO. Hi. Today I am using WSPRX-2 see what the results are today.

10 meter WSPR today. A lot of Es short skip from Europe as well. New DXCC was Paraguay (ZP5BAB).