Here’re my first sota trip reports. I made some mistakes and have lots to learn still, but they were great days out and I’m dead keen to do more. Most importantly, I’ve got better at radio in general - I’m much more comfortable on a microphone, I understand the flow and format of an HF contact far better. It’s very different from the datamodes I’ve been doing for years! One thing that I’ve noticed, and it probably deserves mentioning, is that the SOTA web infrastructure is some of the best I’ve seen in ham radio. Modern looking sites, coherent single sign on and services sharing data in a really clever way. I upload CSV format logs generated by my logging program, cqrlog, and the SOTA infrastructure handles them and shares them with services like sotamapping, to show me maps of my contacts. SOTA spots appear on APRS, and I can spot myself to sotwatch using APRS messages. I’m super impressed! …

This post is part of [tj]’s blog more in June challenge. You should join us and take part - just make 4 posts in June! I have an amount of portable, HF radio equipment that I don’t use enough. One reason is just how awkward and cumbersome it can be to move everything around. I would like to have a small bag/box I can attach to a backpack or my bike before I go out. Powering things in the field is a significant part of that problem. …

This has been a few days of mildly successful radio fidgeting. Few issues diagnosed in the setup, few things fixed and a few things done. First up, the 6" cable I use to connect the FT-100 radio to my tuner has broken. This was replaced (thanks to Ed) and things tuned nicely. This must have been borked for some time - I’m now able to tune up my (roughly) 20m dipole on 30m and 40m no bother - both matching with swr of less than 1.1. No bother. …

Soundmodem, ax25d and uronode This is mostly a repost of something that was on my now deceased wiki, spruced up a little for this platform. Start at the top and work down, you should have a basic, working ax25 packet radio system by the end. I shall address netrom at a later date. I’m using soundmodem as it presents me with an sm0 device I can easily configure in the following steps, however I have also tested direwolf for this successfully. …

This is a continuation of this post about my previous failures at DATV. Debug, Defrag, Defuzz and Start Again Okay, so Bournemouth didn’t go so well. Let’s try again - this time reading manuals and stopping to think. The goal for this project is simple - transmit and receive a DVB-S signal. Hardware What tools do I have available? CCC Camp Badge (HackRF) RTL-SDR Numerous Raspberry Pis Laptop (Linux) Probably a whole other pile of things Software There’s a few things I know about that could use: …