Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AMPKT – Amateur radio packet explorer

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 30 posts

Re: AMPKT – Amateur radio packet explorer

#11

Post by bmitch2112 »

kunwon1 wrote: post #10

I recently got back into amateur radio with an SDR (listening only, my license has lapsed and I need to renew it) I found that using the FT8 protocol, I can pick up transmissions from up to ~6000 miles away, using a very cheap magnetic loop antenna mounted indoors in my apartment. My building is made of concrete slabs and I was pretty shocked that I was able to receive such distant transmissions. I think I've investe…

FT8 is lots of fun. Even more fun when you go to a park or up a summit and see how far you can get out and how far you can hear.

You don't need very expensive radio equipment to transmit FT8 so if you do get your licence back it is worth looking into.

http://qrp-labs.com/qdx.html

Re: AMPKT – Amateur radio packet explorer

#12

Post by lhamil64 »

bmitch2112 wrote: post #11
kunwon1 wrote: post #10

I recently got back into amateur radio with an SDR (listening only, my license has lapsed and I need to renew it) I found that using the FT8 protocol, I can pick up transmissions from up to ~6000 miles away, using a very cheap magnetic loop antenna mounted indoors in my apartment. My building is made of concrete slabs and I was pretty shocked that I was able to receive such distant transmissions. I think I've investe…

FT8 is lots of fun. Even more fun when you go to a park or up a summit and see how far you can get out and how far you can hear. You don't need very expensive radio equipment to transmit FT8 so if you do get your licence back it is worth looking into. http://qrp-labs.com/qdx.html

I got my license about a month ago and ordered a QDX to try FT8, but they're super back-ordered. The orders page shows that they're just now fulfilling orders from May.

Re: AMPKT – Amateur radio packet explorer

#13

Post by nvy »

kunwon1 wrote: post #10

I recently got back into amateur radio with an SDR (listening only, my license has lapsed and I need to renew it) I found that using the FT8 protocol, I can pick up transmissions from up to ~6000 miles away, using a very cheap magnetic loop antenna mounted indoors in my apartment. My building is made of concrete slabs and I was pretty shocked that I was able to receive such distant transmissions. I think I've investe…

Wow. Can you link to the antenna you use?

Could you achieve those distances transmitting with the same antenna, assuming you renewed your license?

Re: AMPKT – Amateur radio packet explorer

#14

Post by mzerod »

I have a QPSK & BPSK packet radio link to several other stations via the QO-100 satellite narrowband transponder, using a couple of Pluto SDRs and in some cases a mix/match of RTL SDR dongles and 70cm radios with transverters.

Only a small group (4 so far) doing it, but we can be heard on the WEBSDR hosted at Goonhilly Earth station[1]

Due to small dish sizes on RX (10GHz) we are keeping it simple and open at 1200 BPSK and QPSK 2400 with IL2P[2][3] for FEC+RS robustness, and not even close to the 2.7Khz max permitted bandwidth.

[1] https://eshail.batc.org.uk/nb/ - 10489630 USB

[2] https://tarpn.net/t/il2p/il2p.html

[3] https://eindhoven.space/il2p

Re: AMPKT – Amateur radio packet explorer

#15

Post by JKCalhoun »

kunwon1 wrote: post #10

I recently got back into amateur radio with an SDR (listening only, my license has lapsed and I need to renew it) I found that using the FT8 protocol, I can pick up transmissions from up to ~6000 miles away, using a very cheap magnetic loop antenna mounted indoors in my apartment. My building is made of concrete slabs and I was pretty shocked that I was able to receive such distant transmissions. I think I've investe…

Interesting. Also interested in getting into this. I have played with SDR, not FT8 though. Maybe you can point to a site that helped get you started with FT8.

Re: AMPKT – Amateur radio packet explorer

#17

Post by kunwon1 »

nvy wrote: post #13
kunwon1 wrote: post #10

I recently got back into amateur radio with an SDR (listening only, my license has lapsed and I need to renew it) I found that using the FT8 protocol, I can pick up transmissions from up to ~6000 miles away, using a very cheap magnetic loop antenna mounted indoors in my apartment. My building is made of concrete slabs and I was pretty shocked that I was able to receive such distant transmissions. I think I've investe…

Wow. Can you link to the antenna you use? Could you achieve those distances transmitting with the same antenna, assuming you renewed your license?

This is the antenna: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08LVYTL5V

I doubt that I could transmit with this, but I could be wrong. It's not something I've investigated.

Re: AMPKT – Amateur radio packet explorer

#18

Post by kunwon1 »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #15
kunwon1 wrote: post #10

I recently got back into amateur radio with an SDR (listening only, my license has lapsed and I need to renew it) I found that using the FT8 protocol, I can pick up transmissions from up to ~6000 miles away, using a very cheap magnetic loop antenna mounted indoors in my apartment. My building is made of concrete slabs and I was pretty shocked that I was able to receive such distant transmissions. I think I've investe…

Interesting. Also interested in getting into this. I have played with SDR, not FT8 though. Maybe you can point to a site that helped get you started with FT8.

I don't recall any specific how-to sites, I was all over a lot of them. There are three applications in my 'pipeline': SDR++ (a standard SDR client, any should work as long as you can choose your audio output device), WSJT-X [1], and GridTracker [2]

I'm on Linux, and I'm using PulseAudio. I need to route audio output from SDR++ to WSJT-X. I do this using these commands, which I found somewhere online that I can't recall:

    pacmd load-module module-null-sink sink_name=Virtual0
    pacmd update-sink-proplist Virtual0 device.description=Virtual0
    pacmd update-source-proplist Virtual0.monitor device.description=Virtual0
This creates a virtual device that I can select in the respective applications' options dialogs.

Connecting GridTracker to WSJT-X involves using the options dialogs in both programs, there is a UDP socket option, the details of which I don't immediately recall. My setup is different because I've written a one-off python script to log contacts for my own edification (sometimes I leave it running overnight to take advantage of the solar weather conditions)

WSJT-X is written by Joseph Hooton Taylor Jr. [3] He is an astrophysicist and Nobel laureate. It is well-documented software, but not very intuitive. Joe Taylor was also part of the team that developed the FT8 protocol. I recommend watching some videos about it or reading the documentation, as per your preference.

[1] https://wsjt.sourceforge.io/wsjtx.html [2] https://gridtracker.org/ [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Hooton_Taylor_Jr.?usesk...

Re: AMPKT – Amateur radio packet explorer

#19

Post by wkat4242 »

kunwon1 wrote: post #17
nvy wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow. Can you link to the antenna you use? Could you achieve those distances transmitting with the same antenna, assuming you renewed your license?

This is the antenna: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08LVYTL5V I doubt that I could transmit with this, but I could be wrong. It's not something I've investigated.

It says maximum power 250mW so it looks like you could do really low QRP with it. I do wonder if you'd get a signal out from your apartment though.

Re: AMPKT – Amateur radio packet explorer

#20

Post by wkat4242 »

cadr wrote: post #5
cogman10 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dumb question (and maybe this isn't legal?) but are there SDR transceivers/libraries? It'd be neat to have a zigbee/zwave hub with my SDR so I could mix and match some stuff.

HackRF One is an option. There are a number of others. Legality varies by country/frequency/power level. Can also make a Raspberry Pi act as a transmitter ( https://github.com/F5OEO/rpitx ), which could hit the zwave frequency but not the zigbee one. (Also, make sure to put a low pass filter on it.)

Or even better, a band pass. The output from that pin is really dirty.

I wouldn't recommend it for anything that will actually transmit into an antenna. Even with filters.

Post reply on HN