The Three Amigos are pleased to announce piHPSDR-Improved v2.451, bringing another round of enhancements to our evolving Linux SDR application.
Our aim remains simple: to build on the excellent original piHPSDR software and make it even more capable, intuitive and enjoyable to use.
What’s New?
A Better Large-Screen Experience
We’ve continued refining the VFO for LARGE Screens layout, with improved dual-VFO presentation, independent RX1 and RX2 S-meters, clearer filter displays and a more flexible floating toolbar. The result is a cleaner, more informative layout that makes better use of available screen space.
Improved Passband Tuning
The Var1/Var2 filter controls have been renamed PBT1/PBT2 and now behave like passband tuning on Icom radios. Adjust filter width and shift to fine-tune the received audio, with consistent operation across modes.
A More Informative Toolbar
Toolbar buttons now provide clear visual feedback when functions such as Split, Duplex, SAT, noise reduction and transmission are active. The indicators follow changes made through CAT, MIDI, GPIO and keyboard controls too.
piHPSDR-Improved v2.451 – Floating Toobar
Smarter Memories and Waterfall Controls
Memory slots now retain Split and Duplex settings, while RX1 and RX2 waterfall levels are remembered independently for each band. The 60-metre bandplan has also been refined to accommodate receive-only Volmet channels and labels without permitting transmission out of band.
Installation and Usability Improvements
We’ve fixed installation issues involving directory paths containing spaces, improved the floating toolbar and menu positioning, and increased the rigctl TCP/IP CAT server capacity to six simultaneous connections.
As always, we’ve also included smaller fixes and refinements to improve day-to-day operation. (Full details in the CHANGELOG)
Tested in Our Shacks, Ready for Yours!
Development and testing have covered Raspberry Pi OS, Kubuntu (KDE Plasma), LinuxMint and Debian 12/13 across both Intel/AMD systems and Raspberry Pi hardware. We’ve been working hard to make piHPSDR-Improved a practical and accessible choice for Linux-based amateur radio stations.
piHPSDR-Improved v2.451 – New Big Screen Display with dual S Meters
Get piHPSDR-Improved
If you’re already using piHPSDR-Improved, this release brings plenty of reasons to update. If you’re discovering it for the first time, our GUI installer makes getting started with Linux SDR software easier.
piHPSDR-Improved GUI Installer
We’re three radio amateurs developing and testing the software because we believe there’s still plenty of potential to unlock in piHPSDR.
Steve (M0XVT), Alan (G1SQB) and I are pleased to announce piSync v0.9, bringing synchronised WebSDR access to Linux users running piHPSDR-Improved and now, a much wider range of transceivers through FLRig.
Windows users have enjoyed this kind of functionality through applications such as CatSync for some time. To the best of our knowledge, piSync may be the first Linux application to offer an equivalent solution for both piHPSDR-Improved and the huge range of transceivers supported by FLRig.
piSync v0.9 with FLRig support
Bringing New Life to Existing Radios
The addition of FLRig support is a significant step forward. piSync can follow your radio’s frequency, operating mode, active VFO and PTT status, allowing a compatible WebSDR receiver to follow you around the bands.
Whether you’re using a modern SDR or a conventional transceiver, piSync opens up new possibilities for exploring propagation and comparing signals received at different locations around the world — without replacing your existing radio.
What’s New in v0.9?
This release also introduces several improvements:
Persistent WebSDR list: Your receiver URLs are now saved on your PC and restored after restarting piSync, rather than being stored in your web browser.
WebSDR map: A new launcher button provides quick access to the WebSDR World Map.
piSync v0.9 – Synchronising WebSDR’s to your Radio.
Easy Installation for Linux Users
Getting started with piSync is easier than ever, thanks to its new GUI installer. Designed to simplify installation and setup, it makes piSync more accessible to everyone, including amateur radio operators making the move from Windows to Linux.
Alongside the GUI installer developed for piHPSDR-Improved, this is another step towards making Linux a practical and welcoming platform for amateur radio enthusiasts.
piSync GUI Installer – One Double Click and it’s ready to use.
We’ve Kicked the Tyres, So You Can Hit the Airwaves!
piSync has been tested on Raspberry Pi, Kubuntu (KDE Plasma), Linux Mint (Cinnamon), Debian 13 (Trixie) and Ubuntu. While we can’t test every Linux distribution, it should work on most Debian and Ubuntu based systems. We’ve done the testing so you can spend less time setting up and more time enjoying your radio!
Get piSync
If you’re a Linux-based amateur radio operator, whether using piHPSDR-Improved or a transceiver supported by FLRig, piSync is worth a look.
Synchronised WebSDR access, on Linux, using the radio you already own.
It’s been a busy week of software bug fixes and enhancements on piHPSDR-Improved and piSync.
piSync v0.9 is currently in test after we added the support for FLRig. This extends the support for many transceivers new and old along side piHPSDR-Improved and makes it useful to HAMs who aren’t using SDR’s.
piSync v0.9 with FLRig support in test
piHPSDR-Improved has also had a lot of work done to it this week with a splurge of bug fixes and enhancements being made. We decided to bring the release forward as we can then concentrate on writing the new modules to bring even more functionality to the SDR solution.
piHPSDR-Improved v2.45 in Test
We’ve put some effort into tidying up the user interface in piHPSDR-Improved along with the new, second S Meter for VFOB. This is a really nice enhancement we’ve been wanting to do for some time but, haven’t had the time to devote to it until now.
piHPSDR-Improved v2.45 in test with Horizontally stacked RX
The floating toolbar has also had some upgrades and is not only looking good but, we’ve added new functionality to it as well.
piHPSDR-Improved v2.45 Floating Toolbar in Test
We’re hoping to release both of these updated software packages very soon once we’ve completed all our testing and are happy that’s it ready for release.
Steve, M0XVT found a little bug in piSync v0.6 last night whilst we were all chatting on the 80m band and so, I jumped on it this morning and got a fix in place.
The bug only raised its head if you manually muted the WebSDR and had “Mute on TX” enabled. With a TX/RX cycle the WebSDR would become unmuted even though the button/checkbox on the WebSDR page still showed “Mute” was enabled.
This bug doesn’t appear on KiwiSDRs, only the PA3FWM type WebSDRs.
piSync Logo
So, if you’ve already downloaded piSync v0.6 in the piHPSDR-Improved release, grab yourself the v0.7 update below and uninstall v0.6 via the installer and then install the new bug fixed version. (Make sure to delete the .venv directory in the v0.6 directory as well)
Take a look at the CHANGELOG included in the zip file for full details on the bug and how it was fixed.
piHPSDR-Improved Logo from The Three Amigos Development Team
For some time now Steve (M0XVT), Alan (G1SQB) and I have been working on a version of piHPSDR to use with our Hermes Lite 2, Anan 200D, Adalm Pluto, Pluto+ and LibreSDR transceivers. The biggest problem we’ve had is the constantly changing code on github that often would stop the software from working on one device or more each time we updated and then we’d have to spend hours finding the issue and fixing it.
Eventually we got tired of this and decided to build our own stable version that doesn’t get anything from github and is made up of all the parts necessary to create a version that just works on the devices that we use on a daily basis.
Using piHPSDR on the QO-100 satellite and the HF bands across a number of very different types of hardware is a challenge in itself, especially when the devices use different protocols and only certain library sets work with certain firmware on some devices, the combinations get complicated to say the least.
To differentiate our build of piHPSDR from all the others available on the internet today we decided to call it piHPSDR-Improved.
So what is piHPSDR-Improved?
piHPSDR-Improved is a version of piHPSDR that has the fixes and enhancements in it that we’ve dreamt of having over the last couple of years. Some of the fixes are simple things like being able to detach the toolbar from the main window thus giving more space for the two panadapter/waterfall displays and have all the toolbar buttons on another screen in a floating toolbar. Other enhancements were more involved and addressed some of the most annoying issues like none of the settings for VFOB (RX2) were saved and so, every time you started the program you had to setup the RX2 all over again from scratch. These sound like simple fixes but, believe me, they’re not.
Another thing we wanted to do was make piHPSDR-Improved easy to install. Many Windows users transitioning from Windows to Linux often regret it the moment they have to use the Linux command line to install piHPSDR.
We’ve committed to having GUI installers for all the applications that we develop and release, regardless of how much extra work this entails.
It’s time installing software on Linux desktop PCs was as easy as it has been on Windows PCs for decades.
piHPSDR-Improved GUI Installer
We’ve taken a modular approach to building piHPSDR-improved. Rather than putting everything into the one application, we’re going to be releasing add on modules that will bring new functionality over time. This way we can build on a structured, stable base keeping everything operational all of the time.
The first module we’re releasing is piSync and we’ve included it in the zip file that you’ll download to install piHPSDR-Improved.
piSync Logo
piSync adds functionality to piHPSDR-Improved that Windows Thetis users have had for a long time, namely the ability to use an online WebSDR along side their own SDR transceiver and have it track the frequency, band and mode automatically. This functionality has proven to be incredibly useful when you are struggling to hear a weak DX or QRP station.
With piSync you can now use an online WebSDR receiver closer to the DX station to aid getting that QSO in the log. It’s like having another receiver in your radio that is located anywhere in the world, for free!
We believe this is a first for the Linux platform and we’re really pleased to be able to share it with the Linux community.
We’ve had great fun with piSync during testing and we think you’re all going to find it extremely useful too.
We’re also planning on adding support for FLRig in the next version of piSync so that you’ll be able to use a WebSDR with any transceiver that is supported by FLRig.
Of course it goes without saying, all of our software is Opensource. When you download and install piHPSDR-Improved or any of the new modules you will get the full source code every time and be free to do whatever you like with it. Every module will also have it’s own GUI installer, no more command line, just double click and go.
Both piHPSDR-Improved and piSync have been tested on RaspberryPi 5/500+, Linuxmint Cinnamon, Kubuntu, Debian 12 (Bookworm) and Debian 13 (Trixie) so, we’re pretty confident it’ll work on most Debian/Ubuntu based Linux distro’s on Intel/AMD PCs and the current versions of the RaspberryPi SBCs.
piHPSDR-Improved, piSync and a WebSDR running on a pi 500+
Inside the zip file you’ll find a file called README.1st, do make sure you read this before installing any of the software as it contains some important information that’ll make installation as easy as possible.
To download both piHPSDR-Improved and piSync in an easy to use zip file, just click the Download button below.
We’ve got lots of ideas for new features, modules and bug fixes (Yes there are still some bugs in there!) which we will be releasing over time. Don’t expect this to happen overnight as Steve still works full time and Alan and I are both enjoying our retirement.
This is just another facet of our hobby and we don’t like to rush things. We do like to use our radios on air, pretty much daily and so we do this software development in between all the other fun things that Amateur Radio has to offer.
To be clear and open we do use Claude Code to help with development. I go through as much of the code as I can without spending days and days just reading code. I am retired after all and have spent enough of my life professionally writing and debugging both my own code and other people’s code. We do a lot of testing on a good number of Linux distros before we even consider releasing the software to the wider world and use it on air as part of the testing process, so we’ve done as much as we can to ensure we’ve not introduced new bugs to the software. Keep in mind we do this as part of our Amateur Radio hobby and so, it needs to be fun and enjoyable.
We hope you enjoy using the software and find it useful. If you’ve got ideas for new things you’d like to see in future versions then please feel free to contact any of us via our contact details on QRZ.
UPDATE: We’ve fixed a little bug in piSync and released an updated version. You can download it from this article.
For some time now I’ve been using an Inverted-L style antenna, albeit not a perfect L but, I have found it to perform extremely well.
When I put the antenna up I was aiming for good NVIS radiation on 80/60/40m for chatting Inter-G and local EU stations <1000 miles from my QTH.
I wasn’t expecting good performance on the higher HF bands as the total length of wire is 37m which is somewhat long for the higher frequency bands however, I’ve found performance around Europe to be very good and extremely good over the north pole to Oceania and the USA.
M0AWS Inverted-L style Antenna
As you can see from the antenna view above, it’s not a perfect inverted-L by any means however, its shape has actually proven to be advantageous.
Wire 1 is 9m tall, it then goes approximately 10.5m in length up to a peak of 12m above ground in the centre, this is where I have a 12m Spiderpole for support. From there the remaining 17.5m of wire slopes down to 5m above ground and is attached to the back of the house via a large insulator. Total wire length is 37m.
Wire 1 is at the bottom of a South facing garden and direction +X is north.
The antenna is tuned at the bottom of wire 1 using my CG3000 Remote Auto ATU at ground level. There are a number of random length radials hidden in the lawn and around the perimeter of the garden running mainly from South to North. I cannot run any radials to the south (-X) as this is farmland and not owned by me.
On the low bands I find it has great NVIS performance with excellent signal reports from all over the UK and out to around 1500 miles into Europe and beyond. This is exactly what I wanted from the antenna and I’ve been very pleased with it’s performance on 80/60/40m.
Looking at the 2D Far Field Plots on the 3 low bands the antenna has a typical NVIS high angle of radiation pattern with some gain.
M0AWS Inverted-L Style Antenna 2D Plot on the 80m Band
On the 80m band maximum radiation is straight up, as expected with a gain of 6.08dBi (3.58dBd). The gain reduces at lower angles however, it still performs well out to around 1500 miles and occasionally even further.
M0AWS Inverted-L Style Antenna 2D Plot on the 60m Band
Once again on the 60m band maximum radiation is pretty much straight up as expected however, I have worked in to Canada many times on 60m with excellent signal reports and so, it also has good DX capability too. With 5.26dBi (2.76dBd) gain it’s not a lossy antenna by any stretch of the imagination.
M0AWS Inverted-L Style Antenna 2D Plot on the 40m Band
On the 40m band things start to change a little with the angle of maximum radiation being at 30 degrees rather than straight up. This gives the antenna “longer legs” on the 40m band making it very easy to work longer distances. It’s still very good for Inter-G but, performance over longer distances is considerably better. With a gain of 3.0dBi (0.5dBd) it’s performance is similar to that of a dipole at a similar height above ground.
Above 7Mhz things start to change considerably. The antenna becomes directional to the North West (NW) and North East (NE) giving excellent DX results over the North Pole into North America and Australia/New Zealand. The antenna does of course also have an element of high angle radiation making it useful into Europe and North Africa on the higher bands.
M0AWS Inverted-L Style Antenna 2D Plot on the 20m Band
On the 20m band the maximum radiation is at 26 degrees with a gain of 5.68dBi (3.18dBd) pointing NW and NE. There is a lower gain lobe to the South West (SW) and South East (SE) giving excellent coverage through Europe and into Africa as can be seen in the 3D Far Field Plot and Azimuth Slice shown below.
M0AWS Inverted-L Style Antenna 3D Plot on the 20m BandM0AWS Inverted-L Style Antenna 2D Azimuth Slice on the 20m Band
Moving up in frequency to the 17m band the 3D Plot and Azimuth Slice are similar to that on the 20m band but, with a slightly lower angle of maximum radiation and slightly more gain as can been in the 2D elevation plot shown below.
M0AWS Inverted-L Style Antenna 2D Plot on the 17m Band
With a gain of 6.61dbi (4.11dBd) at 22 degrees to the NW and NE and slightly lower gain and higher angle to the SW and SE the antenna has proven to work extremely well on the 17m band. My best DX on 17m so far has been a QSO with Eric, FK8GM in New Caledonia some 10230 miles from my QTH using just 80w of SSB.
The 15m band is a similar story, 7.6dBi (5.1dBd) at just 18 degrees pointing NW and NE. This antenna works extremely well into North America and Oceana (I’ve also worked FK8GM on 15m too). Once again there are lower gain lobes to the SW and SE at a similar angle along with some high angle radiation that aids coverage into Europe. The antenna really is a great all rounder on the 15m band.
M0AWS Inverted-L Style Antenna 2D Plot on the 15m Band
The 12m and 10m bands are a similar story, low angle, high gain lobes to the NW and NE with lower gain coverage to the SW and SE.
M0AWS Inverted-L Style Antenna 2D Plot on the 12m Band
On 12m the antenna has a very respectable gain of 7.66dBi (5.16dBd) at a low 16 degrees pointing NW and NE making it a great DX antenna. Once again, higher angle lower gain lobes to the SW and SE.
Finally on the 10m band the antenna has a gain of 6.96dBi (4.46dBd) at a very low angle of 14 degrees to the NW and NE. If DXing over the pole on the 10m band is your thing then this simple antenna will certainly help you along and maybe even put a smile on your face.
M0AWS Inverted-L Style Antenna 2D Plot on the 10m Band
For such a simple antenna that will fit easily into many typical UK gardens I have been extremely pleased with it’s performance. Whether I’m gassing on the low bands with friends from the Matrix rooms or chasing DX on the higher bands, the antenna has put a smile on my face time and time again.
On receive the antenna is surprisingly quiet, with an S3-4 background noise on the 80/60/40m bands through to less than 1 S point of noise on the higher bands. Picking out the weak DX stations really isn’t a problem.
It just goes to show that you don’t need to spend a fortune on commercial antennas to work the world on the HF bands. With as little as 80w of SSB and a piece of wire connected to a remote ATU you can have just as much fun as the big boys!
I’m a big fan of the RaspberryPi single board computers (SBCs) and have been using them since the very first model was released. (I still have the first model even now!)
Over the years I have used RaspberryPi computers for all sorts of things. These days I use them for running services on the local LANs here at home along with a number of virtual machines providing services both locally and publicly on the internet. (Yes, you can run virtual machines (VMs) on RaspberryPi computers)
I currently have 4 x RaspberryPi 5 SBCs running 24/7 and have had them stored in a simple rack that I designed when I first got into 3D printing. The rack worked ok but, it was difficult to get access to the Pi’s without removing those around the one I wanted to access. This is a real nuisance when you have services running on them all.
I’ve now had my 3D printer for a while and decided it was time to design a better solution. Before I set about diving into the CAD software I decided to have a look on Makerworld to see if anyone else had already come up with something more suitable.
The nice thing about this design is that each Pi module connects to the other using a simple sliding, locking pin system. This means that over time you can add more and more modules to the rack as your RaspberryPi collection grows. The other nice thing is that each Pi SBC is held on its own removable sled making it possible to remove each Pi with ease and without disturbing any of the others.
I downloaded the design into BambuStudio and went through all the component parts. I was really pleased to see that there were two sizes of module available, a single board Pi only module and a tall module for housing a RaspberryPi with a HAT installed.
Since the 4 x Pi5’s that I am using have either an NVME + 2nd Gigabit Ethernet HAT or a NVME SSD Baseboard installed I will need the taller module for each unit.
To make it easy to identify each SBC in the rack I printed each module in the same colour as the hostname of the Pi, bluepi, redpi, greenpi, orangepi and a spare slot for purplepi when I get it.
My RaspberryPi rack with 4 x Pi5’s in place and operational
These 4 little Pi’s work hard and CPU temperatures can exceed 50 degrees Celsius very easily. They all have the Official Pi Cooler with fan installed however, this doesn’t come on until the CPU reaches 50c and so I decided to added some extra cooling in the form of a small USB fan onto the back of each module. This reduces the operating temperature of each Pi down to around 25c under full load.
The purple slot on the end is a spare ready to house another Pi SBC. I’d love another Pi5 16GB model but, at the current ridiculous prices it makes no sense to invest in another and so I will fit my spare Pi4 into the slot for now and find something for it to do.
This has been a fun little project to print and put together and will provide the perfect solution to my Pi management woes.
I’ve recently built another AllStarLink node to compliment my personal 70cm band SHARI node as I thought since I have a full duplex dual band handheld it would be great to have another node that I could connect to FreeStar or HUBNet at the same time as monitoring the Matrix node.
Rather than build another personal node I decided this time I would build a public node, obtain a callsign from the RSGB and make it available to the HAM’s locally on the 2m band.
Initially I thought I may be able to use my old Retevis RT85 handheld and AIOC board for the 2m node but, after a little testing it soon became apparent that it overheats during long overs (which are common on AllStarLink) and so, I needed to find another solution.
AIOC connected to the Retevis RT85.
Chatting about this in the main Matrix HAM Radio roomSteve, M0XVT sent me a message saying he had an old Key KM-4000 converted PMR radio that had been reprogrammed for the 2m band that he was looking to sell and that it might be ideal for the new node. Wasting no time, we came to an agreement and I was soon the proud owner of a converted PMR transceiver.
Key KM4000 2m Band PMR Radio
The KM4000 transceiver has a standard output of 15w, 10w more than I needed for the gateway and so I had to reduce the output. A quick search on the internet and I found the Thames Valley Repeater Group website that had all the information required to turn down the output.
I also had to reprogramme channel 1 to the frequency and CTCSS tone allocated to me by the RSGB so that in the event of a power outage when the radio came back on it automatically jumps to channel 1 which would be correctly setup for operation.
Unfortunately the software for programming the radio is only available for windows and so I had to build a virtual machine running windows 10 to be able to reprogramme the radio.
Once this was done I rewired the AIOC USB audio device to work with the KM4000 radio and built the AllStarLink node on a spare RaspberryPi 4.
For an antenna I made a simple end fed vertical dipole from some RG58 coax and mounted it 8m up on one of my Spiderpoles in the garden. Running a coax feed out to the antenna I did some tests into the Parrot to get the audio levels setup and checked that the DTMF codes were interpreted correctly and that the node switched connections without error.
MB7IBW Internet Gateway hardware at the M0AWS QTH
Once this was done I had a few test conversations with stations on the Matrix node and FreeStar to ensure all was fine and then set the gateway status to “Operational” on the RSGB website.
This worked fine for a while with myself and some local stations using the node regularly but, then the hot weather arrived and things started to overheat. The transceiver was getting incredibly hot in the 30c+ summer temperatures and the power supply was also running extremely hot and so I decided to add some cooling.
Cooling the PSU was simple, it has a perforated top panel to which I strapped a cooling fan. This worked great and brought the temperature of the PSU down considerably.
The radio wasn’t so easy to cool. It has a solid case cover top and bottom and so cooling wasn’t going to be a simple affair.
I decided to remove the covers and drill some holes into them to allow airflow through the unit and strapped a fan to the top cover to pull the hot air out. This worked well however, on both transmit and receive I now had a warbling sound on the audio that was caused by the motor of the fan when powered up.
I found that lifting the fan up away from the case of the radio the warbling audio disappeared and things were back to normal and so, I decided to design a cooling tube to fit to the top of the radio to allow full airflow from the fan but, with the fan raised up away from the radio to resolve the audio problem.
Jumping into my CAD software I quickly designed a cooling tower to fit on the top of the radio that would allow the fan to sit far enough away from the radio so as to not affect the audio whilst at the same time pulling the hot air out of the radio and drawing cooler air in through the bottom of the case.
The cooler worked great with the radio staying cool to the touch and no longer overheating and reducing O/P power.
It’s amazing how much dust and dirt is in the air from all the farming activities going on at the end of our garden and how much of it is sucked in by the cooling fan. Regular cleaning is a must!
The MB7IBW Internet Gateway has been on air since mid June 2026 and has worked well. It spends most of its time connected to either FreeStar or HUBNet with connections to the Matrix Node when we have our nets.
Details on Frequency, CTCSS etc can be found under the MB7IBW menu above.
Sadly the initial interest from local HAMs has now wained and I am mostly the only user of the gateway. I was hoping more people would use it and bring some life to the 2m band, I guess time will tell.
It’s been a fun project and was interesting to go through the callsign allocation process with the RSGB representative. It was much easier than I thought it would be.
I now have all the parts to build another Internet Gateway for the 4m band. Hopefully that may attract some more interest. It’s certainly worth a try!
I’ve recently built a new AllStarLink (ASL) node for my MB7IBW gateway that I have recently brought up on air on the 2m band.
AllStarLink 3 has a lot of changes in it when compared to the previous version and this of course impacts my Node-Red Control Dashboard that I’ve been using to manage my first ASL node for well over a year now.
To build the node I used the RaspberryPi imager and added the AllStarlink 3 image as detailed on the allstarlink.org website.
Installing the system this way makes it pretty easy compared to previous installs but, it comes with some quirks which cause issues with Node-Red.
From the outset the plan has always been to have AllStartLink 3 and Node-Red running on the same Pi4 to keep it totally self contained. This was easy enough to achieve and works without issue.
Node-Red Control Dashboard for AllStarLink 3
Installing Node-Red onto a Pi4 is really easy and is fully documented on the Node-Red Website.
Once the AllStarLink 3 operating system was installed on my SD card, booted and operational I installed Node-Red. I soon realised that there were a few things I had to do before loading the Node-Red flow.
AllStarLink 3 no longer logs connect and disconnect messages in the connectlog like it did in AllStarLink 2. To get logging working again I had to create two new BASH scripts as detailed below and put them into /etc/asterisk/myscripts.
For the connect information I created the BASH script as detailed below.
Next I disabled the temporary filesystems that are used by default for the apache and asterisk logging as it’s useful to keep the apache logs for debugging and I needed the asterisk logs for the Node-Red dashboard.
Disabling the temporary file system is very easy to do, just edit the /etc/fstab and comment out the two lines as shown below.
# Comment out the next line for persistent Apache logs
#tmpfs /var/log/apache2 tmpfs defaults,noatime,nosuid,nodev,noexec,mode=0775,size=32M 0 0
# Comment out the next line for persistent Asterisk logs
#tmpfs /var/log/asterisk tmpfs defaults,noatime,nosuid,nodev,noexec,mode=0775,size=32M,uid=102,gid=106 0 0
# Note: These lines are wrapped, should be on 1 line in the /etc/fstab
Once the entries in the /etc/fstab were commented out I rebooted the Pi4 to get persistent filesystems.
The final thing that had to be done was to allow user repeater to use sudo without a password so that it could be used to perform reboot/shutdown/process restart as user root from within the dashboard.
# /etc/sudoers
# Allow repeater sudo without password
repeater ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL
Once this was all done I imported the Node-Red flow, configured the SSH nodes with login credentials for the Pi4 (important to use the user repeater for SSH), clicked deploy and the dashboard was ready for use.
Node Red AllStarLink3 Control Dashboard Flow
I’ve been using the dashboard for a few weeks now and it’s running perfectly, without error.
If you want to build your own Node-Red Control Dashboard for your AllStarLink 3 node then, just download the flow using the button below and import it into your flow editor.
Yesterday morning I ventured up onto the 20m band and to my surprise, found that the band was open to inter-G, unusually short skip for the 20m band.
Wanting to take advantage of the conditions I kicked off with a QSO with David, MI0AIH in Cookstown Northern Ireland. With 59+ signals both ways, it was like being on 40/60/80m with a crystal clear path between us.
Next was GB0BBF operating POTA GB-0619, again 59 both ways and a really easy contact.
My third contact was with Aled, MW0UPH who was parked up in his car on a hill in North Wales. The path between us was incredibly good. With 59 signals both ways and an FM like arm chair copy, we chatted for a few minutes making the most of the short skip.
Aled very kindly made a quick video of our conversation and sent a copy over to me to watch. It’s always nice to hear what you sound like on the other end.
M0AWS as heard by MW0UPH on the 20m Band
Unfortunately I didn’t think to make a video of the conversation at my end but, it was exactly the same, crystal clear arm chair copy, just like a 2m FM contact.
It was great fun working UK stations on a band that I would normally only ever hear EU and DX stations. It was interesting to note that Inter-G on 40m was really poor at the same time.
Thanks to Aled for the video.
More soon …
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