Whilst I’ve been waiting for the weather to improve so that I can get my QO-100 dish antenna up I’ve been working on my QO-100 Node Red dashboard.
The idea of the dash board is to bring together the operating of the receiver and transmitter into one control centre so that the two separate devices are able to communicate and behave as if they were actually one device, like a transceiver rather than being individual components.
Ideally I would like to have the transmitter and receiver talking to each other such that when the VFO on the transmitter is incremented/decremented the receiver VFO also moves by the same amount.
By doing this the receiver VFO should always be in the right place on the 10Ghz band to hear my 2.4Ghz uplink signal and of course, any station coming back to my CQ calls.
So far I’ve only been working on the receive part of the Node Red flow, it’s certainly been a lot of fun getting it put together.
I control my Funcube Dongle Pro+ (FCD) using GQRX SDR on my Kubuntu PC. This software is working extremely well with the FCD and I’m happy with the level of functionality it offers.
GQRX SDR has the ability built in to control the SDR via remote TCP connection using RIGCTL protocol. Currently there isn’t a RIGCTL node available for Node Red so I have written a number of Javascript function nodes that provide the appropriate functionality in conjunction with a standard Node Red TCP node. This is working extremely well on the local LAN in the radio room and is proving to be very stable and responsive.
The flow for the receive section of the dashboard looks fairly complicated but, in reality it’s really not too difficult to get to grips with. The receive flow provides the facility to switch bands, switch modes, change receiver filter band width, display a realtime signal strength meter, receive +/- clarifier in 10/100/1000Hz increments and put the receiver into QO-100 mode where the SDR VFO is tuned to 739.550Mhz whilst the dashboard VFO shows the QO-100 downlink frequency in the 10Ghz band. This is all working very well and I’m happy with the initial result.
I now need to start work on the transmit side of the QO-100 dashboard and get communications between my IC-705 transceiver and the FCD SDR working via Node Red. This could be a little more challenging as it will involve communicating with the IC-705 via WFView over wifi.
More soon …