I finally got my AllStarLink 3 node up and running. I had registered for a node number, and I had bought the pieces to have them ready to go. The little Pi Zero W boards I have wouldn’t boot, so I used a Pi 4 instead with the USB radio device.

Initial Installation on Pi 4

I started out with the official instructions:

• Downloaded the image for the Pi
• Installed the Pi Imager by deb file instead of just dding it to the device, since the imager conveniently allows pre-configuring:
  • user
  • locale
  • WiFi network

Configured the Cheap Ausinc UHF AllStar Radio Dongle

I purchased the hardware from Amazon a while ago. It has a USB-C port, and the cable is flipped for different modes:

• one way to program the frequency via USB serial
• other way to use the USB sound device for TX/RX The product description mentioned the different modes, but I didn’t recognize it. I learned about the flip from a video

I downloaded the srfrs.py Python script to the Pi, and used it to configure frequency and tone to protect default access to it:

./srfrs.py --port /dev/ttyUSB0 --frequency 438.1 --ctcss 94.8

Matthew, KC3WRY, suggested this frequency in the 70cm of the band. I was reading and wondering about 446.1 or 433 or so.

More Configuration and Confirmation

I followed another video for more configuration and confirmation of the settings from intro video.

I made another pass at web-based configs and asl-menu. I set it to be a SimpleUSB device in simplex mode, and I tuned the volume settings. I had no TX until I set “Change CTCSS From = no”. I don’t know what that setting does, but the tip came from the video. Then I could use the allmon3 web interface to connect up to Parrot+ node (55553) for testing, and it reported, “volume just about right.” I could connect and disconnect to nodes from the web interface. There are other commands in the web interface to say the time or id the node on demand.

I could send DTMF commands from my UV-K5 with the F4HWN firmware:

• * starts DTMF entry, PTT sends the codes.
• *1 <node number> disconnects from a node
• *2 <node number> connects to monitor another node
• *3 <node number> connects to transcieve to another node
• other scripts, like “disconnect all” don’t seem to work yet.

The W3GMS admins granted me access to connect my node to the repeater, so I’ll have a chance to try it out there. I was also able to connect to K3IR.

I used the N3KZ repeater system, specifically the York node on 442.050, for the first time from home. I spoke to N3RCI, who I usually hear on KX3B. He was on the node in Havre de Grace. I used the 1/4-wave ground plane antenna in the tree.

I continue to be amazed that a 70cm repeater node has such reach. I used the York node, but I often hear the nodes in Cumberland, York, and Lebanon; sometimes I even hear Chambersburg…on UHF. It just doesn’t seem like it should be possible.

I stumbled into a couple Olivia signals on 14071kHz, and on a good guess, I fired up fldigi, and I was able to decode them. They were Olivia-8/250 encoded. I found lots of good documents on Olivia to read some mmore about where they’re likely found.

Club Business

• Elections
• Ideas
  • Looking for help with fox hunt
    • have the transmitters
    • can get help from other clubs

Presentation: DMR with Jason

• originally designed for professional radio installations.
  • lots of motorola gear
• developed in europe first
• digital voice
• data
• components
  • radios
  • repeaters
  • controllers (for routing traffic)
  • network infrastructure
• lots of networking and linking over large areas.
• types
  • tier 1 - consumer
  • tier 2 - professional, trunked
  • tier 3 - trunked, large-scale
• TDMA (time-division multiple access) - 2 channels / slots
• narrow bandwidth 12.5khz band
• modes
  • private
  • group
  • broadcast
  • data: text, gps, telemetry
• radio id is assigned by radioid.net to you and your call sign
• talkgroup = collecting a bunch of radio ids into a single contact
• popular public networks:
  • tgif
  • brandmeister
• can also be a private network
• hotspots access dmr network via the internet
• delmarvadmr.com
• 3 building blockse
  • talk groups
  • channels
  • zones

My Week in Radio

• Took down my 2M antennas to straighten and resolder.
• Catching up the radio blog with my recent experiences.
• Trying F4HWN firmware on Quansheng radios
  • previous firmware, AUBSUK, for my Quansheng radio was skipping channels when I activated more than 1 scan list.
  • larger display with single VFO
  • rethinking my scan lists
  • the S-meter is calibrated differently from the other firmware
• no questions, because I should just be reading the antenna book
• FT Challenge coming up in 2 weekends. *** Others
• KD3ACF, JT:
  • acquired a j-pole for the attic
  • new ham with an HT
  • magmount on the car, tested with WA3VEE from Manheim High School
• W8CRW, CR:
  • 985 activities
  • Red Rose activities
  • Salem CCARS acitvity
• W3QP, Tim:
  • trip to HRO
  • planning trips
• WA3VEE, Ron:
  • working on an old receiver
    • re-capping
    • Hammerland hq140x
    • terrible, loud 120hz buzz, so ordered capacitors to replace them
    • cleaned
    • fixed
    • needs just a little more work, alignment
  • got over to KC3YSM, Steve’s place to help with his antenna
    • analyzed
    • Buckmaster OCF dipole
• KC3RFG, Jim:
  • watching 10m
  • Croatia, Belgium
  • repairing the 160m/75m dipole, new balun
• AF3Z, Jim:
  • testing his 1-tube QRP transmitter
  • practiced some CW with a friend on 10m
  • found sweden and belgium lower in the band.
• KC3OOK, Bill:
  • 985 net, simplex net
  • working on tower
  • helping Joe, W3GMS, assemble his new tower
• KC3SCY, Luke:
  • lots of time off from school this week
  • 10m has been wide-open
  • spent some time on 40m SSB and AM
• KC3VRW, Phil:
  • attempted to build a 10m inverted-V
  • MFJ tuner
  • trying tech HF frequencies

Questions

• W3QP, Tim: Follow up on battery measurements for the TSA, Watt-hours instead of Amp-hours.
  • bigger batteries have bigger thermal events.
  • Wh is the amount of potential power.
  • Wh doesn’t require doing the math to consider voltage in combo with Ah.
  • 18Ah at 12V.
  • The nominal voltage for the cells is less.
  • Expected usable volts are even less, so Wh is less than just V*A.
  • Nominal voltage can be different across different battery chemistries.
  • Nominal voltage may not be obvious.
  • 11.1 Nominal voltage might be 12.6V at peak charge.
  • Volts and Amps are important for application, but Watt-hours is better overall for capacity.
• AF3Z, Jim:
  • tinkering with Hartley oscillator: mica capacitors, ceramic capacitors, what’s the difference of all the different capacitors?
    • WA3KFT, John:
      • ratings: capacitance, voltage.
      • The “dry electrolytic” is a paste, not oil.
      • main purpose is filtering AC converted to DC.
      • filtering some frequencies
      • ceramic capacitors are pretty stable, until overheated.
      • mica capacitors are small capacitances, pF. used for frequency stablizing.
      • variable air capacitor
      • oil filled are higher capacitance and used for low frequencies in power supplies, etc.
    • WA3VEE, Ron:
      • film capacitors
        • different dielectric
        • used for audio.
      • paper capacitor
      • dielectric is anything that separates the plates.
      • air capacitors
    • W3QP, Tim:
      • silver mica are maybe lower loss than ceramic
      • multi-layer capacitors for higher currents
    • W3DIB, Greg:
      • negatives of certain capacitors:
        • some dielectrics leak
        • tantalums can dead-short, like in a power supply.
      • saw a cool video of people building filters for cheap radios in places with heavy RF to keep them working better.
    • WA3VEE, Ron:
      • they leak when they get overheated.
      • leads to the plate have a little resistance so generate heat.
      • capacitor can have a vent that leaks under pressure.
    • NA3CW, Chuck:
      • capacitors are deceptively complex
      • all components have some bit of capacitance, inductance, resistance.
      • vacuum dialectric for especially high voltage.
      • lots of trade-off characteristics
      • some are piezoelectric (microphone), like a condenser microphone
• WA3VEE, Ron:
  • homework: does a capacitor allow current to flow through it? KC3SQI, Wayne:
• solar telescope demos on December 11 at some park

My Weeks in Radio

• QRP on a couple hawaiian islands
• not much 2m activity
  • added some repeaters and scanned
• POTA
  • Xiegu x6100 mostly turned up to 8W
  • mostly 10m-30m and everything in between
  • challenging to be on an island where you have to go thousands of miles or you reach no one.
  • antennas:
    • 40M EFHW where I had room,
    • 41ft long EFRW with less room
    • vertical whip and coil attached to a fishing pole for a less conspicuous setup on some beaches
  • 6 parks and 2 trails on 2 islands:
    • sandy beaches
    • rocky lava fields
    • inside diamondhead caldera
    • atop steaming kilauea
  • reached:
    • west: Australia, New zealand, Fiji, Japan, Russia, China, South Cook Islands, Samoa
    • east: North Carolina, Kentucky, Ohio, Dominican Republic, Argentina
  • practiced some CW on the beach when I didn’t get out the computer
• back to a home park yesterday, but the weather was not as nice.
• took down my home-made 2m antennas and straightened them up.
• trying F4HWN 3.7 firmware for Quansheng radios
  • from a scanner-centered AUBSUK firmware that was skipping some channels
• looking forward to that FT Challenge contest

Other News

• contests
  • CQ WW CW this weekend
  • no contests for the Thanksgiving weekend
  • following weekend
    • 160m CW arrl contest
    • FT challenge contest
• KA3TKW: R&L electronics: TYT MD-9600, GD-77 open firmware
• digipeat through the ISS
• high pass of ISS tonight at 9:10pm.
• 224.220 repeater is up and running, but not linked yet.
• KC3NNO: mini dxpedition to canada

The home-brew yagi blows around in the wind a bit, so I brought it down this morning as it started to snow, so I could straighten and tighten the elements. I realigned it for the 985 repeater, and checked it to be giving -96dBm.

I also resoldered some radials on the 1/4-wave ground plane antenna that go knocked loose in the tree.

Problem: AUBSUK multiple scan list

The scan lists aren’t combining correctly on AUBSUK firmware. It’s skipping entries based on ordering. I realized I was missing most of simplex channels, but seeing the GMRS channels, when I enabled my “simplex” scan list in combo with primary repeaters. There’s an existing issue logged, but it’s hard to describe and to reproduce, I think.

Trying the Next Firmware, F4HWN 3.7

F4HWN is available on GitHub. I loaded it on both radios in place of AUBSUK to see how I get along. I’ve found a few features I really like:

• Scan on start: if it’s scanning when I switch it off, it’ll scanning when switched on.
• 3 scan lists: 1, 2, 3, 123, 0, all
  • they don’t recombine as freely, but I have:
    • simplex, repeaters, satellites on 1
    • GMRS on 3
• scan is just as fast as others, so we’ll see if it’s tolerable.
• “main only” display is nice, much easier to read.
• spectrum analyzer with scan range, but I can’t assign it to a button.
  • Fn-5 is only way to activate it.

I think the S-meter is calibrated much differently from AUBSUK, and other firmwares I’ve loaded, calibration for VHF/UHF vs HF, The S-meter seems to read higher than I expect with lots of S9+.

The spectrum analyzer with a range seems wonky at times: it may be scanning the entire range, but the graph doesn’t seem all there. I noticed it with the scan of 144MHz-148MHz.

My Weeks in Radio

• QRP on a couple Hawaiian islands
• Not much 2m activity on the islands
  • added some repeaters and scanned
• POTA
  • no summits
  • all successful activations via FT8/FT4
    • allowed me to use pskreporter to study my propagation on different bands, even if other stations didn’t answer my call
  • practiced some CW on the beach when I didn’t get out the computer
  • mostly turned up to 8W
  • mostly 10m-30m and everything in between
  • challenging to be on an island where you have to go thousands of miles or you reach no one.
  • 6 parks and 2 trails on 2 islands:
    • inside Diamondhead caldera
    • atop steaming Kilauea
    • rocky lava fields
    • sandy beaches
  • reached:
    • west: Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Japan, Russia, China, South Cook Islands, Samoa
    • east: North Carolina, Kentucky, Ohio, Dominican Republic, Argentina
  • antennas:
    • 40M EFHW where I had room,
    • 21.5M-long EFRW with less room
    • vertical whip and coil attached to a fishing pole for a less conspicuous setup on some beaches
• It may be time to start cobbling together an allstar node.

Others

• W3JAM, Jeff: Jerry Sevic (w2fmi) books on transformers and baluns
• KC3TMZ, Matt:
  • Lives in a park
  • Built a dipole and analyzed it
    • really good SWR: 1.048:1
    • 20 ft into the tree
    • reached California on 20m
    • ran into ARRL Sweepstakes
    • dipole in a tree is a lot of work
    • playing with Inovato Hamclock
• WA3VEE, Ron:
  • worked ARRL Sweepstakes a bit
  • cleared the bench
  • may have gear to sell soon
• KB3ZIM, Bob:
  • avoided ARRL Sweepstakes
  • enjoying 10m
  • some 10m AM as well
  • spent time in Honolulu and enjoyed the Diamondhead years ago
• KC3RFG, Jim:
  • had a balun fail
• KC3YSM, Steve:
  • getting an HF antenna up with help from Chuck and Bill
  • George lent the launcher
• KC3TYX, Vic:
  • Sweepstakes: 75 contacts
  • VaraC for keyboard chat on HF
    • lost settings and had to setup again
• W3QP, Tim:
  • found the 4th edition of the balun book on archive.org
  • winding 2 wires around the toroid is a lot like winding coax
  • winding 4 wires in opposite directions will give more bandwidtch
• NA3CW, Chuck:
  • learned lots from W2FMI book
    • W2FMI tested everything extensively
  • got Steve’s antenna in the air…through the vines, thorns, etc
  • normal nets, including PMA AM net.
  • working on an ultimate transmatch tuner
• KC3OOK, Bill:
  • helped with Steve’s antenna today
  • 2m band opening on Sunday: PA to Ottawa on DXView
• W8CRW, CR:
  • 985 breakfast
  • showed wife around 10m tech area
• AF3Z, Jim:
  • built a Hartley transmitter for 1929 AMA event
    • 1 tube
    • 1-2W
    • worked 5 stations over 80 minutes
• KV3JGB, Matt:
  • 985 breakfast
  • launched an antenna with help from 985-ers after breakfast
  • starting cwops
• W3MFB, Mike:
  • just chatting locally on the radio
• W3FES, Fred:
  • building out a new, larger ham desk
• W3MOW, Mike:
  • quiet week

Questions

• KC3TMZ, Matt:
  • setting up shack in the garage, and ordered a hamclock. wifi is a bit weak. can he extend with a yagi?
    • W3CRW, CR:
      • years ago, had a yagi antenna for wifi, and it worked
      • wifi extender/repeater does even better
    • W3DIB, Greg:
      • trench fiber instead of cat5/6.
        • isolated from electrical storms
      • if you don’t need a ton of bandwidth, try wifi halow bridge on 900mhz.
        • 4Mb
      • yagi antenna may pull in noise from others
    • KB3ZIM, Bob: Adam, KB3ZUV, another 985-er, is working on a similar project
  • flying with HTs?
    • WA3VEE, Ron:
      • bring a good copy of your license printed from cores
      • batteries must be carried on, not checked
    • KB3ZIM, Bob:
      • batteries are the concern
      • check size with the airline
    • KC3WWC, John:
      • wonderous bag of radio gear
        • HT
        • 10Ah lifepo4
        • QRP radio
        • antenna wires
        • if you check any gear, separate out the batteries to carry
    • WA3VEE, Ron:
      • sent link to website
      • limit 8wh, do the math.
      • precheck helps smooth the screening
    • W8CRW, CR:
      • CR has more trouble with carrying powertools since they’re not marked than HT
• KB3ZIM, Bob:
  • wants to get a wire for 160M in the air.
  • could be a long wire with a tuner
  • what’s a good length for a random wire
  • W3QP, Tim: lots of tables out there
  • KC3WWC: google “udel random wire”
    • always choke and counterpoise to avoid common mode current
  • KB3ZIM, Bob:
    • google “ham radio secrets”
      • talks about tuning the counterpoise
    • could try a super-slinky
• W3DIB, Greg:
  • recently got on RF instead of
  • has anyone reverse-engineered the serial connections for Yaesu
  • W3QP, Tim: could use wireshark to look at serial traffic through usb serial adapter
  • KC3WWC, John: there’s cat and drivers for everything
  • W3DIB, Greg: this is a lesser radio without cat control, so he’s looking to control all the comms himself

I went to Hawaii for the first couple weeks of November 2024.

I packed up all the POTA radio gear and headed out to fly to Hawaii. I carried all my radio gear and big battery in my carry-on backpack.

I added a few repeaters, and scanned 2M, but didn’t hear anyone on my UV-K6.

I started out operating FT8 at the resort with the EFRW (12.5M) strung between columns on the patio. I could reach stations in Hawaii, Fiji, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and Oregon on 10m, 12m, 17m, and 20m. I had to turn up to 8W to get heard.

For parks, I operated 6 parks and 2 trails across 2 islands: beaches, lava fields, and volcanos.

On 2024-11-04, I activated US-0753, Pu’uhonua o Honaunau National Historical Park, with the EFHW for 40m strung across trees in the picnic area near the rocky coast. I accidentally split the day, since I wasn’t familiar with the timezone offset. Fortunately, I had enough contacts for an activation in each of the 2 days. Much of the west coast of the big island also counts as US-4565, Ala Kahakai National Historic Trail.

On 2024-11-08, I activated US-0037, Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, with EFHW stretched from a shelter and picnic table to a nearby tree on West Rim Road in the park. I struggled for a bit from my start at 10am. Conditions got better near 2pm local time, and I finished up my activation while having lunch with Emily.

On 2024-11-10 I went to US-2214, Kekaha Kai State Park, after running around a bit to find a spot. I wanted to work fast, and there were no trees in the vast lava field, so I deployed the whip and coil bungied to the fishing pole and the grill of the car. That activation went pretty fast.

On 2024-11-13, I visited US-0739, Kaloko-Honokohau National Historical Park, which is also US-4565, Ala Kahakai National Historic Trail. It had closed an earlier day, so I couldn’t activate that day. It was good, because I hiked the mile or so to setup on the beach and toss the counterpoise for the vertical whip into the ocean.

On 2024-11-16, I walked across Waikiki to US-10923, Artillery District of Honolulu Historic Site. It was pretty early morning and slow. I strung the shorter EFRW (12.5M) from a table to a tree in an inverted V. I chatted a while with another traveling ham, and I didn’t manage to complete my activation. I ran out of time, and packed up.

My last activation was on 2024-11-17, at US-6425, Diamond Head State Preserve, I setup at a picnic table near the hiking trail, US-10913, Diamond Head Summit State Trail. The whole park is in the caldera of the volcano. The EFHW stretched from table to a tree. The antenna wire disconnected from the transformer, but it was close, so it received OK, but trying to transmit showed a high SWR where the antenna would never usually. It was super-windy as the sun set early over the mountain surrounding me.