It is reasonably straightforward to do this, but first let me say, it is preferable to run hot-spots through a wired internet connection, if at all possible, You will have better digital voice performance with lower latency than if you run your hot-spot using WiFi.
After you burn the image onto a micro SD card, you'll end up with two partitions, /root, where most of the Raspbian OS is installed and /boot, a smaller partition used during initial boot up. Before you try to boot from this new SD card, you'll want to create two files in the boot partition to enable both WiFi and remote access.
To enable SSH, simply create an empty file, ssh, in the boot partition. This will cause the system to enable ssh on its first boot up.
To enable WiFi, you simply need to provide a working wpa_supplicant.conf file and you do this by creating this file in the the boot partition. On the first boot, the OS will copy this file to the proper location and enable WiFi. This is explained, with an example, on the Raspbian website at
??In the wpa_supplicant.conf file, you just need to specify the WiFi network name (ssid) and the password (psk) and also set your country (country). If you want your Pi to optionally connect to a different WiFi network, it gets slightly more complicated because you also need to define a priority for each defined network.
The first time you boot up on this card, give it some extra time. It will boot twice as it automatically expands the file system to incorporate all available space on the SD card. It will also take some extra time to make its first connection to your WiFi network.
After the system is booted up, you should be able to ssh into it: ssh
?pi@<internet?address>
Then do a "sudo apt update" followed by an "sudo apt upgrade". After that you can reset the pi user password and change your locale in the menu-driven command: raspi-config.
After all that you're ready to download and build QnetGateway...
John Hays - K7VE / WRJT-215