I'm the original poster....?? In reply to your question....

First, I was mistaken on a couple of the details...

We have nine sites. And adding two more by April of 2022.
Each site has internet either provided by the site owner, or we brought it in via an Ubiquity 5 gig microwave shot.? The Ubiquity, the Cisco router, the laptop power brick, and a few other items are run off a 600w APC UPS that has no internal battery but is connected to the 12 volt site battery (400 amp-hour) which has it's own Samlex charger.

We plan on running a Pi off of a buck converter off of the site battery. The Pi will be connected to the router via an ethernet cable (preferred) or wireless - each site has an old residential Dlink, Linksys or some other brand only for wifi-cellphone use while we are on site.?? (when you can pick them up for $5 each at thrift stores, why not?)

We will use a wall wart feeding a DC relay as the local AC power sensor... dry contacts grounding a GPIO pin.? When the Pi sees the power go away it starts
a routine that checks every minute for 5-10 minutes to see if it's a momentary or a "hard" outage (could be as short as 10 min, could be a week... a few years ago one forest fire burned out the power lines to one site and the site was on generator for a month.??? Someone had do a round trip of 30 miles of highway plus 15 miles of 4x4 roads every other day for 51 days with ten 5-gallon jerry cans of gasoline on each trip.

On a power fail the Pi will to send an email message to a list of addresses (probably 8 to 10 addresses)...? ?
The email will contain the site name, the local time, date, day of week, system uptime, and any other Pi-connected sensor info... Inside temp, outside temp, humidity, etc.

On a power return, it depends on if the duration exhausted the battery (which is primarily there for the repeaters). Each site has a low voltage disconnect circuit to prevent killing the batteries with overdischarge...

If the Pi is still running (i.e. the disconnect didn't activate) then the system will send a "power is restored" email similar to the above.

If the disconnect did activate and the Pi has to reboot then it will note the parameters for the restoral email (time, day and date, etc from it's RTC board), then wait until the microwave internet link re-establishes (i.e. wait until it actually can send the email).

Once the link is up it pings the us.ntp.org server to verify the link is actually up (and BTW to verify the actual time and date).? Then it sends the email, with a note as to the time of the actual power return.

And a cron job will send the periodic status message that I mentioned in the original posting.

Again, I don't mind buying something, even ham built, as long as there isn't a? monthly charge and it's a stand-alone device (i.e. not cloud based).

One person pointed me to this:?? https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B089QQNKJL

It's financially attractive, and the fact that is has three AAA cells inside to make 4.5 volts to power it while the power is off can be worked around... The three cells could die and leak... we've not been to some of the sites in years.

The workaround is two pieces of wooden dowel the diameter of a AAA cell, with a brass thumbtack pressed into one end and a wire soldered to the thumbtack. You can get 4.5 volts from a buck regulator off the site battery.

The biggest issue with that device is that there is a company monitoring it and actually sending the emails, and cloud companies have a habit of evaporating.

Since I posted the original message we've been focused on other things... we had to move 3 systems from one building to another at one mountaintop, we had to replace 4 antennas at another mountaintop, and the Thanksgiving holiday happened (my wife decided that we were going to do a Thanksgiving trip to another state... I drove? 600+ miles / about 12 hours each way and we spent a week visiting family).

I'm probably going to be building up something using a Pi ver 2, a metal case (https://www.amazon.com/Flirc-Raspberry-Pi-Zero-Case/dp/B08837L144),
and using the ideas presented in the previous postings.

Again - comments, suggestions, pointers to products - even a 1-man ham company in a garage - are welcome.

Mike WA6ILQ?? (callsign //at// gmail //dot// com)

Huh ??? ?Pi-Star runs on a Raspberry Pi....not on Windows or MacOS. But you can access it's web interface using Windows or Mac web browsers. Is that what you are asking ?

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On 12/3/21 10:41, Paul Withers wrote:

Has anyone had an issue with Pi-Star not running on my Windows 11 machine.
Thanks for any help.

is the best place to ask.

No. Pi-Star seems fine on your Windows 11 machine from here.

On 03/12/2021 13:41 Paul Withers <kd0etl@...> wrote:


Has anyone had an issue with Pi-Star not running on my Windows 11 machine.
Thanks for any help.

Paul, KD0ETL

Nigel A. Gunn, ///shoulders.outwards.resolutions tel +1-937-971-0366
Amateur Radio G8IFF W8IFF and GMRS WRBV701, e-mail nigel@... www

Has anyone had an issue with Pi-Star not running on my Windows 11 machine.
Thanks for any help.

Paul, KD0ETL

--
- Dave,?
-- Lifetime Member of??&??and curator of??--

I use VNC to access my Pi in headless mode from either a PC, an Android phone, or mostly through a Kindle Fire tablet. The IP address is either the same as my router if at home and all on the network, or 10.10.10.10 if the Pi is out of range of WiFi and is working as a hotspot. The name and password are what I set up on the Pi using the BAP tools for hotspot management. I don't recognize the VNC screen you are showing, but it has been a while since I set VNC up and once done it seems to replicate across other platforms when I sign in. Try entering the IP address and the Pi user and password and see if the port assignment is even needed.

=Vic=

I'm not sure a metal case would be the? answer. After all, the wires leading in and out of the case would just act as short antennas sending the RF to the Pi in spite of the case. I do like the idea of chokes, though.

Hi,

Just for my own curiosity is the offending radio in a plastic box or in a grounded metal box?

7,

Bill KU8H

bark less - wag more

--

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Yeah, EMI from large motors too

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Consider the antennas and coax also. Try putting a dummy load on the radio and see if the problem goes away. You might have a common current problem. ?Antennas that are in balanced or have an insufficient counterpoise can cause RFI to the equipment in the shack. The dead giveaway that it’s the antenna and not the coax is to put the dummy load out at the antenna.

Although it's not an issue for the OP, I found that the Pi's i2c bus is very susceptible to RF. Note that at VHF or UHF frequencies, an i2c ribbon cable of an unfortunate length can be especially troublesome. Since there was no good solution using a ferrite, I bought some fine copper mesh on eBay to put the Pi and its i2c-connected devices inside a Faraday cage. This worked. The long-term solution, though, was to use USB-connected devices instead of i2c-connected devices. USB isn't impervious to RF either, but its natural noise immunity appears to exceed i2c's.?

73 Chuck K4RGN

Sounds like you have a harmonic or rf back into the touchpad.?

Is anybody experiencing RF problems with the Raspberry Pi 400? I was recently gifted a Pi400 and loaded the HamPi distribution. I don't have RF problems with anything else in the shack, but when I transmit (so far only on 20 and 40 meters) the Pi400 goes nuts. Stuff jumps around on the screen, programs open and close and all matter of strange behavior. It's like there are multiple mouses screaming around randomly clicking on things. Nothing is connected to it, just the Pi400 with its stock mouse and power supply hooked to a generic monitor. It was on a small table several feet from the radio. There are four other computers in the shack and a variety of other things that are not affected at all.

Thought appreciated.


--
73,
Michael WA7SKG

"Any day you do not learn one new thing is a wasted day."

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Sorry, fat fingered the port.?

VNC has always used TCP ports starting at 5900 (not 5000!).? Username is 'pi', unless you created another user.? Password is 'raspberry', unless you changed it.

If you're installing Raspbian completely headless, first you have to connect via ssh and enable VNC using 'raspi-config'.? It's either in interface or advanced options.