Hi Ramon, I used these instructions as a baseline for modding a CM-108. It's a bit of very small work (parts are tiny), and I'm an old fart, but I have the right tools for the job, and a good magnifier light. I connected the audio in, out and PTT directly to the cm-108 by cutting a Baofeng mic/headphone cable apart so I had the molded plug and all the associated connections. Unfortunately, I never applied polish to the job and dressed it up, but I did have it working fine, on a Pi0W, and a UV-5R. I VERY much like the UV-5R as I am not a radio snob, and if it works, it works. I used the marrold instructions as a guideline and I changed them a bit too. I added an optoisolator directly to the CM-108 for the PTT and isolation protection between the radio and card/Pi. The negative connection is common to all of the parts. I got a bit of flack for unknown reasons when I tried to help out others by posting my PTT circuit on here, so I stopped. Questions about WHY I used a resistor instead of leaving an open collector output, or my use of the 'incorrect' label. If you don't know what I mean, you don't understand electronics enough to build it, so don't.
As I see it the biggest downside to using a UV-5R, or any other handheld is the adjustment of the levels for audio in/out. I have used several UV-5Rs for APRS. I use the 12v automobile cigarette lighter power supply, pop it apart and mount an Argent Data OT3-mini inside the adapter housing with the regulator. The above mentioned cable for the mic/headphone gets used again and this makes a package that clips on to the HT like the battery, plug in the molded plug and supply 12vdc, set levels, good to go (you have to know where to set the volume knob). I have not, but a GPS could be connected to the OT3-mini, for tracking, as well. The stations I have built like this are used in fixed locations for battery, temperature, fill-in applications. 73.
On Fri, Nov 17, 2023 at 10:48?AM Ramon Kolb < ramonkolb@...> wrote: On Fri, Nov 17, 2023 at 07:26 AM, Gil Rand wrote:
Ramon, VERY cool! This would appear to be a very painless way to install for people who are less than agile with Linux. The hardening of the OS would be excellent as I had my station fail, and the reason was not readily evident. I am using a Pi 1 with an external soundcard USB dongle, homebrew interface, and a mobile radio to provide a 2-way Igate for my area. I suspect that either there were too many writes to the SD card or a few hard downs messed up the OS. I put the latest OS and Direwolf back on and reconfigured and everything was good again.
Your project, if I understand it correctly, would alleviate some of the down time and simplify an install or re-install.
You could get away from the VOX if you mod a CM-108 for PTT, I'm thinking.
Great work!
Hi Gil,
My experience with aircraft tracking (many GBs of data daily!) is that most of my SD cards, even the "endurance" ones, last a maximum of about 2 years. You can see when they are dieing because the IOWAIT cycles go up dramatically; when you see that you have a very short time to get stuff off ;)
This is one of the reasons that I containerized everything and keep docker configs & persistent data inside a single directory tree (Docker lets you do that easily). For most of my internet-connected station, I do nightly backups (using my Google Drive account for that) of only that portion of the data that is important. That way, rebuilding a Pi and restoring it to the previous state can be done in about 15-20 minutes, including flashing a clean OS onto a SD card.?
As for Docker - it does add a little bit overhead to the system (mainly in disk usage and a minute amount of CPU to manage the containers). What you get back for it, is a quasi-virtualized environment where you can run sets of programs (containers) in their own environment. You don't have to "build" or "create" that container yourself or install software inside of it - this is all done through "pulling" that container and adding your configs to a standard configuration file. (There are options to do many things manually as well, but that's what I tried to avoid!). All you need to do is to tell the system to bring the container "up", and it will take care of the rest for you.
If there are software changes (the container maintainer brings out a new version, etc.), all you need to do is tell the system to "pull" the new version of the container and start it. The management of replacing the old container with the new one, etc. is all done automatically for you.?
As a result, Docker is ideal for running a bunch of disparate things on a single machine at the same time, without these things interfering with each other. It's also ideal for "maintaining" your software, since upgrading to new versions is done by a simple "docker compose pull" command.?
A good friend of mine wrote a primer on how to do things with Docker. It's focused on creating aircraft ADSB receivers and feeding that data to FlightAware, FR24, and a bunch of other aggregators, however it's a great thing to read up on even if you don't want to do that:?
Enough about Docker and code development -- I need to start reading up on the CM108 PTT thing and how to make a simple interface between my Baofeng (POS) handheld and the sound card. I'm using the APRS-K2 cable now, and as expected, the TXTail is atrocious.
--Ramon kx1t, Belmont MA, USA
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