Just wanted to share my success story:

• Raspberry Pi 3 B
• NinoTNO from tarpn.net
• Baofeng UV5R for now, just ordered a better radio as it's too weak/deaf in my area
• KM4ACK Build-a-Pi script to install VHF related software including YAAC
• Using realVNC to access the PI from a laptop/desktop/tablet
• all housed in a small HF/Apache weatherproof case
• The case has a N type bulkhead antenna connector and waterproof power connector. The radio is modified to run on 12V and the Pi has a 12V-5v converter.
• There is room to add a small battery for off-grid operation.

I've had this up for a few weeks and it's been great as a 2-way igate. There is one other RF-IS igate in my town and another 20 miles away in another town.
It was fairly easy to setup entirely through the GUI, no command line required!
I have been using it to message as many stations as I can and have made a few contacts. One is a neighbor running a BBS on 145.010 so I'm interested in adding another TNC/radio for the other frequency as long as I can make sure to direct traffic out the appropriate ports.

For a comparison I tried using Xastir, but didn't like it as much. YAAC is more responsive in map rendering and UI features. I like the messaging capabilities in YAAC better as well

pie-in-the-sky features I'd like to see:

• option to automatically start tracking new (mobile) stations so I don't have to enable it individually

• bring all the individual "chat with station" windows together into a single window with tabs or other way to select who you're chatting with.

• visibility into and/or control over which port data is being sent to (RF, IP, second RF, etc)

Thank you. Nice setup you have there.

Regarding your feature requests:

1. Track all stations is already available. Turn it on from View->Map Layers->Show Track Stripes. This is persisted over YAAC restarts so the next time you open YAAC it will be doing it again (or not) as you left it before. You can also specify plotting track stripes on a per-station basis from the Tracked Stations table. Also, if you don't mind having your computer talking to you, you can install the sounds plugin and the espeak application, attach a speaker to the audio out jack on the Pi, and then YAAC can verbally announce when new stations come into range. I don't recommend doing this on a major digipeater site, however; a friend of mine who's on a major Interstate highway leading to Dayton, Ohio, did that just before Hamvention a few years ago and YAAC just would not shut up about all the hams en-route to Dayton. :-)

2. I never thought one person would be simultaneously chatting with multiple people over APRS (unless it was to a single group alias for a round-table). But that sounds like a reasonable re-design of that particular window. I'll look into it. It might also be a good addition for the smallscreen plugin as well.

3. There is some control over traffic routing already.
a. Each RF port specifies which digipeating aliases it supports (suitable to ensure a VHF/HF cross-band digipeater doesn't accidentally flood the slow HF channel with local VHF traffic), which beacon it transmits (you can have a different beacon per port), and what types of traffic that port will transmit (APRS, OpenTRAC, or raw connected-mode AX.25, or any combination thereof). You can't control what it will receive (YAAC accepts anything it hears), but then you can't control what other stations are going to transmit anyway.
b. connected-mode traffic tries to use the RF port pointing at the specified station if there are multiple ports that the traffic could go through (per the traffic type settings above).
c. Each RF and APRS-IS port can be selectively enabled for transmit (so you can have a receive-only port if needed). APRS-IS ports also support beacon choice.
d. The transmit log file lists the port each packet was transmitted through.
e. You can filter the raw packet and map displays based on the port traffic was received through.

Let me know what kind of additional traffic control you need.

Andrew, KA2DDO
author of YAAC

________________________________________
From: [email protected] <[email protected]> on behalf of KG7KMV <jonglauser@...>
Sent: Thursday, December 10, 2020 12:06 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [yaac-users] Success story

Just wanted to share my success story:

* Raspberry Pi 3 B
* NinoTNO from tarpn.net
* Baofeng UV5R for now, just ordered a better radio as it's too weak/deaf in my area
* KM4ACK Build-a-Pi script to install VHF related software including YAAC
* Using realVNC to access the PI from a laptop/desktop/tablet
* all housed in a small HF/Apache weatherproof case
* The case has a N type bulkhead antenna connector and waterproof power connector. The radio is modified to run on 12V and the Pi has a 12V-5v converter.
* There is room to add a small battery for off-grid operation.

I've had this up for a few weeks and it's been great as a 2-way igate. There is one other RF-IS igate in my town and another 20 miles away in another town.
It was fairly easy to setup entirely through the GUI, no command line required!
I have been using it to message as many stations as I can and have made a few contacts. One is a neighbor running a BBS on 145.010 so I'm interested in adding another TNC/radio for the other frequency as long as I can make sure to direct traffic out the appropriate ports.

For a comparison I tried using Xastir, but didn't like it as much. YAAC is more responsive in map rendering and UI features. I like the messaging capabilities in YAAC better as well

pie-in-the-sky features I'd like to see:

* option to automatically start tracking new (mobile) stations so I don't have to enable it individually

* bring all the individual "chat with station" windows together into a single window with tabs or other way to select who you're chatting with.

* visibility into and/or control over which port data is being sent to (RF, IP, second RF, etc)

开云体育

@Andrew P - thank you for the response, You have a very fine application to be using! I'll look deeper into the tracking and routing options you described. It could be that what I want already exists if I look harder.

@Tommy - surprisingly it's a power converter intended for RC cars/planes! Wide input range of 5.5-26VDC and 5V/3A output. I run both a Pi3 and Pi4 with these and it plugs directly onto the IO pins 4-6 to power the Pi:?

This is a really cool package, nice job.

Look into the MoPi-2 Hot-Swap Mobile Power HAT for RPi. About $37 from DigiKey. Has two 6.5-24V inputs and a charge input. Powers the RPi and provides a switched 5V to control external equipment. Has an ON/OFF button for starting/cleanly stopping the RPi. I use the switched 5V to control a relay to turn my radio on and off. If voltage drops on primary input, it switches to secondary source. If secondary voltage drops, it cleanly shuts the RPi down. Normal configuration would be to put vehicle power in primary and a small rechargable battery in secondary. Feed proper voltage to charge input to keep the backup battery charged.

Works great.

73,
Michael WA7SKG

Tommy Beene - KD4CHW wrote on 12/10/20 10:18 AM:

* On 2020 10 Dec 14:15 -0600, Tommy Beene - KD4CHW wrote:

Nice setup! Where did you get the 12v to 5v converter for the Pi? I
need one for a Pi in my truck to run mine and a high power DSTAR
repeater.

Another option I saw referenced elsewhere is the USBbuddy from
Powerwerx:



it looks like a USB A to USB C cable would be required for powering a Pi
4 or a USB micro for a Pi 3 and earlier.

I don't have one and there may be other similar devices available.

73, Nate

--

"The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all
possible worlds. The pessimist fears this is true."

Web:
Projects:
GPG fingerprint: 82D6 4F6B 0E67 CD41 F689 BBA6 FB2C 5130 D55A 8819

I tried using the USBBuddy from Powerwerx with an RPi 3B+ and it always gave a low voltage indication. It was fine for a few other things that were USB powered, but was less than stellar for RPi use.

YMMV

Michael WA7SKG

Nate Bargmann wrote on 12/11/20 10:22 AM:

Does it need more amperage than it is getting?

Probably just the incredibly thin wires and connector contacts in the micro-USB cable/plug/socket causing voltage drop at the Pi's high current draw, because I see the same "low voltage" problem with 120Vac powered Pi power supplies. I have one of the NW Digital Radio DRAWS hats, and I would never power a Pi using that hat from the micro-USB connector, especially since the DRAWS hat provides a 12->5 voltage regulator that backfeeds the Pi with much less voltage drop through the GPIO pins (i.e., the same power input connection that KG7KMV is using).

I just checked the NFPA's wire ampacity versus gauge table, and 22 gauge wire (which is larger than the wires in USB cables) is only rated for 0.92 amperes for power transmission. In other words, USB cables are vastly undersized for iPhone or Pi level power draws (and they get away with cheating only because the cable runs are short, unlike the 50 to 100-foot runs for house wiring). The voltage drop has to be relatively huge. There's a reason why, up until Apple, USB was rated for a maximum draw of 500mA.

Andrew, KA2DDO
author of YAAC

________________________________________
From: [email protected] <[email protected]> on behalf of Christopher Rose <kb8uih88@...>
Sent: Friday, December 11, 2020 4:01 PM
To: '[email protected]'
Subject: Re: [yaac-users] Success story

Does it need more amperage than it is getting?
Items plugged into the pi or stacked on it need power



-----------------------------------------

From: "Michael WA7SKG"
To: [email protected]
Cc:
Sent: Friday December 11 2020 3:46:53PM
Subject: Re: [yaac-users] Success story

I tried using the USBBuddy from Powerwerx with an RPi 3B+ and it always
gave a low voltage indication. It was fine for a few other things that
were USB powered, but was less than stellar for RPi use.

YMMV

Michael WA7SKG

Nate Bargmann wrote on 12/11/20 10:22 AM:

* On 2020 10 Dec 14:15 -0600, Tommy Beene - KD4CHW wrote:

Nice setup! Where did you get the 12v to 5v converter for the Pi? I
need one for a Pi in my truck to run mine and a high power DSTAR
repeater.

Another option I saw referenced elsewhere is the USBbuddy from
Powerwerx:

/> >
it looks like a USB A to USB C cable would be required for powering a Pi
4 or a USB micro for a Pi 3 and earlier.

I don't have one and there may be other similar devices available.

73, Nate

<<br>

One part of your story gave me a bit of a laugh.

From: [email protected] <[email protected]> on behalf of KG7KMV
Sent: Thursday, December 10, 2020 12:06 PM
Subject: [yaac-users] Success story

For a comparison I tried using Xastir, but didn't like it as much. YAAC is more
responsive in map rendering and UI features.

Mapping more responsive on a Raspberry Pi? I hope Xastir isn't that bad (even if they are my competition :-). Map response is terrible for me on a Pi. So I looked up KG7KMV on the FCC's Universal Licensing System to see where he lives, then compared the size of the YAAC-imported .ways files in his area to the ones in mine. Gee, the .ways file for 1x1 degree of the planet in my area is 13 times the size of one in his area (and mine are small compared to the tile for the home of the OpenStreetMap Foundation in London, England). No wonder it runs fast for KG7KMV; he's in a relatively rural area instead of in the densely urban (and highly-detailed map) area I'm in on the East coast of the United States. Plus the Raspberry Pi picked the slowest possible gadget possible for random-access mass storage: an SD card. Well, no, it could have been worse; I'm old enough to have used punched paper tape on a Model 33 Teletype. :-) And there used to be floppy disk drives, too, not that they would have enough capacity to hold the YAAC code (let alone the map data).

There's a reason I've spent 7 _years_ trying to make the YAAC map rendering faster, even as the members of the OpenStreetMap Foundation keep cancelling out my efforts by adding more details to the map database. :-) When I started writing the map code in YAAC, the OpenStreetMap dataset in compressed XML was a mere 24GB in size. Today, it's 97GB in size (one reason why I moved to using the PBF format, which is slightly smaller at 55GB, and much faster to process when it's time to re-import the entire planet again).

Andrew, KA2DDO
author of YAAC