Notizbl0g

➔ DV4mini on Ubuntu 14.04

Published: Tuesday, Jan 12, 2016 | 3 minute read

By end of december I got the chance to get one of the much coveted DV4mini Sticks for the use as a D-Star dongle. After plugging it to an Ubuntu 14.04 system the kernel created a serial device (/dev/ttyACMx). After downloading the software from [1] I executed mono dv4mini.exe and nothing worked. The GUI sayed it is searching the DV4mini device and obviously could not find it. The output of the terminal from the binary showed something like this:

➔ HackBert - The Audio Player

Published: Tuesday, Dec 29, 2015 | 2 minute read

A few weeks before christmas we discovered a nice little audio player in a wooden case that is usable for little children [1]. But after reading that it is at 250€ we declined from buying it. Instead we thought about building one by ourselves. This piece was also available as just the PCB for 150€ which is also a little expensive. After searching the net for a while I found a nice do-it-yourself version by Christoph [2].

➔ Pseudo TTY Devices for GPS Emulation

Published: Friday, Dec 11, 2015 | 3 minute read

Looking for a possibility to emulate some GPS data for testing some balloon tracking software I found the nice tcl application called gpsfeed+ [1]. That is very useful for feeding simulated GPS data into a device using a serial port. My usecase is testing software with GPS data on the computer itself. The way to go is to use pseudo TTY devices that is a piece of software pipe that you can put data in on the one end and read of from the other end.

➔ Update on fli4l and CF Cards

Published: Tuesday, Nov 24, 2015 | 7 minute read

It seems that the procedure to install fli4l on large CF cards that I described in 2012 does not reliably work any more. This is probably due to changes from grub to grub2 within recent operating systems. Therefore I did some research again and tried various options and boot loaders to start fli4l from compact flash card. In the end I found a solution that works with a syslinux MBR and syslinux itself installed to the boot partition.

➔ Arduino KISS TNC

Published: Wednesday, Sep 30, 2015 | 1 minute read

Inspired by [1] I recently setup a quick and dirty version of a KISS TNC to be used with Xastir for APRS position reporting. The harware consists of an Arduino nano Board and a few external parts. Altogether this solution costs about 5€. The Arduino is a simple clone with ATmega 328P and some USB-RS232 Chip from China. I put the components together on a small bread board in order to test.

➔ Apollo-Soyuz Diploma

Published: Thursday, Sep 17, 2015 | 1 minute read

On July 19th there was another SSTV activity from the International Space Station on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the Apollo-Soyuz flights. After some time I received another nice diploma proving the reception of their images. See here:

➔ Activating GPS from 9k6 Data Output

Published: Wednesday, Jul 22, 2015 | 2 minute read

After fitting the ICOM ID-E880 into my car I thought about activating the GPS receiver automatically from turning on the radio and switching it back off again afterwards. The view into the Manual and Service Manual revealed that there is no signal that goes high nor a pin that carries some voltage when the radio is on. The only source would be Pin 1 on the Mic connector. That carries +8V but is only up to a load of 10mA.

➔ STREEK High Altitude Balloon

Published: Saturday, Jul 11, 2015 | 1 minute read

After an annoucment on the UKHAS launch mailing list I supported the Strato Geeks Team with decoding telemetry sent from their balloon launched in the early morning hours of July 11th. My antenna is quite bad situated for such experiments but i managed to receive some pictures and deliver parts to the SSDV picture database. As the launch team made a mistake in configuring the payload the tracker at [1] could not parse the data and did not show any position.

➔ Portable APRS Client on Raspberry Pi with Touchscreen

Published: Sunday, May 24, 2015 | 4 minute read

For tracking purposes on a holiday trip to France I was looking for a small solution allowing APRS to run. For a spare Raspberry Pi I picked up a TNC-Pi and a small 2.8” touchscreen display. That allowed xastir to run on that machine. GPS data is feed to the system from an ublox NEO-6M GPS receiver connectet to the Raspberry Pi via an FT-232 USB-RS232 adatper. The raspian image is configured to start the graphical desktop on the 2.

➔ ISS SSTV diploma

Published: Tuesday, Apr 14, 2015 | 1 minute read

A while ago there was an annoucement by Polish radio amateurs for a special diploma handed out for receiving a set of SSTV images sent from the ISS between 22nd and 24th of February 2015. Today I receid the mailing with the nice piece of paper. See here: