Winter Field Day, Summer Field Day, "Summits On The Air" with W7MRC, Amateur Radio, Rhodesian Ridgebacks, Field Craft, Living in Montana, Old 4 Wheel Drives, Old Tube Radios, Hiking and "Just Getting Out There"
On Wednesday, January 11, 2023, I was on my way back to the QTH after a brief trip to Raleigh, NC.
Later in the afternoon, I needed to take my daughters to a class, thus I had a strict deadline to meet. Still, it was a beautiful day so I decided to pop by Tuttle Educational State Forest for a nice walk and possibly an activation if I time allowed. I’d spent so much time in my car the previous couple of days, I really wanted to stretch my legs.
After that casual walk, I found that I had a good 45 minute window–no more–to fit in a full activation including set-up/take-down. Very doable!
The radio I had packed away for this road trip was my Elecraft KX2 field kit which included a Tufteln no-transformer random wire antenna (compact equivalent of my 28.5′ speaker wire antenna) and my AX1 portable antenna. I had this particular kit because I’d hoped to do an urban park activation in Raleigh, but simply didn’t have the time to fit it in.
Setting up the KX2 is a swift process.
I chose a picnic table, deployed the Tufteln antenna and was on the air in no time!
Gear:
Note: All Amazon, CW Morse, and eBay links are affiliate links that support the QRPer.com at no cost to you.
I hopped on the air and starting calling CQ POTA (in CW) on 20 meters. Within eleven minutes, I had logged the ten stations necessary to validate this activation. I was very pleased with these results considering it was a Wednesday morning (not exactly prime-time for POTA)!
I continued operating an additional 14 minutes and logged twelve more stations for a total of 22 logged in 24 minutes–all on 20 meters.
This was just the right amount of “radio therapy” I needed that fine morning!
QSO Map
Here’s what this five watt activation looked like when plotted out on a QSO Map.
Activation Video
Here’s my real-time, real-life video of the entire activation. As with all of my videos, I don’t edit out any parts of the on-air activation time. In addition, I have monetization turned off on YouTube, although that doesn’t stop them from inserting ads before and after my videos.
Lately, my schedule has been so jam-packed, I feel like there’s hardly any room to squeeze in a POTA activation.
I learned early on in my POTA career, though, that it’s important to keep a fully-stocked and self-sufficient field kit in my vehicle at all times.
I find it difficult to wake up in the morning, look at my schedule, and confidently predict that I’ll have a POTA opening because it requires 1.) having enough time (a very minimum of 20 minutes for a portable deployment) and 2.) being in the vicinity of a POTA park. SOTA, of course, is even more difficult because summits aren’t usually as accessible as parks.
If I’m not making a video, I can fit in an activation in 20 minutes.
Indeed, the upcoming field reports are all portable and all fairly rapid. And lots of fun, if I’m being honest!
Thank you
Thank you for joining me on this quick activation! It was a nice dose of outdoor radio therapy after a fairly somber beginning of the week. One of my best friends lost his wife to pancreatic cancer and the funeral was the previous day in Raleigh. He’s also a ham and, like me, finds his radio time healing.
As always, I’d also like to send a special thanks to those of you who have been supporting the site and channel through Patreon and the Coffee Fund. While certainly not a requirement as my content will always be free, I really appreciate the support.
Thanks for spending part of your day with me! Here’s wishing you a wonderful week!
Survival Radio with a Raspberry Pi is a technical endeavor. The emcomm tools we use will always require parallel operator skills. There is no getting around that!
There isn’t a day going by where a comment is left on the channel saying our comms tools should be easier to use, or concepts should be less complex. Although I can agree, we should try to remember communications for emcomm or preparedness will always require a certain amount of investment in skills and field experience by the operator. There is no other way!
As a young ham radio operator, I went out with the university ham radio club, who taught me about setting up a field station. Because of the extreme conditions (extreme cold or killer mosquitos), we have here in Finland, keeping and eye on pragmatic-deployment was essential. Any amount of fiddling was too much. It was essential to get your station up and running, as quickly as possible.
A few years ago I started publishing videos and blogs promoting the Raspberry Pi as an emcomm tool for communications preparedness. The Raspberry Pi had huge potential as a cheap, easy to use, and accessible platform anyone could deploy. The problems with the Raspberry Pi were many, but one of the biggest issues was poor software support from the ham radio community.
The best example of ham radio software on the Raspberry Pi was JS8Call. JS8Call has a nice install shield, making it easy to install. The install shield could be downloaded from a normal website using a shared link. There was no need to compile anything, or enter any complex string of commands to get it on a Raspberry Pi (or any other platform). The executable could be zipped and sent over the air to a remote station if needed. It is so easy to set up, all a radio operator had to do was focus on the radio communications. That’s actually the point, but let’s get back to this later.
Often after publishing a video or blog with something new on the Raspberry Pi, the support questions started coming in like there was no tomorrow. This took my attention away from making YouTube videos and blogs, instead wasting my time on supporting the installation and configuration of hobby grade ham radio or Linux software packages. This wasn’t true for all packages, but for most it was a nightmare.
The thing about the Raspberry Pi is the tinkering! The Raspberry Pi is an excellent tool for those who like to tinker! I would argue that those of us who are using radio as a preparedness toolset, are not interested in tinkering. We need systems as streamlined as possible, and as easy to deploy as possible. We should be focused on reliability, and able to leave out the majority of “tinkering”. Bottom line, we should almost solely be focused on communications! This forces us to ask “why is the tinkering necessary?”. A couple of reasons really.
The Raspberry Pi is designed for tinkering, hacking and learning to code.
There are few if any “standards” for quality of deployment.
It is designed to be bare bones, budget-friendly, and a learn as you go platform.
In my Ultimate Raspberry Pi video, I introduced clever tools from groups in Germany and North America, designed to make deployment easier. These were huge steps forward! Automated software downloads and install using a guided GUI. Definitely getting better! Although these tools bridged the gap, they also added new problems to the list. After 4 years working with the Raspberry Pi on the channel, I gave up on it as a critical communications solution! That was a sad day! I also knew I would take a hit from the community.
The video below illustrates the issues with using the Raspberry Pi as our primary set of emcomm tools for emergency communications and preparedness. It is the video outlining my shift away from a Raspberry Pi platform, to a Windows based solution, despite my disdain for Windows!
What we fail to consider
The Raspberry Pi is not the perfect computer! It can get close to being as functional and reliable as higher end machines, but not without spending significantly more money than a base RPi. Here are just a few of the areas where upgrades were required to bring the Raspi up to a reasonable level of reliability.
The best emcomm tools eg Winlink, Vara HF, Vara FM, VarAC, … are currently only available on Windows!
Get rid of the SDCard for OS and memory storage. Replace with SSD.
Add buck converter to drop 12 volts from my station power, to 5 volts for the Pi.
Smart power button for soft shutdown.
Find a portable power supply to keep the Pi up and running when out in the field.
Integrate a GPS for time sync.
Build a custom enclosure to house all the components.
Setup VNC on the Pi and an Android smartphone or tablet to interact with the raspberry pi.
Add the cost of an Android tablet or smartphone
…
Ultimately, all of the required packages and hardware customizations became individual potential points of failure. Memory card corruption, reconfiguring or reinstallation of tools after updates, package incompatibility after updates, VNC server connectivity issues, lost connection between tablet or smartphone and Rpi, … What started as an effort to simplify our emcomm tools, became a tail-chasing race to keep the darn thing up and running.
The Raspberry Pi was great doing one thing! JS8Call ran absolutely wonderfully on the RPi. WSJT-X was also OK. FLDigi was a nightmare to configure. PAT Winlink was unnecessarily difficult to install and configure. Winlink Express has not been ported to Linux and it doesn’t seem it ever will be. It is the same story for Vara HF. If all ham radio-focused applications were implemented and deployed like JS8Call (eg download link, install shield, executable, setup GUI, desktop shortcut), there would be no need for such complex deployment tools. I digress!
The point is reducing complexity! As radio operators, we are primarily focused on our emergency communications skillsets. Moreover, some computing skills are required and absolutely necessary BUT, the required computing skills (whatever the platform) and complexity should not become an obstable to getting on the air. This is why I ultimately decided to dump the Raspberry Pi for critical communications. Take a look at the video below to see the journey from start to end.
Migrating to the Microsoft Surface
Ultimately I moved over from a Raspberry Pi to a Microsoft Surface. I have mentioned before my disdain for Microsoft, so there is no need to rehash that point. It didn’t have to be a Microsoft Surface though. It could have been a Dell Latitide, Panasonic Toughbook, or whatever low power field computer the operator was comfortable with using. I chose the Microsoft Surface Go 2. At the time it was the budget Surface model but had enough memory and CPU for ham radio data mode communications. There are also several other “field computers” in my arsenal.
Dell Latitude 7280 laptop
Microsoft Surface 3 Pro
Lenovo Yoga C920 with touchscreen
RasPad Tablet (Raspberry Pi 4B)
Raspberry Pi 4 NTP server
I understand many of the followers of this blog and channel, felt I abandoned the Raspberry Pi, but let me explain a few things we may not have considered.
The cost of the RPi and Android smartphone plus all the hardware add-ons was more costly than the Microsoft Surface Go 2. This is without adding the same reliability and ease of use as the Surface tablet provides.
The weight of the RPi, Smartphone, power bank for the RPi, SSD, GPS, cabling, and enclosure, … became heavier on the Raspberry Pi, than the Microsoft Surface Go 2.
With a built-in SSD, the MS Surface has not experienced any memory/write failures, corrupted SDCards, … vs the Rpi failure rate of several times per year, when using it daily.
“Time to get on-air” with the Raspberry Pi from start up to ready to transmit was 7-10 minutes. Time from start up to ready to transmit with the MS Surface was 2-3 minutes.
Rather than having multiple components cobbled together with the RPi, I now have one computer, and one radio! Some consider this a single point of failure. Perhaps it is! However, the MS Surface after nearly two years of operation (since February 2021) has not experienced a single failure of any type, either at home, or in the field! Moreover, I will soon add the Surface Go 3 LTE to my kit.
There were no significant power savings using the Raspberry Pi!
The Raspberry Pi certainly was fun to tinker with. It was even nice to use as a home desktop machine for FT8, JS8Call, … When it is in use every day, one begins to understand how fragile the Raspberry Pi really is. It was not designed to be a desktop or laptop replacement running 24/7. It was adopted by the ham radio and preparedness communities as a low-cost alternative to more expensive computers. I get it, but it will never be a one to one replacement!
default
The video below explains the benefits of the Microsoft Surface Go 2 over the Raspberry Pi/Android smartphone solution. Keep in mind my focus is on critical communications, and not just casual ham radio. Reliability is critical, Ham Radio is not my “hobby”. Ham Radio is a tool for emergency communications and preparedness.
Getting to the point
As I mentioned earlier in this post, off-grid radio operators for emergency communications and preparedness must have a deep skillset. We must understand many things like:
Propagation
NVIS vs DX
Antenna configurations
What band to use at specific times of day
Bandwidth and filters
Efficiency vs throughput
What modes to use when propagation isn’t cooperating
Powering our stations while off-grid
Minimising our current consumption, while remaining effective.
The emcomm tools we use are complex. In fact, they are never going to be easier than they are now. The best we can hope for is simplifying the deployment of our tools, creating better user interfaces for the tools, and making it as easy as possible to set things up. We already have an incomprehensible amount of knowledge required to carry out reliable HF communications. So we should not be making our emcomm tools and the hardware systems they run on, unnecessarily complex. Keep It Simple Stupid! Even if that means using a Windows machine. Until the ham radio community reaches a reliable, cross-platform level of development, we need to reduce multiple failure points, in our off-grid comms configurations. We should never embrace unnecessary complexity.
As I drove to Tuttle, I made a decision to film a Hike & Talk session–I had a topic on my mind and thought the timing was right to make a recording. You can check out that (previously published) Hike & Talk session here.
I hopped on the air and starting calling CQ POTA (in CW) on 20 meters. Within eleven minutes, I had logged the ten stations necessary to validate this activation. I was very pleased with these results considering it was a Wednesday morning (not exactly prime-time for POTA)!
I continued operating an additional 14 minutes and logged twelve more stations for a total of 22 logged in 24 minutes–all on 20 meters.
Lately, my schedule has been so jam-packed, I feel like there’s hardly any room to squeeze in a POTA activation.
As always, I’d also like to send a special thanks to those of you who have been supporting the site and channel through Patreon and the Coffee Fund. While certainly not a requirement as my content will always be free, I really appreciate the support.
