Welcome
We are currently developing a lot of interesting software and hardware relating to digital ham radio operating. My main focus is digital modes along with software tools and VOIP (Echolink) plus propagation and operating principles.
My main interest is also web design and the development or fully responsive mobile first sites, far too many ham radio sites seem locked in the 70's with table based non responsive designs. If you need any help with updating your website get in contact.
We are very conscious of the impact our operations have on the environment and cost of course. We have now switched away from using a power hungry Intel i5 based server to a low power 4GB raspberry PI 4.
The performance is excellent, this change has had a minimal impact on site performance. Using Cloudflare to further optimize site performance it really does make a difference.
This site is developed using a custom Laravel framework 8.5 based CMS with the correct support and user interface that is fully responsive, we have developed a templating system so that the site can be driven my many different html templates building upon the excellent Laravel framework.
The online logbook shows what is possible when using low power. Long distance contacts are possible even a very modest vertical antenna system.
The underlying code that drives the site is currently being redesigned. This is to support PHP 8.X through to PHP 9.X with Laravel 8-9.
All of the contacts were made using FT8 with Xeigu G90 SDR transceiver into a multi band vertical antenna.
WSJTX plus a custom FLRIG combination is in use, I co-author the Xeigu G90 support for FLRIG and its now available for download on their site.
We have recently updated the rigs firmware and now the tune and ATU VIC commands are fully supported and working fine. We have also uploaded a new FLRIG optimized driver for the G90 having pulled away from the core release, I do not like the additions that have been made to FLRIG that was on both Ubuntu and OSX causing issues, this is optimized to the Xeigu G90 of course.
We are also now working on a custom version on WSJTX with enhanced features and user interface, using Ubuntu 20.04 (Ubuntu Mate) on a PI 4 as our main FT8 workhorse, compiling is easy and works as designed.
The Raspberry PI 4 workstation running Ubuntu Mate 22.04 with USB SSD boot is working very well indeed and is proving a good low power workstation.
We have it mounted in an Argon One case using our custom fan control system available here Ubuntu Mate 20.04 Argon One Fan Control we fully recommend a PI 4 as a Digital Modes workstation.