Fully Mobile Digital Ham Radio with Wires X

March 18, 2020

Below is a video demonstration of a fully mobile digital ham radio setup that can be operated anywhere within range of Wi-Fi or cellular networks.  With this setup I can connect to any Wires-X room in the entire world.  I can be indoors working plugged into AC and WiFi or fully portable using battery power and a Wi-Fi hotspot.

The laptop is handy for quickly finding and switching to rooms, but so long as you have a nearby Wires-X or System Fusion repeater connected to the Internet you could work with just the handheld radio.

Parts to buy:

  • A radio
…

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FT3DR No Audio on Wires-X

April 20, 2020

A rather odd thing happened with my Yaesu FT3DR when connected to the computer with the SCU-39 USB audio cable – I could transmit but could not receive any audio!  I knew that the radio’s audio was working because I could hear non Wires-X stations just fine – just no digital.  I tried reinstalling the Wires-X software – no change.  Finally I realized that the radio was starting up in Analog Wires-X mode.  The only reason I noticed this was by looking at the log that shows up in the Wires-X software and then over at the radio which was …

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Yaesu System Fusion with a Pi 2 Model B

While experimenting with the digital world, I thought I’d try to build a Pi-Star as a connection point for my Yaesu FT3DR.  There are plenty of tutorials online on how to do this, so I won’t get into that.  I’ll just say that yes it works and it only took about an hour from downloading the latest Pi-Star image, formatting the SD card and configuring the Pi-Star to get up and running. 

Compared to the Wires-X software, I definitely like the Pi-Star dashboard better since it keeps track of everything I hear and it’s linked up to QRZ.com for looking …

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