Ham Radio on a Pi2

Figure 1: Quisk running on the second “homemade” tablet, which use a Pi2 SoC SBC board. (Click to enlarge).

Some of the other posts on this site refer to my “homemade” tablet, which I subsequently outfitted with components for ham radio usage.  I recently built another “homemade” tablet, this time using a Raspberry Pi2 board for the computing power.

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Note: This author is not affiliated with the Raspberry Pi/Pi2. For information about those projects visit http://www.raspberrypi.org. “Raspberry Pi is a trademark of the Raspberry Pi Foundation.  Figure 1 contains elements of a desktop system and associated programs that have been released under a free software license (Copyright: LXDE team: http://lxde.org). As a derivative work, the respective part of the screenshot in Figure 2 falls under that same license. The full text of the licences may be found at http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/lgpl-2.1.en.html.  Fig1 contains another program that has been released under a free software license (Quisk). As a derivative work of that program, the respective part of the screenshot in Figure 1 falls under the same license (GNU GPL). This site/author has no affiliation with the author of the Quisk program. The code and full text license for Quisk may be found at https://pypi.python.org/pypi/quisk/.

SoC/SBC Boards for Ham Radio

Figure 1: Various combinations that have, thus far been considered for ham radio audio duty (see text for explanation).

For the past couple years, I have been attempting to determine what might be the best platform for ham radio and other communications related applications, with a bias projected towards looking at mobile platforms. The graphic (above) shows a few options that I have seriously considered, and a couple for which I have built prototypes to aid in the testing process. The graphic is not intended to imply any capability or lack of capability with respect to the hardware, the SoC chip based SBC boards, or the operating systems. The selection only implies what I have made as a personal preference, for reasons that (shortly) – I’ll enumerate. In other words, the Raspberry Pi may use USB Audio, but I would prefer I2S if I can make it work.  Many alternate combinations are possible, and I have refined a list of preferences for the audio configurations I’ll use.  I have more info about this subject at:

https://programmingmiscellany.wordpress.com
(The link goes to another of my blogs)

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