Category: Equipment

Hi power hotspot

Put together a high power hotspot using a ICOM 880H, BI7JTA repeater V3F4 mmdvm board and a rasperry pi 3b+.

Works great. Very easy to setup.

It took 2 weeks to receive the mmdvm board after ordering.

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005003174244427.html?pdp_npi=2%40dis%21AUD%21AU%20%24114.70%21AU%20%24114.70%21%21%21%21%21%402101d8f416761811285847120e1417%2112000024498658627%21sh01&spm=a2g0o.store_pc_home.productList_6001760834218.pic_5

Dead V2000!

My V2000 Triband (6M/2M/70cm) antenna developed high varying SWR!

After taking the antenna down and opening it up, I found where it was arcing over! (The black bit between the brass sleeves under the 5pF cap). Right in the middle of the antenna, near the joint in the outer fiberglass pole.

I de-soldered one end of the cap and pushed the longer brass sleeve to the left so that the gap between sleeves was about twice the original. I then scraped out the burnt fiberglass bits.

Resoldered the cap , the leads were long enough. Put it all back together and checked the SWR with my nano vna and IC7300 and it works great again.

Saving YSF rooms in FT-70D memories.

The FT-70D will save YSF rooms in its 5 room memories if there are no spaces or underscore characters, and all others are uppercase in the room name.

SSH into your pi-star and edit the YSF_Hosts file.

pi-star@pistar1(ro):~$ rpi-rw
pi-star@pistar1(rw):~$ sudo nano /usr/local/etc/YSFHosts.txt

Remove any space or underscore ‘_’ characters in the room name of interest. I also deleted the extra numbers in front of the room name. Pi-star will change the lowercase characters for you so you don’t need to change them if you have ‘UPPERCASE Hostfiles:’ turned on .

eg. CQ-UK WiresX becomes CQ-UK-WIRESX.