FT-1000 Mark V Remote Station with a Raspberry Pi

There are currently proven solutions using a Raspberry Pi to operate a remote radio station whether industrial or open source; those include MFJ’s RIGPI solution or RemoteQTH’s Open Source developments.

Owning a Raspberry Pi 3B with a sound card, I wanted to make a remote control prototype of my FT-1000 Mark V Field that does not require any developments and uses only open source software, free or low cost softwares. I call it a prototype because an operational solution must take into account the remote radio ON/OFF, the reset of the Raspberry Pi, computer security (anti-intrusion, …) and possible remote switches of devices (amp, antennas, …)

I already used my Raspberry Pi to run WSJT-X in FT8 remotely controlled by my PC using VNC Viewer. So I looked for a software solution to transmit the sound between the radio and the PC and a simple and user-friendly solution to control the radio:
– for the sound I chose the Mumble suite that has the shortest latency, the other solutions leading to latency of more than a second,
– for the the radio control I chose flrig that supports 60 different radios and that has a user-friendly interface (GRIG and rigctl were also tested).

The solution described was successfully used to make phone QSOs with the Yaesu FT-1000 Mark V Field on a WiFi LAN. It also works with a Yaesu FT-857D.

I also tested a second solution that uses the usual software suites on the PC (DXLab, HAMRadio Deluxe, N1MM) to control the radio using COM TCP ports. It will be described in another presentation.

This page contains a video presentation of the first solution and a file providing all the commands to install the softwares.

https://youtu.be/YsrWRNufHoo

 

Softwares installation document

73
Philippe – F6CZV

CW Skimmer and SDRPlay

CW Skimmer is a software that allows to:
– decode simultaneously on a frequency range:
– either the stations calls,
– or the transmission content.
– display the Morse code (dots/dashes) of a signal.
– generate spots to a local or remote server.
– feed a spectrum window of the frequency range for example the Spectrum window of N1MM.

In input CW Skimmer uses either a 3 KHz audio stream or an IQ stream from an SDR up to 192kHz of bandwidth. It is in the latter case that the use is most interesting. In our case both interfaces were tested interfacing the SDRuno software.

There is also a server version of Skimmer without MMI that can simultaneously decode the calls on 7 amateur bands (if the associated SDR allows that) and provide the corresponding spots.

The attached presentation describes the configurations used for the tests I performed as well as a findings on the use of that software.

CW Skimmer and SDRPlay

FT-1000 Mark V Field panoramic adapter output

The Yaesu FT-1000 Mark V Field does not have an “Intermediate Frequency” output that allows to view a “waterfall” or spectrum view of the selected band using an external device.

This article, after presenting different solutions, describes the solution chosen and its implementation with an SDRPlay RSP2PRO receiver and SDRUno software.

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