Since last year, I’ve become a bit of an arborist throw line evangelist. Arborist throw lines have made my wire antenna deployments so quick and easy compared with using monofilament fishing line or more complicated systems.

Since purchasing this arborist throw line last year, I’ve never looked back. The throw line never gets caught in tree branches, it’s reusable hundreds of times, and with it I can easily snag branches 50’+ above the ground to hang my wire antennas.

What follows doesn’t pretend to be some kind of “definitive guide” or “last word”, on the contrary, it’s aimed at people who have little or no experience with SDR but want to try putting together a decent station without paying an arm and a leg.

The idea of writing this came to me after reading a number of messages and discussions on various online groups/forums, in a lot of cases, someone bought an SDR (usually the ones coming with a telescopic whip antenna), and after connecting it was expecting it “just to work” or, better said, pretending that the SDR connected to that whip (usually placed on a table right near the computer) could receive ANY POSSIBLE signal, including transmissions coming from the “dark side of the moon.” 🙂 Those folks got scared by the fact that the SDR “didn’t work” and decided to give up; now, this short “guide” should allow anyone to setup what’s needed to have a working SDR

My self-imposed limitations for this project/experiment were the following:

The whole setup shouldn’t cost more than 150 Euros so that, if after trying the SDR one doesn’t like it, (s)he won’t have paid $$$, otherwise, if (s)he decides to keep it, the resulting station will allow for further expansion/improvement
The available space was considered to be that of an apartment, that is, no large field to put up huge wire antennas or to raise towers, the limit was the one of a balcony (in my home) that is 8 meters (max antenna length) by 3 meters (available height) by 2 meters (balcony width)
The whole setup should be simple and straightforward, no need to solder components or to build special types of antennas
Given the current Covid-19 sheltering, most components should be available online, while for others one may arrange with whatever is locally available (e.g. duct tape)

Since 2012, the Raspberry Pi nano computer has become an increasingly important part of the DIY and « maker » community. The increase in power of the Raspberry Pi over the years offers very interesting possibilities for radio amateurs. Indeed, it allows not to permanently monopolize a PC in the decoding of frames with software like WSJT-X, FLDIGI, etc…, without forgetting the possibility to control the Raspberry Pi remotely and thus to be able to work outside the radio shack as I can sometimes do on my couch. Moreover, this nano computer is now widely used in any Hotspot (DMR or D-STAR).

Digitale Sprachbetriebsarten für Einsteiger. Ein Vortrag von Kurt Baumann - OE1KBC