[Elecraft] Dedicated FTx Rig

[Bill Frantz]

I see a wonderful building project here. Lets start out with a 
Raspberry Pi -- for me the latest version with plenty of compute 
power for FT8 It draws about 2-3A @ 12V. Add in a HDMI display 
(from Adafruit) at about 0.8A @ 12V, some kind of sound card (if 
the display doesn't have sound), and a USB keyboard. (I would go 
with a separate keyboard for its typing advantages. YMMV) We now 
have a functioning computer.

The next question is what we do about a radio and here comes the 
camel's nose into the tent. The simplest solution is a 
single-mode, single-band dedicated radio. One of my favorite 
radios is the Small Wonders Labs PSK-20. (Unfortunately the kit 
is SK.) It tuned the PSK subband at 14.070 and nothing else. It 
had no UI, everything was done on the computer. It should be 
simple to retune it for 14.074 and run FT8.

But suppose we want more than that. There are any number of QRP 
radio kits around that might do. Or even a KX2. But the KX2 
wouldn't be enough for my friend Jim, K6EI who likes to go into 
the woods of Washington state and run QRP 160M. He'd need at 
least a KX3.

Regardless of what radio is chosen, it would be easy to leave 
enough space around the computer board to allow for future 
computer upgrades. (I assume the computer will become obsolete 
faster than the radio.)

Have fun building.

73 Bill AE6JV

On 8/11/19 at 1:11 AM, xdavid at cis-broadband.com (David Gilbert) wrote:

>"Now if you are backpacking and just making a few QSOs for fun, that’s another story."
>
>That was my hypothetical intent.  For vacation and portable 
>operation, I'd probably be using a non-directive antenna, I'd 
>settle for whatever propagation there was, I'd be making FAR 
>less than tens of thousands of QSOs, and I already suggested 
>transferring logs to my desktop computer via a USB flash drive.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Bill Frantz        | Since the IBM Selectric, keyboards have gotten
408-356-8506       | steadily worse. Now we have touchscreen keyboards.
www.pwpconsult.com | Can we make something even worse?