How To Add an OLED To A Zumspot DMR Hotspot

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I got the distinct honor of speaking at the local Amateur Radio Club last night and it caused me to dust the, errrrrrr, dust off of my DMR Hotspots.    After the club meeting I came back and updated the OS’s (PiStar) on my Zumspot and JumboSpot and updated the firmware as well.

The JumboSpot has one distinct advantage over the Zumpsot I have.  It has a cool OLED display.

That got me to thinking.  I could probably add an OLED to my Zumspot.   I could. Here’s how you do that:

Zumspot OLED (click to enlarge)

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Olight Seeker 2 Pro Review

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I’ve never really done flashlights before.  About a year or so ago I realized I had one crap flashlight at home.  Bought some inexpensive but good flashlights on Amazon and kind of caught the flashlight fever.   Also I started going camping and without a doubt you need a good flashlight walking around in the woods or for when the campsite power goes off (It will).

I’m not a Prepper, but I’m not unprepared by a long shot either.  I like quality, and I like quantity.  When it gets dark is not the time to ask “where’s the last place I had the flashlight?”  A good quality flashlight should be within reach basically in just about every room of the house.  Seriously.  You may think that is a bit much but it’s really quite practical.

Also, as a typical person in America I have a job that requires me to be there early, and since my dog can’t walk himself and since dog walks typically occur in the dark in the morning I also carry a light with me to keep from getting hit.  I also jog early in the morning, in the dark and wear dark clothes.  A high quality flashlight is a must.  Those are other smaller flashlights that I carry (from the same company) but this blog is about the Olight Seeker 2 Pro.

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Why Is Radio So Important To Me?

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Thought I’d do some philosophical stuff today instead of technical stuff today.  Beware.

One of the things that first fascinated me as a little kid (besides baseball and before women) was radio.  Specifically short wave radio.  We had a world band radio in the house and it had the TV audio band.  I used to think that was so cool.  Then along came Citizens Band (CB) radio.  Oh God how I loved that.   I really find that odd because now at my advanced age of 57, and the fact I’m a licensed Ham, I really don’t care to talk.

But oh how I love to listen.  I almost don’t care what I’m listening to as long as I’m LISTENING.

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Skewing Satellite Antenna for GOES (and others)

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I live in Eastern NC and have a ground station to receive GOES-16 East.  No need to skew or tilt the disk.

However, I wanted to get GOES-17 West which requires some skew of the antenna to properly receive the signal.

 

 

First you need your stats.  Go to dishpointer.com and type in your address and the satellite you wish to track.

Awesome. Scroll to the bottom of the page that gets returned from the search and it will indicate Azimuth, Elevation, and required Skew.

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Hurricanes and Monday’s Always Bring Me Down

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I’ve lived back in the USA about 5 years and now lived through my 2nd Atlantic Hurricane.  Florence put a whooping on New Bern in 2018 and Dorian which just passed was a NEAR miss on New Bern.  We caught the very edge of it.

But every big life event like this teaches you some things.  One of the biggest lessons that I learned was that the news Hurricane coverage just was not up to date.   You could be awake at 3 AM and check the news web sites and their latest updates were 2-3 hours old.  In a fast moving hurricane, headed for you, 2-3 hour old news is age old.

Prior to the storm I set up a GOES satellite receiver which pulls down data from GOES-16 EAST.  The data looks like this:

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NooElec Sawbird GOES Barebones

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Just a quick blog for showing how to hook up the NooElec Sawbird GOES Barebones for those of you trying to decode NOAA GOES satellites.  Oddly enough I couldn’t find a data sheet or manual for it.  And its a bit of a head scratcher if it is your first go-round with such items.  So I’m here to make it easy.

Their webpage merely says this which gives you the info you need to hook it up:

Each module allows for 3 different power options, but you should only power with one option at any given time! The recommended power input through the SMA output port (for bias-tee capable SDRs like the NESDR SMArTee XTR) is 3V-5V DC.

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GOES satellites

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Above you working silently are Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES).  They are operated by NOAA and are essentially weather satellites.

Now here’s the current configuration above.  Seeing as how I live on the East Coast of the US I aim at GOES-16 or GOES East.   Getting the signal is a bit of a challenge and requires some special hardware.

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RTL-SDR Fun

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One of my favorite hobbies of course is radio.  I own a few.

I think the most interesting “radios” are RTL-SDR devices.  The RTL stands for Realtek (which is the chipset) and SDR stands for Software Defined Radio.

They only cost a few bucks for a “generic” one and there are more sensitive and selective ones that cost bigger bucks.

Essentially if it is a radio signal of some kind, with a $20 USB Software Defined Radio you can listen to or decode a multitude of radio traffic/chatter.  In fact it seems darn near illegal, and sometimes it is.  I have other blog pages with this information but I’m just going to re-hash what I’ve been up to this week.

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Syctale-C For Decoding Inmarsat STD-C EGC Messages

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Everybody over at the Facebook SDRPlay message board is having fun decoding L band ACARS and STD-C messages.  One of the SDRPlay guys, Mr Mike Ladd, put together an excellent guide on using the RSP devices to decode L band traffic.  It has invigorated that Facebook community somewhat and I’m excited to see everyone trying it out and posting their results/questions.   Mike posts excellent tutorials and videos and if you fancy yourself an SDR enthusiast or hobbyist you owe it to yourself to check out his videos.

ACARS AERO messages are for, you guessed it, Aircraft,  and Enhanced Group Call (EGC) messages are Maritime notices and warnings.   These messages are from Inmarsat Satellites and the one I use specifically is Inmarsat 4-F3.  Clicking on the image will show you that its geosynchronous orbit covers North and South America.

Inmarsat (click to enlarge)

Inmarsat 4-F3 is located at 97.6 West.  Strongly recommended to get an app called Dish Align to locate the satellite.

So to pull this off you need:

  • An RTL-SDR device capable of delivering Bias T voltage to the antenna.  For today I used an SDRPlay RSPDuo.  There are certainly cheaper devices out there though.
  • An L band antenna such as this one or an old Othernet L Band Patch antenna from the old version 2 hardware.  I had one of the old L Band Patch antennas laying around already. You might be able to find one on eBay or of course make your own..
  • A Windows laptop with a little bit of OOMPH
  • Software such as SDRUno if you are using an SDRPlay device or SDR# if you may be using an Airspy device.
  • Virtual Audio Cable to get the audio from your SDR software into Syctale-C software.
  • And of course Syctale-C software

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Radio – An Observation

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Radio.  It’s an interesting medium.  From Edison to Marconi it has been with us since the late 1800’s.  Among the first wireless, commercial transmissions were referred to as Marconi-grams.

Marconigram Mar*co“ni*gram, n. [Marconi + –gram.] same as {radiogram}; a wireless message. [Webster 1913 Suppl.]

Transmitting messages wirelessly became preferable over wired transmissions referred to as the telegraph.   In 1920 our world changed as KDKA, a government radio station was thrust upon the airwaves and commercial radio kicked off.   The BBC in England followed suit around 1922.

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