s0lesurviv0r

My Ham Radio Experience So Far

I was always interested in computers and, as a consequence, electronics. Therefore it's no surprise that radios caught my attention at a young age. I've been a licensed ameteur radio operator for around 18 years but I haven't been consistent and I know I'm not alone. I've had many breaks from ham radio due to other priorities and I've lacked growth in many areas of ham radio I should be much stronger in for the amount of years I've been licensed. As I've gotten older, more patient, acquired a little more disposable income, and am either at home or in the hills due to the COVID-19 pandemic, I've gain a renewed interest in the hobby. For myself, and others, I want to share the journey thus far.

Childhood

There were two people I met when I was in middle school. One was in my classes and the other I knew from the community. They were both my age and both had HT (handheld) radios and their Technician class licenses. Upon hearing them talk about ham radio I immedietly grew int

s0lesurviv0r

Why I Chose Golang

I've went through numerous programming languages personally and professionaly. In the last year I've picked up Go as my primary backend and REST API development language. In this post I document the reasons. Please note that these reasons are coming from my perspective of primarily developing in Python for the last 3 years. The following are somewhat ordered by importance.

Simple language specification

The Go language specification is one of the shortest I can remember (https://golang.org/ref/spec). As an experienced developer it took no more than a few hours to fly over the basics. The main benefits include faster onboarding of new developers and improved readibility. At work, I wrote a new microservice of moderate complexity and witnessed my colleagues grasp the core logic with ease. I believe that having a limit on the amount of language features will also reduce the headache of understanding code I write when I look back at it months and years down the road. Finally, the enfor

s0lesurviv0r

Raspberry Pi SDR with GNURadio

The Raspberry Pi is a small SoC type device you can find for around $40. I never had much use for it earlier on but, having found out one of the GPIO pins on the Raspberry Pi 2 can produce a square wave in the range of "130 kHz to 750 MHz", I finally felt justified. Thanks to Evariste Courjaud F5OEO, creator of rpitx, the Raspberry Pi can transmit RF within said frequency range, effectively making it the cheapest transmitting SDR I've seen to date.

Note: As mentioned in many articles, the square waves will produce harmonics of the target frequency and may cause unwanted interference. A band pass filter is needed to restrict transmission to the desired frequency.

After some Googling, I found a GitHub repo with some useful command line examples for rpitx. I discovered the rpitx supports having samples piped in through STDIN. This is convinent because GNURadio supports TCP sinks and nc can act as