24 June 2015
The Rapberry Pi Foundation have upgraded Raspbian to Kernel 4.0.5 this week, seems to be
stable, I dont have any issues with the new Kernel so far.
In the mean time, I have also finally compiled the Kernel module for the Ralink 7601 WiFi
modules that I have kicking about, it turns out that all the issues I had with the compiles
in the past related to my use of the Pi2 for the compiling, I finally remembered that the
Broadcom SOC on the Pi2 is NOT the same family as the one on the Pi A/B/B+, should have
spotted that sooner, I know, still I made a build script for the change (since it needs a
re-compile after ever kernel upgrade), that should be that for the future.
14 June 2015
Many updates going into Pi-Star at the moment, the dashboard has had many new additions,
it is now possible to choose your linked reflector from the dashboard, its also possible
to set the prefered reflector that ircDDBGateway connects to on start.
Next up, pistar-keeper has had a substantial update, it now has its own config file,
seperate from the script - that makes adminisration more pleasent. Pistar-keeper also now
checks the conected REF and then re-connects to that one when the keeper's presence (or
lack of) causes pistar-keeper to flip flop. Very nice feature if I do say so myself.
New on the (extensive) feature list is pistar-watchdog - this is a service watchdog, a
simple idea, that I hope will cure the issues with the ircDDBGateway process. Somthing
and I am yet to work out what yet, causes the process to flop, the watchdog monitors a
number of system services and restarts them if (when) they fail.
The dashboard has also had some service monitors added, this allows a simple view of the
D-Star related services at a glance.
Finally, the configuration pannel has had some major overhauls with firewall control
to configure the uPNP firewall control module. The hardware is now also configurable on
the configuration portal.
In short there has been a LARGE amount of upgrades added in the last 2 months, I think
I'm almost ready for a public release!
11 May 2015
I hear this argument come up, time and time again, "Why does D-Star use the AMBE VOCODER
when there are other opesn source alternatives available?".
So why did they - well there are potentially a number of reasons, D-Star is probably older
than you might realise; It was developed in the 1990s, a time when open source software
was still very much a "new" thing, the software itself was in its infancy and super low bit rate
codecs were few and far between. Add to that the fact that the CPU's available to build the
radios with would have been very much less powerfull, and suddenly you can see exactly why
the AMBE Vocoder was chosen.
Why are there people who are worked up about this - because, they think for some reason that this
AMBE Vocoder is the whole reason that D-Star has not been adopted by other manufacturers - but
that isnt the case either, D-Star (the name) is a trademark owned by Icom, sure, but the
protocol, the inner workings etc. were developed by the JARL (Japan Amateur Radio League) and
not Icom.
Maybe those same people who are worked up about the use of the AMBE Vocoder are annoyed because
that means they cannot build their own D-Star radio, again this is nonsense, if you really want to
build a high quality VHF radio, without using a single off the shelf part, and without buying
anything - I'd be supprised and it will be a huge undertaking. Fact is you will have to buy some
of the bits, so just add the Vocoder to your list.
AMBE also offer a software version of the vocoder (as Icom uses in their current generation of
radios), thats right - if you are that alergic to the chip, you could use the software version.
Finally - the Open Source community; there are some shaky implementations of the AMBE Vocoder
complient codecs, they are having to be clean room reverse engineered, sure they are not perfect
but maybe in time.
28 April 2015
This website has been hosted in a few places, at home, in america and now in northern france. The current hosting provider also gives me a static IPv6 address for my host.
If you have IPv6 internet access, you may already be veiwing this site over IPv6! IPv6 isnt common place in the UK yet, many of the UK providers seem to be really
struggling to make IPv6 work for them, the new provider http://www.ovh.co.uk are doing a great job providing IPv6 on their hosting platforms, seemingly before most
of the competition are starting to think about it. Well done to OVH for that one, I suspect I will be moving all of my hosted services over there soon!
06 April 2015
Jonathan Naylor (G4KLX) has updated his D-Star software, I hadn't looked in some time, but there
are a good few updates. So today I have re-compiled the code runing on Pi-Star to the latest
versions. There are some changes - sadly the config programs are GUI only, and I had to run those
in order to add the aditional lines for the new DV-MEGA code.
The other side effect is that the "admin portal" also needed to be updated to include the same
configuration updates, but that was trivial thankfully.
The remaining project is to make copying the SD-Card in situe possible form the admin console.