What are you hoping to do with it?
For what bands?
Most transmit-capable SDRs will have a very limited power output, and you will have to design a frontend for the band you want to transmit on. For example if you want to take a HackRF One and build it into a HF or VHF transceiver you have to build a linear preamp that can drive a 15 dBm (30 milliwatts) output up to something more reasonable.
Speaking of baofengs I got a video saying "this is the new baofeng" (was another brand) and thought it was just bs but the radio itself seemed to have some cool features for the same price. Too bad the video disappeared before I could check the brand name again...
Furries and trannies seem to have wormed their way into every hobby that's not normie-tier, you never see a guy in a fox costume playing golf on a country club but there's a civil war going on in nixOS with trannies and furfags trying to get every dissenter who refuses to kowtow to their insanity expelled.
Look into LoRa “Meshtastic” then, it will be right up your street. License free short messaging on very low power. Some BBS type solutions just starting to appear, it’s kind of retro fun.Great to see a thread on this, thanks @777Flux. I've been out of ham radio for a while, but I have nothing but good memories about it. I bought a new Icom 7300 series transciever a couple of years ago to get back into HF ham radio, but other things got in it's way. It's just sitting on my desk now, connected to a random wire antenna, and I only do listening for now. Both to weird number stations or just trying to pick up European HF stations during nighttime.
Back in the days pre-internet when living in Europe I used to fuck around a lot with packet radio because dialing any other European country was unaffordable, up to 10 current US dollars a minute, to exchange data with other nerds that were into ham radio. Hours long AX.25 sessions over HF, exchanging either Fidomail for local BBS'es or just straight up pirating software over radio. Loved VHF/UHF DX'ing as well, trying to pick up TV stations from far away and seeing the station identifying logo's through a fuckload of noise.
Happy to see what other Kiwi's are up to, this is certainly renewing my interest in this stuff again!
Are you thinking of the Quansheng? People are flashing custom firmware in to them and doing fun stuff like 2meter SSB.
Ya. A few guys from my club made a big deal of it because the heatwave we had kept them home on Field Day weekend. I got to show up and just eat BBQ and operate.
At the moment, for a proper standalone transceiver the Yaesu FT-710 is your best bet.
Nah this one had a color LCD.
All baofengs, quanshengs and other one-hung-lo radios are reasonably ok for RX. The Quansheng radios which people reverse engieered the firmware for are quite good, with the custom firmwares you really can squeeze the last bits out of the integrated radio-on-a-chip IC. They are all based on the same Si4732 or BK1080 chip which is a DSP based transceiver chip. The SSB modes are definitely a good addition ove the stock firmware. One need to keep in mind that the analog RF circuits are made for 2m and 70cm operation so even if you can set the radio to any frequency in the 25-1100 MHz range you might find that it either transmits poorly or that the harmonics (especially on HF) are actually strongest on the 2m or 70cm bands. Some of these radios are also not certified for use in Europe because they lack CE due to the sheer amount of harmonics they emit.
It might be one of the analog-only TYT, Radioddity or AnyTone handhelds. I think one AnyTone was mentioned upthread.
Decent is relative but I built this kit and it seems pretty ok. Portable too, works stand-alone but I usually have it plugged into a PC doing wspr or just to have a nice big waterfall display.
Meshtastic is flashy and popular but it's kind of silly if you think about it. With how tightly coupled the hardware and network infrastructure is to the messaging app, I can't see it being all that useful truly "off-grid" if their website and repos go down.
Don't know, they made a big deal about how it could be easily modded to have extra features from more expensive units.
You telling me it can't be run locally? no P2P?
It can, that’s the whole point of it, as far as I can tell. People are using the default channel to chat apparently, but you’re supposed to create you own channel with an encryption key. Personally I can’t pick up any other stations but my own hilltop repeater covers a few locations in a 30 mile radius.
This is my biggest grief with it. This and the fact that LoRa is proprietiary, full of overcomplicated wizardry like spread-spectrum and frequency hopping all while the general opinion in the field is that it's at most juts slightly better than plain old FSK.
This is the price of plug and play. The chat app is also the only main use of it. It's a curse and a blessing, the entry barrier is nonexistent. Buy this or that, connect to usb, go to this website, boom, meshtastic node up. I bet that 90% of the users have no idea how it works.
That's just WebUSB, there are scripts that let you do it the normal way with a piece of flashing software or if all fails you can flash it using the microcontroller's dedicated programmer. But most of these modules have a UART-flashing bootloader
Other then winlink I have never tried running any of the apps right on the phone but I have used digiPi. It turns a pi in to a hotspot and you use the normal FT8 software right through the web browser on any phone or tablet. I have a Pi Zero running the digiPi image with a digirig and cable for my 891 and it seems to work fine. Though I normally just end using a laptop/digirig.
Ya and it all seems like a step backwards compared to just regular old packet when it comes to the application aspect of it.