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I live on the 4th floor of a six story downtown condo, 20 feet ASL, no access to the roof don't even have a balcony, not allowed to put up any visible antenna here. (:
But I wanted to be on the air 24/7, even if I had to hide a small vhf or uhf antenna in a window. First just listened on the local repeater's frequencies, heard the repeater's IDs, but hardly heard any voice traffic on these, but I heard packet radio signals quite frequently, mostly on 145.070 MHz.
By monitoring these, I've discovered my good old buddy Jerome, VE7ASS, running a JNOS Node and BBS on a Raspberry PI, 24/7 . Hearing is one thing, but connecting to other stations is a lot harder with 3 to 5 watts into a whip from a Yaesu FT-530 HT radio.
With Jerome's help and tireless support, I was able to more or less duplicate his setup. Unfortunately I experienced frequent crashes, most likely because I had to start and control the headless Raspberry PI at a remote location via wifi and SSH connection.
Goodbye JNOS, hello BPQ! The linux version, running on a Raspberry PI, that is.
My BPQ NODE, BBS, CHAT and TELNET server is up and running fb for some time, thanks to Mike, VE3UIL, without his elmering it never would have gotten off the ground. Many thanks to Mike, N9PMO too, who refined my setup and have been a great forwarding partner from day one. |
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