Learn by Hamming

Author: Chris Reitz

  • MESHTASTIC: A Ham Gateway Drug

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    Chris Reitz
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    This post draws heavily from a presentation Chris N9CVR gave at a Fox Cities Amateur Radio Club meeting in summer of 2025. What is Meshtastic? In order to answer this, we need to back up a bit… The ISM bands ISM stands for Instrument, Scientific, Medical. The ISM bands are 6.78, 13.56, 27.12, 40.68, 433.92…

  • (Don’t) Build a Transmitting iGate: Part 1 – Getting On Air

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    Chris Reitz
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    Over the past couple years, I’ve had a lot of interest in APRS, and messaging in particular. This interest brought me to the idea of building my own APRS digipeater and iGate. This project came in two parts: initial configuration and getting the station on air, and building it into an enclosure. The first part…

  • Build a Take-It-Anywhere SDR Receiver: Part 3 – CAT Control

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    Chris Reitz
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    As of SDRConnect version 1.0.5, you can now control your RSP1B via CAT control! In this post, we’ll look at how to set that up. RigControl Before configuring CAT control, you’ll need to install a program called RigControl. Open a web browser, navigate to SDRPlay’s website and get the correct version of RigControl for your…

  • Cool (non-ham) Project: Solar LoRa Node

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    Chris Reitz
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    Those who have seen my video about my weather station will know I’ve been looking for at least some ability to see the current WX conditions/ I’ve also been messing with LoRa (specifically Meshtastic) a lot, so I figured I’d combine the two into one fun project! While we’re at it, I figured, let’s make…

  • Cool (non-ham) Project: Easy LoRa Node

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    Chris Reitz
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    I started my foray into the world of LoRa with a Heltec device in 2024. Very soon after, a friend gave me a commercial 900MHz antenna, so I started looking for an excuse to build another one. This generated a solar weather-indicating node which acts as a repeater, based on the RAK19007. It turns out…

  • HamClock for Your Shack

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    Chris Reitz
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    Many hams salivate over the Geochron, a mechanical world clock which shows light and dark areas of the world map based on the time of day in that part of the world. That type of Geochron is very expensive (I configured a Boardroom at 4,050 USD!), but the Geochron company also sell a dongle that…

  • Build a Take-It-Anywhere SDR Receiver: Part 2 – SDRPlay

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    Chris Reitz
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    Install SDRConnect In the VNC window into your Pi, open up a browser and go to https://www.sdrplay.com/sdrconnect/. Scroll down to the bottom of the page and download SDRConnect for Linux arm64 (arm64 is the type of processor the Raspberry Pi uses). When it finishes downloading, go to your Downloads folder, right-click on the .run file…

  • Build a Take-it-Anywhere SDR Receiver: Part 1 – The Build

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    Chris Reitz
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    I won an SDRPlay RSP1B software-defined radio receiver at a recent ham radio club meeting. The RSP1B is a really cool receiver which will receive signals from 1kHz through 2GHz. Not only that, but it’s about 3 inches square, and only about an inch tall (and looking inside the enclosure, SDRPlay probably could have made…

  • Finding Velocity Factor of Unknown Coax

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    Chris Reitz
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    [This topic was originally discussed at the May 2024 Fox Cities Amateur Radio Club meeting.] For those who missed, the Tech Tip at the May club meeting was determining the velocity factor of an unknown piece of coaxial cable. For those who didn’t, you missed one of Chris’ (N9CVR) famous math errors. We worked a…