W7OWO-10 is going through some upgrades. Outages will be expected.

Submitted by W7OWO on Tue, 2021-04-13 23:48

Got a list of upgrades I'm doing which will produce (hopefully short) outages.

1) Adding UHF Capabilities.
With the antenna surrounded by trees, and they are starting to leaf out, I'm noticing the VHF can be attenuated at times. I will be migrating the current W7OWO-10 radio hardware to UHF at: 441.000 MHz for both VARA Wide mode and packet. Hoping to lessen the signal attenuation due to the trees. The replacement VHF frequency RMS may experience outages as I migrate the computer, radio equipment and configurations.

Except for the VHF side still using the original antenna eventually slated for the W7OWO-5 APRS Packet IGATE, this was completed on 04/13,

2) Switching to 12 volt powered small form fanless Celeron CPU computers.
I've managed to get them running Windows 10 running quite well. Initial measurements show they use about twice the power a Raspberry PI 3 does.

As of 04/`15, the VHF system is now running completely off the 12 volt power supply. The UHF system is still pending.

3) Upgrading the backup power.
Should have automated backup power in place once everything is in place, the old system was manual if the power remains out longer than a few minutes. The new system should

4) Software Packet TNC will be Dire Wolf for all systems.
A March 2021 drop of the Dire Wolf Software TNC Windows version 1.7 allows it to support CM108/119 GPIO PTT. So soon the radios with DRA digital radio interfaces will use Dire Wolf as do the SignaLink systems I support currently use.

Winlink Linkomatic