Struggles of Life

 Hello all, it's been awhile. 

    It's hard to explain but I feel like I should let everyone know what is going on with me. It's like I need to share it and stop keeping it bottled up. 

    As you guys know, my back has been nothing short of a source of endless troubles for me. I've had several surgeries and not of them really helped me out. I'm constantly falling down because I  lose feeling and control of my legs. I'm almost always getting false sensations in my legs. It will feel like my legs are on fire or all of my bones are broken. There is no fun in this. It's like I'm imprisoned to living my life in bed. I have been sentenced to life without parole. I do have some positive notes over being in a real prison. I get to visit my family every day. I can watch what I want on TV. I eat better food. There isn't any sodomy. I get to go on furlough to doctors offices every week. Every now and them my buddy Tim W5TAH will come and kidnap me do a few hours or an entire weekend. 

    Over the past few years I feel that people have been hurt because of them not understanding what exactly is going on with me. I will start with my eating habits. I will go to peoples house and these are great people and wonderful additions to my life. They don't want to see anyone leave their house without eating. Then I show up and refuse to eat. I know it bothers them, it bothers the hell out of me. Especially when they cook up a lot of deep fried southern soul food. You know, the good stuff that fills up your stomach and hugs your soul. It will hug your heart with hardened and blocked arteries but you got to have the good stuff every now and then. I'm on I believe more than twenty prescription medications that I have to take every day. That is a hell of a lot of side effects. My stomach doesn't work like it should. I have to be extremely picky on what I eat or it will make me sick to my stomach. What makes me flip out is I will eat something, lets say green beans. I will eat it at one meal and then not eat it again. Then I will throw up up to two weeks after I eat the green beans and I will throw up those green beans. Meaning they have been sitting undigested in my stomach for two weeks. I can go two to five days without eating anything because my stomach will just fill up with undigested food and I wait until I spend a night throwing up until my stomach is empty and I can eat again. We've thought about going to get it checked out but there is just too many more pressing health concerns that we need to work on that is more important. 

    About a year ago I started experiencing pain from the middle of my shoulder blades up to the base of my neck. Then several months back I started having intense pain in my biceps. More so my right than my left. We talked to my family doctor and we decided to start with an X-Ray and go from there. I got the X-Ray done and my doctor said that I may have severe arthritis. So I went to an orthopedic to figure out what can be done. The orthopedic said that by looking at the X-Ray he didn't see very much arthritis. After looking at my history with my back and going through my symptoms he said that it could be where my back problems have moved up to my neck. At this point we are waiting to get an MRI and we will go from there. I'm experiencing a lot of pain in my shoulders, neck, biceps, forearms and hands. There are times when I'm way more useless and a burden than normal. I can't pick up anything. It is like picking up a glass if tea is like dislocating my shoulder and elbow. The other day I was holding our cat and everything was ok then suddenly my right arm from shoulder to hand just exploded in pain and I nearly had to throw the cat to Desiree to keep from dropping her (She is an old and very well loved cat). It took over six hours to recover from that. I'm unable to draw, it's hard to write. Doing electronics is next to impossible for me. I've been trying to do a simple AGC add on kit for a radio that I sold to Tim W5TAH. What would take a normal person an hour to do, I've been fighting it for six months. I keep dropping my soldering iron, which isn't fun, I will put electronic components in wrong. I just want to get this done and give it to Tim so that he can use it, but I feel at this point it is nearly impossible for to do. A month back some of you saw that for the very first time I grew a moustache and beard. It looked pretty sweet and was solid white. I really hated it, but I grew it cause I couldn't hold a razor or clippers to shave. 

    About the main thing that I have been doing is working on my bonsai trees. However even though they weigh no more than a pound I have to get someone to move them for me because they are just too heavy for me to pick up. 

    I have plans that I have been working on, like a YouTube channel. My channel idea is basically combining my recumbent trike with ham radio and my health challenges along with showcasing the beautiful parks and trails in the Oklahoma City Metropolitan area.. I'm in really bad shape and I'm constantly racked with severe pain. My hope is to say to people "Hey look what I have to deal with every freaking day of my life! If I can get out of the house and do something physical and just DO SOMETHING then so can you. Life is short and precious, don't waste yours by hiding away inside. 

    Right now I'm limited to riding my trike no farther than a mile from my house. That is so that when I run into health problems and need someone to come and get me. I'm 50 years old and I have a lot of challenges in front of me. Those are challenges that I plan on overcoming somehow. Here are a few:

• Find out what is going on with my arms and try to fix it. 
• Spend more time riding my trike so that I can eventually build up to being allowed to ride farther from home. 
• Finish my bike trailer so that I can take more radio equipment with me on the park. I have my dream radio and everything but my stuff is kind of bulky which makes it hard for me to fit everything on the trike. I have one of those bike trailers for hauling kids and I'm trying to turn that into a cargo trailer. It is taking longer than expected cause it is difficult for me to use any tools. 
• Get electric assist for my trike. This is crazy expensive, roughly $1,500 for the cheapest option, so this will remain more of a dream than reality. This will allow me to ride farther and then when I have heath problems on the trail, it will let me limp back home on my own.  

    I'm not asking for anything, I'm not wanting any symphony. Not a single person is able to go through life without struggles. Some have to struggle more than others, that has been the way it is since the moment of creation. Just got to keep in mind that God will not give you any obstacle that is greater than your ability to overcome. I'm 50 years old, I'm in horrible health, live each moment in chronic pain. Yet I still believe that my best years are ahead of me. I'm also eternally grateful for my family and friends that pick me up off the floor (literally), and continue to support me and encourage me to move forward. Every day I feel like I don't deserve my wife and kids, but everyday I thank God that they are in my life. 

    Again feel free to leave any comments in the comments section below. Subscribe and you will be notified for any future activity. You may contact me at Aaron@K5ATG.com

 

Flashing a Raspberry Pi

 The Raspberry Pi is a fairly cheap single board computer. It doesn't compare with the power of a desktop or even a laptop.  For computing power they are about comparable to laptops from about ten years ago. 

As I said the Raspberry Pi is just a single board computer. Just because it isn't as fast and powerful as todays computers does not make it useless. If I were to list just the amateur radio projects that you can build around a Raspberry Pi, you would be reading that list for days. Just Google amateur radio projects for Raspberry Pi. 

So I got you here today to get started. The Raspberry Pi - RPI uses a Linux based operating system. For the hard drive it used Micro SD cards. So just with the Micro SD card, you have tons of options for how much memory your RPI will have. The MicroSD card is  the hard drive for the RPI so you can have a hard drive of 32gb, 64gb etc. They even make 1TB Micro SD cards! For the most part a 32gb MicroSD card will work. For this post I'm using a Raspberry Pi 4 with 4GB of RAM and a 32GB SanDisk Ultra Micro SD card. My goal here is to walk you through the process of putting an operating system on a RPI so that you can do it on your own. 

Just like any computer, your RPI will need an operating system. Now like the big W operating system there are minor financial incursions to use the RPI operating system. To start it's just a minor $500 deposit and another $700 a year for the permission to use it. JUST JOKING! 😂 The RPI operating system is Open Source which means it is 100% free. The concept of Open Source can be another post so email me at Aaron@K5ATG.com if you would like for me to write a post on that.

Where shall we start?

How about we start at the beginning.

We need an USB Micro SD card so that we can put the RPI Image (A RPI Image is just another words for RPI Operating System or OS) on your Micro SD Card. You don't need anything elaborate, here is a nice cheap one that will do the job: USB3.0 Micro SD Card Reader

Once you have your reader you will need the Raspberry Pi Imager software. To download it simply go here: Raspberry Pi Imager You can download it for Windows, macOS and Ubuntu so download the version that goes with your operating system.

Once the Raspberry Pi Imager is downloaded you want to put the Micro SD card in the USB Microd SD Card reader and plug it into a USB port. Then you will need to start the Raspberry Pi Imager software and a window will appear that looks like this:

First step is we start off on the left hand side of the RPI Imager. Why do we start off on the left you ask? It's because it's my darn blog and I'm left handed. Do you know how much the world is made around right handed people? All of it! In grade school, I had to cut along the dotted line with regular scissors which just tore up the paper all the while being high from the after recess glue high! Anyway back to today, or are you reading this tomorrow? So I'm typing this now and you are reading this in the future... thats trippy. Ok glue is put away. 

The first option is you need to choose your Raspberry Pi Device. you click on the white CHOOSE DEVICE  and select the Raspberry Pi device that you are using. The RPI Imager that I'm using is V1.8.5 and here is a little list of RPI devices that it supports:

• No Filtering - Show every possible image
• Raspberry Pi 5 - Raspberry Pi 5, 500, and Compute Module 5
• Raspberry Pi 4 - Model B, 400, Compute Modules 4, 4S
• Raspberry Pi Zero 2W - The Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W
• Raspberry Pi 3 - Models B, A+, B+, and Compute Module 3, 3+
• Raspberry Pi 2 - Model B
• Raspberry Pi Zero - Models Zero, Zero W, Zero WH
• Raspberry Pi 1 - Models A, B, A+, B+ and Compute Module 1

For this post we will select the Raspberry Pi 4 option cause that is what I'm using. The next step is to select the Raspberry Pi Operating system. This is the Raspberry Pi version of Windows or Mac. The RPI operating systems is based off of Linux and again is open sourced. This means that you can go into the source code and make a bunch of changes and not have a team of lawyers showing up at your door. So here is the list of options that you have:

• Raspberry Pi OS (64-bit) - A port of Debian Bookworm with the Raspberry Pi Desktop. (Recommended)
• Raspberry Pi OS (32-bit) - A port of Debian Bookworm with the Raspberry Pi Desktop. 
• Raspberry Pi OS (Legacy, 32-bit) - A port of Debian Bullseye with security updates and desktop environment.
• Raspberry Pi OS (other) - Other Raspberry Pi OS based images.  

We pick the first option here, RPI OS 64-bit. I just go with the one that is recommended, I don't know enough about the Raspberry Pi different operating systems to tell you the PROS and CONS of each version. 

Next option is to select the USB device that has your Micro SD card in. Make triple shure that you have selected the correct device because this process WILL delete everything on the device selected. Wouldn't want to accidentally delete thousands of pics and videos and other files on your external hard drive. make sure that you have the proper device selected.  

Now we click the NEXT button and a window will appear asking you if you would like to apply OS customisation settings.

I would recommend selecting the EDIT SETTINGS option as this will take you to another window where you can enter the Hostname, Username, Password, internet options. Going through this will make things easier down the line. Due to privacy I will not show this window. 

Click the YES option and a warning window will appear saying: All existing data on USB STORAGE DEVICE  will be erased. Are you sure you want to continue? 

Here is another chance to make sure that you have the selected device to write the Image on. Once again triple check and click in the YES option.  now the imager will go through the steps in putting the Raspberry Pi OS on your SD card. 

Once it is all complete eject it from your computer and remove the Micro SD card, insert it in the Raspberry Pi and boot it up. 

Thank you for following along this far. If you like this content please hit the subscribe button. That would really make my week. Feel free to put any comments or questions you have in the comment section below this post. You can contact me via email at Aaron@K5ATG.com

72/73

Aaron K5ATG

Oklahoma Football on sBITX HF Transceiver

 This post is a little bit of bragging than anything else. 

I'm doing my weekly net for the Mid-Del Amateur Radio Club and the Oklahoma vs Missouri football game was on. So I turned on my trusty sBITX and went to YouTube and was able to watch the game on my radio. Can your high tech expensive radio let you watch the game on it? 

Oh yeah I can also check my email and order stuff from Amazon and ebay. 

Subscribe and get updated on some of the other wonders this rig can do. 

New Desk

 I finally got my new homemade desk in. There is still a lot of organising and getting used to it but after a few weeks I really love it. 

New Shack Desk II

 Got an update on my new shack desk. 

Special thanks to my son Dakota, the finish and the poly has been applied. Now we just need to air it out for a few days to get rid of the fumes and then put it in the house. I'm getting excited for it. It will make life in the shack so much easier. 

Bob Heil K9EID SK

 The amateur radio community is sad by the loss of amateur radio legend Bob Heil K9EID. He is the founder of Heil Sound, who makes audio equipment that is used by the best musical artist around the world and also the first manufacture to be admitted to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He was also on of the original hosts of Ham Nation.  I could go on and write down all of his accomplishments but I would be typing here for a week. 

I was very lucky to have met him in 2019 OzarkCon in Branson Missouri

We exchanged probably over 100 emails over the years with him giving me advice on radios and antennas and me entertaining him with jokes. I'm sure that he is in Heaven building coaxial resonant dipoles and hooking up a audio mixer and stage monitors to a HF radio. 

Bob thank you for teaching us so much. 

Aaron K5ATG

P.S. SK stands for Silent Key which in amateur radio lingo means that a amateur radio operator passed away. 

sBITX V3 Board Review

 A few months back Ashhar Farhan VU2ESE, the father of the BITX series of QRP transceivers came out with the latest edition of that line the sBITX. Once I checked out the copious number of attributes of this little, I immediately realized that this is the HF Transceiver that I have been waiting for. It first came out as the sBITX D.E. (Developers Edition) this edition was to help iron out all of the little problems that come with launching a new product. 

The sBITX DE may have been mainly for ironing out problematic issues, but it proved to be capable of paving the road for the sBITX series. The future and pretty much the present of HF transceivers is SDR- Software Defined Radio. An SDR is in layman's terms, where many functions of transceivers is performed by software instead of traditional electronic components. This allows the physical size of the transceiver to remain small and at the same time expanding its features. What Farhan did with the sBITX DE was genius. He took a relativity cheap (at the time) single board computer the Raspberry Pi 4 and incorporated it into a custom built 40-watt HF Transceiver. He then made the transceiver, and 

Raspberry Pi OS open source and made everything freely available for anyone to download the software and hack it and change it in any way that they see fit.  

The sBITX DE covered the 80, 40, 30, 20, 17, 15, 12 and 10 meter bands. It was about the size of a bread toaster. It incorporated a Raspberry Pi 4 (2 gb) and a 7 inch Raspberry Pi touch screen. By having the Raspberry Pi fully incorporated into the system, a whole new plethora of features that are not even seen it transceivers costing ten times as much. 

Digital modes has been a large part of the hobby for decades. Usually you need to have an HF transceiver, a computer and some sort of interface that connects the transceiver to the computer. On top of that you need all of the cables that come with the computer, all of the cables that come with the transceiver and the cables required to connect it all together. The sBITX gets rid of most of that mess. You need a power cable and a antenna coax. That's it. Yeah a keyboard and mouse are great additions to the sBITX (does your expensive HF radio use a keyboard and mouse?) but with the Raspberry Pi, those can be wireless. So without any extra devices, cables etc, the sBITX allows you to operate on most if not all digital modes. To help you keep track of all of the QSO's that you will have with this rig a logbook is also incorporated into the system. In some modes it will do all of the logging for you on its own! As we all know, we like to brag about getting some rare DX in your logbook. A lot of the time your buddies will just have to take your word for it. The sBITX now allow you to back up your bragging with the ability to record that QSO and play it back to your envious friends. 

One of the sBITX features that i really love is CW. It is well known that I have a host of medical problems. Some of those problems are neurological in nature. These neurological issues keep me from sending CW via key, paddle, bug and most other devices. I can type decent enough though. There are a few ways to send CW via keyboard. Usually in the form of an expensive keyer that has a keyboard feature as an afterthought. The sBITX really makes my heart thump with its options at sending CW. You can send with a straight key, a bug some paddles, and of the traditional stuff. Also you can have a keyboard on the 7" touch screen where you can send by using the on screen keyboard. As mentioned earlier you can use a wireless keyboard and mouse with the sBITX. So of course the coolest option is you can send CW with the wireless keyboard. The CW signal is decoded on the screen as a back up to you decoding it yourself. 

The first edition for public sale was the sBITX V2. This offered all of the features of the DE edition but the depth of the enclosure was cut down by more than half. The new version was about the size of the ARRL Handbook This made it much more friendly for POTA, SOTA and other portable activities. 

You can pack up the sBITX, a battery and antenna and get out of the shack and go out to a local park and get on the air. You wont need any extra parts like a computer of fancy keyer to show all of the passer by how cool amateur radio is. Also you can use your cell phone as a hotspot so you can use THIS HF radio to catch up on Farhan's latest YouTube video or you can cruise on over to the BITX 20 io group to ask any question you want about any of the BITX radios. The sBITX comes pre loaded with the Libre Office suite of software, so when the bands are dead you can make a antenna measuring spreadsheet on LibreOffice Calc or you can use LibreOffice Writer to write your next best selling novel. Can you write a book on your two thousand radio appliance? Didn't think so. 

The latest edition is the sBITX V3. This is the one that I am blessed to have. I have the board only version where I had to supply the Raspberry Pi, 7" touch display, speaker and microphone. 

The V3 has a new gui (Graphic User Interface) however the V3 operating system and sBITX software will work on the DE and V2 versions. Instead of transmitting 40 watts the V3 has a more respectable (to me at least) 20 watts. 

Now I have put my V3 through some use and racked up a few new countries. Here is my setup, but your mileage may vary. 

• sBITX V3 transceiver board only (I really need to figure out an enclosure for it before something gets shorted out.) 
• Raspberry Pi 4 (4 GB RAM) 
• ATU-100 EXT Automatic Antenna Tuner, I really do not need this (see antenna below). I'm mainly using it as a power/ swr meter which again is not needed at when transmitting the sBITX displays the transmitting power and the SWR. 
• 20 Meter homebrew Inverted V dipole broadside east-west. The feed point is 32' above the ground. I have it tuned to 1.0:1 - 1.1:1 SWR on the CW and Digital portions of the band (14.000-14.200 MHz).

I do not have a dedicated room for my shack. My house is fairly small and there are four humans and a cat that call this place home. My "shack" is one wall on the side of my bedroom that I share with my beautiful XYL. We have been married since June 1997. To have a long lasting happy marriage both parties must be willing to compromise. Saying that me and my wife have two different sleeping patterns. My wife likes to sleep in late and decades of work tuned me into getting up a couple of hours before the Sun. So I make an extra effort at being quite so my wife can sleep. To make this even more challenging, I'm mostly deaf and I live in my bed, so getting up and going to another room is generally not an option. So I tend to lean towards the quieter modes like CW and digital modes there I can wear head phones. Typically we still have to put up with the sound of a fan keeping the finals cool on the radio and of course the ever present clacking of the relays. Well the sBITX has neither of those. Operation is really quite. You can hear the electricity flowing during transmit but that isn't really loud enough to be a bother. I was having a problem with SWR. The radio would dial down the power to one or two watts, the SWR was being displayed at 25:1 and higher. Every time I would transmit the computer monitor that I was using for a display for the sBITX would shut off. It was driving me crazy. The antenna kept measuring a perfect 1:1 SWR. After several days of looking for the problem (Remember because of my health I could search for just a little bit at a time so what would take a healthy person a few hours took me days) and I finally found the problem as being a loose coax connector. Once I got that tightened up, the sBITX has proved to be better than I even dreamed that it would be. I use a 15" computer monitor instead of the 7" touch screen display. The reason for this is entirely because of my eyesight and has nothing to do with the radio. I'm due for some new eye windows so that problem should go away. I have been mostly on FT8 and I'm not used to having such an awesome waterfall display. I still have a lot to learn about this awesome radio and I bet I'm going to be enjoying the learning process. You can go ahead and view the sBITX as the new radio on the street. To me it the ONLY radio on the street. I plan on pushing this radio to the limit and I'm sure even at a proper QRP level of 5 watts the sBITX is going to make my logbook fatter than my stack of bills. 

Over this winter I plan on having a few more surgeries to get some of my back problems ironed out. I plan on healing up in time for spring. The plan is for me to be able to start riding my recumbent trike again. Since I was last active on my trike Midwest City has built many new miles of bike trails and even a new city park. With the small size of the sBITX V3, I will be able to put it in my trikes saddle bags with a battery and some wire and go back to operating portable. Permanently mounted on my trike is a 23' telescoping fishing pole that is perfect at supporting a wire antenna. I recently was able to get a second matching fishing pole so expect me to add that to the trike to expand my options. I have already added a HT and a small dual band mag mount antenna. This is to let me talk to my friends while riding the trike. Also in the past I would go out and ride and hurt my back or have my blood sugar to drop to dangerous levels and would require someone to come and help me out or bring me to home or the hospital. On my trike I wear a small head set so I only need to press a single button to operate the HT and get into the repeater. I'm lucky that my mother in law and daughter have their radio license and I have many wonderful friends that monitor the repeater just in case for me. 

I plan on sharing my sBITX exploits here on this blog. I have many plans for it in the future. My brother recently moved into a house that is just yards from a state parks that will need to be activated. I have family that live on SOTA Summits that need to be activated. I can't wait to work the world with this little radio, its gonna be fun. So as always, feel free to share any comments or ask any questions in the comments section below. You can be notified of my adventure and any future blog posts simply by subscribing. Please email me (I get lonely) at Aaron@K5ATG.com

Until Next Time 

'72

Aaron K5ATG

Merry Christmas

 Merry Christmas from the K5ATG Amateur Radio Station in Oklahoma City to each and every one of you through out the world. May the Lord bless all of you. 

72

Aaron K5ATG

AR Notebook #1.1 sBITX RFI

 I had my sBITX v3 hooked up to my computer monitor via HDMI - VGA adapter cable. I removed the HDMI - VGA cable and took my computer monitor out of the system. I then hooked up a 7" Raspberry Pi monitor to the sBITX via HDMI Micro to HDMI cable. This worked pretty good, but that isn't surprising since the sBITX is designed with a 7" Raspberry Pi Touch Screen. As mentioned earlier my sBITX v3 is just the bare board model. I have to supply the Raspberry Pi 4, Monitor, and enclosure. At the time of this post the sBITX is still without an enclosure so that could also be a cause of RFI. 

Since my eyesight is really poor it is hard for me to see everything with the 7" monitor. The sBITX gives you so much information on the display that the font becomes really small. If you use the WEB option on the display that helps quite a bit with larger font. The sBITX is open source so I bet that there is a way to design a optional display that cuts down the amount of information displayed on the sBITX screen to make room for a larger font. I should look into that. 

The sBITX gets its brains from the Raspberry Pi 4. In my experience you can operate the RPI4 headless using VNC and other options. I can then use my PC monitor as a display for the sBITX without any cables. That looks like the easiest option at this point. 

Again until next time you are encouraged to leave comments or questions in the comments section below. Also you can email me at Aaron@K5ATG.com

'72

Aaron K5ATG

AR Notebook #1.0 sBITX RFI

 Got my sBITX v3 from HF Signals and set it up to kick the crap out of the F Layers and in true Aaron the Great style, there was no assault on the atmosphere. Actually the atmosphere did not even get bumped. 😢 But hey I tried. First things first, here is my setup:

• Cool I made a dot
• sBITX v3, 20 watt SDR transceiver that is good on 80-10. In my case it is just a populated PCB with a large heat sink. HF Signals are running a little bit behind on the enclosures and they will get one to me when they can. So for now it is all open air. 
• N7DDC ATU-100 Extended Board Antenna Tuer
• Another dot
• Homebrew 40 Meter EFHW
• Just one more dot for the road. 

I have a 15 inch computer monitor hooked up to the Raspberry Pi 4 that make up the smarts for the sBITX v3. I also have a wireless keyboard and mouse hooked up to the sBITX. How many HF radios do you know of  that uses a keyboard and mouse? 

The problem is that when I go to transmit the computer monitor goes black and remains that way until I stop transmitting.Once I stop transmitting the monitor goes back to normal operation. Since the transceiver is not in an metal enclosure I think that may have something to do with the RFI. Since I'm still in bed rest recovering from my surgery, I'm very limited on what I can do. My first step is I will try to put some ferrite beads on the HDMI cable that connects to the HDMI Micro jack on the Raspberry Pi 4 and I have it connected to the display with a HDMI-VGA adapter. Once I do this, I will post the results and try to come up with a plan to go from there if it does not work.

As always feel free to leave a post in the comments any suggestions for this RFI is welcome. You can email me at Aaron@k5atg.com

72

Aaron K5ATG