Sunday, September 13, 2015

Arduino Masters Ham Radio Digital Mode

[jmilldrum] really gets a lot of use out of his Si5351A breakout board. He’s a ham [NT7S], and the Si5351A can generate multiple square waves ranging from 8 kHz to 160 MHz, so it only stands to reason that it is going to be a useful tool for any RF hacker. His most recent exploit is to use the I2C-controllable chip to implement a Fast Simple QSO (FSQ) beacon with an Arduino.

FSQ is a relatively new digital mode that uses a form of low rate FSK to send text and images in a way that is robust under difficult RF propagation. There are 32 different tones used for symbols so common characters only require a single tone. No character takes more than two tones.

The Si5351A can easily handle the encoding job. Since the output is a square wave, you do need a low-pass filter to put it on the air. [jmilldrum] also used some relatively small amplifiers to get the output up to 20 watts.

You might remember, we’ve talked about [jmilldrum’s] work with the Si5351A before. We also recently were talking about hams experimenting with digital modes and this is a great example, both by the developers of FSQ and [jmilldrum] for implementing it with an Arduino. If you want to learn more about FSQ, see the video below.


Filed under: Arduino Hacks, radio hacks, wireless hacks

via Hackaday » radio hacks http://ift.tt/1Kh49mP

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