CATS mobile transceiver in a 3d-printed case

CATS: A New Communication And Telemetry System

March 15, 2024 by Dave Rowntree 27 Comments

CATS is a new communication and telemetry standard intended to surpass the current Automatic Packet Reporting System (APRS) standard by leveraging modern, super-cheap Frequency Shift Keying (FSK) transceivers rather than standard FM units. The project is in the early stages, but as of this writing, there is a full open source software stack and reference hardware for both Raspberry Pi-based gateway devices and an STM32-based mobile device.

CATS packets are called ‘whiskers!’

From a radio perspective, CATS uses raw FSK rather than the inefficient AFSK used by APRS. A real killer for channel utilization is the PTT time; this is the dead time around a packet APRS requires for ‘keying up’ and ‘keying down.’ The CATS standard is aggressive with PTT timing, enabling the channel to get going on sending the data sooner.

Additionally, compared to APRS, the packet baud rate increases from 1200 baud to 9600 baud. Other key points are using LDPC encoding for forward error correction and data whitening (a useful PDF guide from Ti) to smooth over any burst errors.

One of the neat concepts of APRS is the APRS-IS (APRS Internet service). This enables amateur radio services to be connected over the Internet, vastly improving range. The CATS equivalent is called FELINET (if you’re not spotting all the ‘cat’ references by now, go and get another coffee). Together with the I-gate hardware, FELINET bridges the CATS radio side with the current APRS network. As FELINET expands to more than the current few dozen nodes, APRS services will no longer be required, and FELINET may well replace it. Interestingly, all software for FELINET, the APRS relay, and the I-Gate firmware are written in Rust. We told you learning Rust was going to be worth the effort!

On the reference hardware side of things, the CATS project has delivered a Raspberry Pi hat, which uses a 1 watt RF4463 transceiver and supporting passives. The design is about as simple as it can be. A mobile transceiver version uses an STM32 micro to drive the same RF4463 but with supporting power supplies intended to run from a typical automotive outlet. Both designs are complete KiCAD projects. Finally, once you’ve got some hardware in place and the software installed, you will want to be able to debug it. CATS has you covered with an RTL-SDR I-Gate module, giving you an independent packet log.

APRS is quite mature, and we’ve seen many hacks on these pages. Here’s an earlier APRS IGate build using a Raspberry Pi. Need to hook up your PC to a cheap Chinese transceiver? You need the all-in-one cable. As with many things amateur-radio-oriented, you can get playing cheaply.

A Look Inside A 70-GHz Electromechanical Attenuator

March 15, 2024 by Dan Maloney 4 Comments

It might not count as “DC to daylight,” but an electromechanical attenuator that covers up to 70 GHz is pretty close, and getting a guided tour of its insides is quite a treat.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this one comes to us from [Shahriar] at “The Signal Path,” where high-end gear most of us never get a chance to work with goes for one last hurrah after it releases the magic smoke. And indeed, that appears to be exactly what happened to the Rohde & Schwarz 75 dB step attenuator, a part that may have lived in the front end of one of their spectrum analyzers. As one would expect from such an expensive component, the insides have some pretty special engineering. The signal is carried through the five attenuation stages on a narrow strip of copper. Each stage uses a solenoid to move the strip between either a plain conductor or a small Pi pad with a specified attenuation. The attention to detail inside the cavity is amazing, with great care taken to maintain the physical orientation of the stripline to prevent impedance mismatches and unwanted reflections.

The Pi pads themselves are fascinating, too, especially under [Shahriar]’s super-duper microscope. All of them were destructively removed from the cavity before getting to him, but it’s still pretty clear what’s going on. That’s especially true with the 5-dB pad, which bears clear signs of the overload that brought on the demise of the whole attenuator. We suppose a repair would have been feasible if it had been just the one pad that needed replacement, but with all of them broken, it’s off to the scrap bin. Or to the recycler — there appears to be plenty of gold in there.

We thought this was a fantastic look under the covers of an exquisitely engineered part. Too bad it didn’t rate the [Shahriar] X-ray treatment, as this multimeter repair or this 60-GHz phased array did. Oh, well — maybe next time.

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Custom Library Rescues Good LoRa Hardware From Bad Firmware

March 13, 2024 by Dan Maloney 17 Comments

The range of hardware that comes on some dev boards these days is truly staggering. Those little LoRa boards are a prime example — ESP32 with WiFi and Bluetooth, a transceiver that covers a big chunk of the UHF band, and niceties like OLED displays and plenty of GPIO. But the firmware and docs? Well, if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all. Or better yet, just roll your own.

Of course that doesn’t hold true for all the LoRa dev boards on the market, but [Rop] certainly found it to be the case for the Heltec HTIT-WB32LA. This board has all the bells and whistles and would be perfect for LoraWAN and Meshtastic applications, but it needed a little help getting it over the line. [Rop]’s contribution to this end is pretty comprehensive and is based on his fork of the RadioLib library, which incorporates a library that greatly reduces wear on the ESP32’s flash memory. In addition to full radio support, the library supports all the hardware on the board from the pushbutton to the display, power management and battery charging, and of course the blinkenlights.

[Jop] includes quite a few example applications, from the bare minimum needed to get the board spun up to a full-blown spectrum analyzer. It’s a nice piece of work, and a great give-back to the LoRa community. And if you want to put one of these modules to work, you’re certainly in the right place. We’ve got everything from LoRaWAN networks to the magic of Meshtastic, so take your pick and get hacking.

Stressless Shortwave Reviewed

March 12, 2024 by Al Williams 17 Comments

[Dan Robinson] picked up a shortwave receiver known as the “stressless” receiver kit. We aren’t sure if the stress is from building a more complicated kit or operating a more complicated receiver. Either way, it is an attractive kit that looks easy to build.

Presumably to reduce stress, the VFO and receiver boards are already built, so assembly is just a few hours connecting large components and boards. As kits go, this is a fairly simple one. We were surprised to read that the supplier says you can’t upgrade the firmware. We, of course, wonder if that’s true.

For technical specs, the receiver is AM only and can operate from 100 kHz to 30 MHz. It uses a double conversion with intermediate frequencies of 21.4 MHz and 455 kHz. There’s a BNC connector on the back, and the radio requires 11 to 15V on the input. Apparently, the frequency generator inside is an SI5351. The sensitivity and selectivity numbers look very good for an AM radio.

We were surprised to see the radio didn’t have provisions for SSB since AM-only makes it not as useful for hams or others interested in non-broadcast transmissions. If we are doing our conversions correctly, the kit is fairly pricey, too, especially considering that it is AM only.

Still, we like that you could easily assemble a nice-looking radio kit. We were interested in hearing it perform, and [Dan’s] video lets us virtually try it out without the effort. We’ve seen the SI5351 on a carrier if you want to roll your own. Come to think of it, we’ve seen several.

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Inside America’s Last Morse Code Station

March 8, 2024 by Al Williams 39 Comments

The Titanic famously (or infamously) used Morse code to call out in distress at the end of its final voyage. Ships at sea and the land-based stations that supported them used Morse code for decades, but with the growing use of satellites, maritime Morse code ended in 1999. With one notable exception. [Saahil Desai] writing in the Atlantic tells the story of America’s last Morse code station, KPH just north of San Francisco.

In fact, KPH did shut down in 1997 as part of the wind down of Morse code in ocean vessels. But some radio enthusiasts, including [Tom Horsfall] and [Richard Dillman], have brought the venerable station back to life. The radio squirrels, as they call themselves, dutifully send news and weather every Saturday to anyone interested in listening. They also exchange radio traffic, primarily with the SS Jeremiah O’Brien, a World War II-era ship parked nearby. N2FQ visited the station and operated the station on video, which you can see below. Or, check out the tour in the second video, below.

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Phenolic board from an RC car - a well-known sight for a hacker

Pairing A New Remote To A Cheap RC Car

March 8, 2024 by Arya Voronova 9 Comments

The cheap little RC cars are abundant anywhere you are, and if you’ve ever disassembled one, you are familiar with how the PCB looks. A single-sided phenolic paper PCB with a mystery chip driving a bunch of through-hole transistors, a sprinkle of through-hole capacitors, and a few supporting components for the wire antenna. It might not feel reusable, but [Chris Jones] begs to differ, with a Twitter thread showing us how he’s paired a scrap board from one RC car with a remote control from another, all to help a little family project.

These mystery ICs turn out to be RC-car-on-a-chip modules, and Chris lucked out in that his IC has a detailed datasheet available, complete with code pulse examples for different commands. The datasheet for the chip in the remote control is nowhere to be found, though, so we have to dig deeper. How about scoping the RF output? Turns out the supported codes between the two ICs are basically identical! The scrap board wouldn’t move any motors though, so it was time to narrow down the issue.

The RC car board has a 128KHz oscillator, and scoping that has shown the issue – it was producing 217KHz for some reason. It turned out that the oscillator’s load resistor was 100 kiloohms instead of recommended 200k, and switching that put it back on course. We would assume that, wherever the original remote control for that car is, it is similarly mis-tuned, or otherwise the RC car could never have worked.

Through sheer luck and tactical application of an oscilloscope, the RC car moves again, paired to a remote it was never meant to be, and the family project moves forward. Got a RC car, but no remote? Perhaps a HackRF can help.

A bias tee module added inside the Starlink terminal, connected to the pads where a GPS antenna used to be wired

GPS Antenna Mods Make Starlink Terminal Immune To Jammers

March 6, 2024 by Arya Voronova 68 Comments

The Starlink receivers need positioning and precise timing information to function, and currently the best way to get that information is to use a global navigation satellite system (GNSS) such as GPS. Unfortunately, the antenna used for this secondary satellite connection leaves something to be desired. Of course, when it comes to solving Starlink problems, there’s no one best than [Oleg Kutkov], whose duty is to fix and improve upon Starlink terminals used in Ukraine — and when the specific problem is GPS bands getting jammed by the invading military, you better believe that a fix is due.

[Oleg] sets the scene, walking us through the evolution of GPS circuitry on the Starlink terminals. Then he shows us the simplest mods you can do, like soldering an improved passive antenna in place of the chip antenna currently being used. Then, he takes it up a notch, and shows us how you could attach an active antenna by using a bias tee module, a mod that would surely work wonders on more than just this device! Then, he brings out the test result tables — and the differences are impressive, in that the Starlink terminals with active antenna mods were able to get GPS signal in areas with active jamming going on, while the unmodified ones could not.

The post is exceptionally accessible, and a must read for anyone wondering about GPS antenna reception problems in customer-accessible devices. This is not the only Starlink hardware mod we’ve seen [Oleg] make, we’ve just covered his Starlink Ethernet port restoration journey that meticulously fixes Ethernet connectivity oversights in the newer models, and the blog also has an article about powering Starlink terminals without the need for PoE, so, do check it out if you’re looking for more!