☰ Rogue Valley Amateur Radio Club

October 3, 2019 Club Meeting

Thursday, October 3, 2019 at 7:00 PM Medford Police Department Community Room, 219 S. Ivy St., Medford, OR

Program: TBD

Information about the October program has not been received as of the newsletter publication date.

The club holds nominations for 2020 officers at the October meeting. Three current office holders have agreed to run again for their respective offices (Treasurer, Secretary, and Vice President). Please attend and consider volunteering to help our club. The time and effort involved in the positions is not that great.

Announced in the October 2019 issue of The Repeater.

Meeting Notes

From the November 2019 issue of The Repeater.

RVARC Oct. 3, 2019 Meeting Minutes

7:07PM Acting President Scott Cummings, NA7OM, called the meeting to order. Attendance was about 17 people.

Club Treasurer Mike Bach, WB6FFC, reported the bank balance is $4714.00, with $2.20 in petty cash, also $30 of dues for 2020 to be processed. Still waiting for the CARE club to contribute their half of the 2019 Field Day expenses. The club insurance was renewed at $200 expense and the approved $150 donation to the ARRL Spectrum Defense Fund was paid.

Pat Cunningham, KD7MPA, demonstrated the new K7MFR.com website and proposed a shopping page where folks can order Tee-shirts and other swag. There could be the possibility of customization with your own logo or callsign.

Don Bennett, KG7BP, announced the next license test will be given on Oct 26 at 9:00 AM at the Fire Dist. #5 location 5811 S. Pacific Hwy. Contact Don at [email protected] for details.

The September 7 RVARC swap meet was a success, but we will have to find another location for next year.

Scott reminded us that the California QSO Party starts at 9:00 AM October 5, 2019. The local group was going to the Montague area, as there is a good propagation zone there.

Pat, KD6MPA, volunteered to order stickers of the new club logo for PR uses.

7:31PM Break for snacks and visiting.

8:13 PM Scott, NA7OM, announced he would be in Luzon, Philippines for next year’s CQ WW WPX contest and will be trying for ‘worked all zones’ status.

8:15 PM This month’s presentation on The Raspberry Pi and Ham Radio was given by Pat Cunningham, KD6MPA.

The Raspberry Pi is an inexpensive, credit-card sized, low-power single-board computer first released in 2012 by the Raspberry Pi Foundation (in Great Britain), primarily for educational use. The target price was $35 and total sales have grown to over 25 million units. The first version had a Broadcom SoC with an ARM 700MHz CPU, 256MB RAM and had interfaces for audio, video, HDMI, GPIO, USB, Ethernet, DisplayCSI & CameraCSI connectors.

Newer RPI 2’s & 3’s have 1GB RAM, more USB ports and GPIO, and a faster CPU. It runs a variety of Linux operating systems and Windows 10 IOT core.

The official system is Raspbian, a customized version of Debian Linux. See raspberrypi.org for details and downloads.

Bare-board 5v power draw is around 0.5 amp to 1 amp for boards prior to the RPi4B.

History:

  • 2012 RPi 1B
  • 2013 RPi 1A
  • 2014 compute module on a 200pin SODIMM module
  • 2014 RPi 2B+, RPi 1A+
  • 2015 RPi 2B+
  • 2016 RPi Zero, RPi 3B
  • 2017 Zero W/WH
  • 2018 RPi 3A+, RPi 3B+
  • 2019 RPi 4B (1GB / 2GB / 4GB RAM versions)

Ham radio uses: Hotspots, WSPR, fldigi, PiTX, Host Websites (AREDN)., TNC-PI: tnc-x.com www.pigate.net , SDR

Pat went over writing the bootable SD card, command-line vs GUI operation, ‘headless’ configuration, network setup, basic terminal commands, and accessories.

Downsides: the RPi needs a network connection to get the current time (no RTC), is not fully open-source (binary blob for BCM SoC low-level operations), and older units had some power stability and possible SD card corruption issues

Overall, good stability on newer versions when using quality power supplies.

Hardware is available through Canakit, Adafruit, Newark/Element14, Microcenter, etc.

You need a 5v power supply, a microSD Card to hold the operating system, and for connectivity: either:

  • A USB keyboard, mouse, and HDMI cable to your display, for direct access.
  • Or a network connection so you can sign-in over SSH, for ‘headless’ access via another computer / keyboard / display.

Some reference links from google:

Lots of questions and answers followed the presentation.

9:06 PM Scott adjourned meeting

  • John Armstrong,KF7UMK secretary
Tags: meeting

© 2026 Rogue Valley Amateur Radio Club