Wanting to be able to operate my ham radio station via remote has always been a goal of mine. I spend a large amount of time away from home, in hotels, because of work. The radio I use for VHF weak signal work (Yaesu FT-736R), does not really have a good CAT control system. I am planning on upgrading to a radio that does have CAT control shortly though, a FT-991A.
In the mean time, I have had good luck using remote desktop to work digital modes on WSJT-X – mainly FT8 and MSK144. Although I do need to configure the radio before I leave the house for the correct frequency settings and ALC.
The radio control is only half the battle though. There are a number of other devices that need to be monitored and controlled. So, I decided to make a “Dashboard” to organize everything I would need. When I started the design process I had some primary goals:
- Web browser based interface (with the ability to VPN to my network from anywhere)
- Ability to rotate my yagi antennas and view the current heading
- Ability to turn on and off the 2 meter Mirage B-5030-G amplifier
- View temperatures of certain devices
- View voltage levels of certain power supplies
- Display some quick reference info
In the coming posts, I will give a more in depth look at how I accomplished all those aspects of the project. This post is more based on the Dashboard itself.
I wanted to make it from the ground up and not use preexisting platforms, such as Node Red. I selected a Raspberry Pi 3B+ to be the hosting device and started working on it.
The first line of the Dashboard displays the time it was last loaded, my callsign, and my Maidenhead Locator System grid square. The next line displays the last command issued to the antenna rotator. Then there is a menu of fairly self-explanatory buttons that directly drive the rotator.
There is a live video stream from the Raspberry Pi’s expansion camera, using this python script, which is pointed at the display of the antenna rotator control box. Eventually, I may be upgrading this system to use an optical character recognition (OCR) program to digitize a numerical value and move the display to a Java Script type compass.
Finally, there is a control for the Mirage 2 meter amplifier. These buttons control a TP Link smart plug that an Astron 50 amp power supply is plugged into. The green “light” is showing that the amplifier is currently on.
As we scroll down, there are a series of gauges. These gauges are Java Script and the data is driven by different supply devices and JSON scripts. More info on Gauges.JS can be found here. I will explain more on the gauges in coming posts.
Finally, at the bottom of the Dashboard is a ham radio propagation banner from N0NBH, a link to my garage door control menu, a link to the HF antenna selector (more info found here), and finally, a weather banner from Forcast7.com.
Awesome!