What use is an F-call?

I've just built myself v1.0 of a Raspberry Pi SDR. It still has some way to go until I can show it off - needs a touch screen, a power supply that runs on 12V, some user interface elements, but the functionality is there.

If you're unfamiliar with the nature of a Raspberry Pi, it's a single board computer, the size of a credit card, has Ethernet, USB, HDMI, audio, video and a MicroSD card slot. My version comes with 512Mb of memory. It's 17mm high. This is a tiny fully functional computer.

From a geek perspective, it's running a version of Debian Linux, called raspbian. It's the same version of Debian as my main computer, Wheezy, which means that everything you have on your main computer, you could theoretically use on a Raspberry Pi.

I've plugged in a USB Television Dongle, one that allows it to be reprogrammed into a versatile receiver. After a little bit of programming, nothing too complex, I can now see wave forms and spectrograms of 2 MHz of bandwidth.

I'm aiming to make this enclosed and self-contained, so I can take it with me in the field and use it as a pan-adapter with my Yaesu 857d.

So far it's cost me $38 for the Raspberry Pi, $15 for the SDR dongle. I'm waiting for a screen to come back in stock, but in the mean time I've just plugged it into my monitor on my desk.

It's only a little hack, but it was fun to do.

I'm Onno VK6FLAB