Amazing work by Jon Dawson at 101 Things and others to bring a very capable SDR to the RaspberryPi PICO.
I've forked the project here and had claude write some very useful documentation on the user interface operation.
It sounds great:
You might notice that my display is offset two pixels to the left. The solution is to select the OLED type of SH1106 instead of the default SSD1306. (It seems they are frequently substituted).
Jon's blog post here is very good reading.
A terrific net this morning on 40m here in VK3. We had stations in VK2, VK3, VK5 and VK7. Stations were using not just FreeDV 2.3.1 but also the macOS FreeDVNeo and the Thetis SDR software. One was listening on an SDR that decodes RADE at the Nepean Men's Shed.
There was some SSB partly overlapping our normal frequency of 7.177 so I moved up 2kHz to 7.179. Most people realised but at least one didn't and when they transmitted interfered. In future I'll be careful to move at least 3kHz away. Lesson learned.
Here's some of the stations on the net, if you haven't heard RADEV1 this will give you a good idea of how it typically sounds.
Stations on the net included: VK2AWN, VK2BLQ, VK2DWG, VK3FAR, VK3FC, VK2KNC, VK3GTP, VK3JCO, VK3JF, VK3KEZ, VK3ZTR, VK5ABE, VK5FD, VK5RA, VK7HOB and me, VK3TPM.
Thanks to Stephen, VK2BLQ, for sending this clip of his reception of me in Sydney (about 1000km away).
In other AI news, after the success of the SpaceX IPO, based largely on future profit from their AI component, the other AI companies - OpenAI and Anthropic - are also planning their own IPOs. One model, "Fable 5", from Anthropic was released and then withdrawn for non-US citizens and this highlights a risk to Australians who rely on AI cloud services not controlled by us. Listen here: https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/nightlife/nightlife-tech-talk-with-peter-marks/106805414
A terrific net this morning in south east Australia. Amazingly there has been mobile FreeDV activity during the week! Most people are now on 2.3.1 which resolved a Windows audio issue.
Stations heard included VK2BLQ, VK3APG, VK2AWN, VK3FAR, VK3FC, VK3GTP, VK3KEZ, VK3PTR, VK3YSA, VK5ABE, VK5JPL, VK5RA, VK2DWG, VK2KNC, VK5FD, VK3JCO, and me, VK3TPM.
Several stations said that they'd like an option in the FreeDV app to auto-start the Modem at launch. This is particularly helpful when operating on headless, or small screen Raspberry Pi. I've raised a feature request here but it needs some more backers. Please add your email if you support this.
Built for my own entertainment but might be of interest to other macOS hams. FreeDV Neo is enough of an implementation of FreeDV RADE V1 to be usable on air. More info here including a download link.
This app is not officially supported and you should first use the official FreeDV app from the project.
