Upgrade to my SvxLink Node

1 Scope

This project is a follow-up of a number of predecessor projects. From time to time, projets need a face lift, and my SVXLINK noe suffered a nearby lightning strike, and lights went out. Time to replace the machine used up to now.

The most recent computer hardware used for the project was a Seagate FreeAgent, an early embedded platform that you could use as a hacker. Even though we're using Raspberry Pi 3B+ today, version 1 still is very useful and so I decided to assign one of my surplus boards to this task.

Previous experiments in this context:

• Porting SVXLink to OpenWRT
• A SVXLink Server based on the BeagleBoard
• Setting up a remote, electrically independent, low power EchoLink relay
• The Echolink Node DB0BUL
• Bedienung des DB0BUL-Echolink-Knotens über Funk

2 Mechanical changes

• The entire hardware was upgraded to be a 19" 3HE board carrier. I am using two VERA BICC Monovolt, giving me sufficient power at 12 and 15 volts.

• The mast unit has been replaced with a most recent Miktorik W60G "wireless wire" operating at 60 GHz.

• The main switch unit has been replaced to be a 1HE Mikrotik RB2011RM with 10 ports. The former switch unit, a noname 5 port switch went out of operation.

• The Raspberry Pi 1 now operates a USB hub, which again connects to an external disk of 500GB, acting as home partition.

3 Software

In order to retain a working Debian / Ubuntu distribution that includes and monitors also the SVXLINK files, I decided to use a trick. There are many tutorials out there how to compile SVXLINK yourself. But the idea of having unmanaged files on my disk sucks.

• This works fine: https://github.com/sm0svx/svxlink/wiki/InstallBinRaspbian

4 Images

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