Home Brew D-STAR

Here is my home brew D-STAR Hot spot. I have had this running for a little over a year now on a tower near my QTH at 40 watts on a  11 Dbi  gain dipole about 270 ft AGL and has worked great... plans are to add a separate receiver and a duplexer and make it a full fledged repeater

What was needed to build

• Raspberry Pi 2 board
• GMSK Modem board - the one that I used is the Rasp DV AVR board from KI6ZUM
• Western D-Star image that uses the IrcddbGateway and D-Star Repeater software from jonathan naylor (g4klx)
• Modified Kenwood TK-860H transceivers, made the accessory cables from scratch
• DosBox software and Kenwood programming software  

The boards were made from KI6ZUM's files and sent to OSH Park for pcb fab once that was done the fun part of soldering all the components onto the new boards...


Further information on these boards can be found on Jim's web page.
http://ki6zum.com/dstar/dv_overview.html

3 bare boards ready for soldering


very small smd components






Here you see the GMSK modem board attached to the header on the Raspi





After making a few cuts on the case i was able to make it all fit easily




Custom accessory cable was made for the Kenwood radio and also ferrite beads added to all the leads to minimize interference



Links to related items

• http://www.westerndstar.co.uk/
• http://vk5rex.squarespace.com/blog/2013/4/21/gmsk-modems-for-raspberry-pi-and-arduino.html
• http://www.dstar101.com/ircDDBGateway.htm
• https://github.com/dl5di/OpenDV
• http://www.papasys.com/index.php?pageid=gmskboards

73's
WV8TIM