Cariboulite success

M0RVB

Well. Further to my previous post where all hope seemed to have gone out of the window I finally made progress today, but not the way I set out to.

First off, I pulled a Raspberry Pi 4 from another project and sat the CaribouLite HAT on it.

Next was a fresh installation of DragonOS. But this time it did open the ssh port - I've no idea why it did not before and note I am being unscientific here as I changed the Pi, but I am not going backwards.

Then, time for install.sh...

All seemed to go well but the software failed to compile completely. Searching on the errors I added #includeto two source files, cariboulite/software/libcariboulite/src/CaribouLiteCpp.cpp and cariboulite/software/libcariboulite/src/CaribouLite.hpp. Stripping out all the 'apt's and 'depmod' from install.sh and running it again and the software compilation completed! I had already added and commented out the necessary lines in /boot/firmware/config.txt so a reboot was all that was needed to kick it into life. The driver was loaded - lsmod|smi showed this and also /proc/device-tree/hat now exists, both precursors to success according to the notes and YouTube videos.

Running sudo SoapySDRUtils --find showed the card, and, finally (!), running SoapySDRServer --bind and CubicSDR on the Mac mini finds the server on the Pi and I can tune to the local radio station.

Success, but that was a struggle. Mind you, I learned stuff at least!

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CaribouLite SDR

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QO100 success

Got myself a Heil headset for the laptop as the built-in mic picked up room noise. So, I figured it was time to try a QSO on QO100 even with the floating (frequency wise) Pluto. And - success! I had a short QSO with a German station. Just waiting for some small signal diodes to arrive before I glue the GPSDO output to the Pluto. There is a modification that involves removing the 40MHz TCXO and connecting an external source but the Leo Bodnar GPSDO output is 3.3V, too much for the chip in the Pluto. The mod involves two diodes in antiparallel to earth, plus a capacitor between the Pluto chip and the diodes, and another between the diodes and GPSDO. Hopefully that will work and the surgery on the Pluto does not consign it to the scrap pile! The GPSDO I have has two outputs, one 25MHz to the LNB, and one 40MHz for the Pluto. I still need to sort the dish as signal strengths are still below where I expected. I am also concerned at the filter/pre-amp because it does not draw as much current as it is supposed to - it works but I wonder…

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M0RVB

QO100 sort-of success

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