Arduino Masters Ham Radio Digital Mode
[jmilldrum] really gets a lot of use out of his Si5351A breakout board. He’s a ham [NT7S], and the Si5351A can generate multiple square waves ranging from 8 kHz to 160 MHz, so it only stands to reason that it is going to be a useful tool for any RF hacker. His most recent exploit is to use the I2C-controllable chip to implement a Fast Simple QSO (FSQ) beacon with an Arduino.
FSQ is a relatively new digital mode that uses a form of low rate FSK to send text and images in a way that is robust under difficult RF propagation. There are 32 different tones used for symbols so common characters only require a single tone. No character takes more than two tones.
The Si5351A can easily handle the encoding job. Since the output is a square wave, you do need a low-pass filter to put it on the air. [jmilldrum] also used some relatively small amplifiers to get the output up to 20 watts.
You might remember, we’ve talked about [jmilldrum’s] work with the Si5351A before. We also recently were talking about hams experimenting with digital modes and this is a great example, both by the developers of FSQ and [jmilldrum] for implementing it with an Arduino. If you want to learn more about FSQ, see the video below.
Filed under: Arduino Hacks, radio hacks, wireless hacks
