W7PFB's blog

W7PFB VARA 4.01 upgrade and antenna move

Submitted by W7PFB on Tue, 2020-12-01 23:56

W7PFB-10 has been upgraded to version 4.01 of VARA FM. Users will need to upgrade as well, sorry for the short notice and inconvenience.

AX.25 1200 baud packet continues unchanged.

The station has been moved from 5 feet AGL to 65 feet AGL. Moving the antenna was an opportunity to inspect the feed line, which will need replacement soon.

As always, comments, complaints, problems all welcome, email [email protected]

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W7PFB-10 Station changes

Submitted by W7PFB on Sat, 2020-09-19 15:52

W7PFB-11 has been shifted from BPQ running on a Raspberry PI and a TNC-X onto different hardware in order to support VARA FM.

Vara FM appears to be both the bee's knees and the cat's pajamas rolled into one. The Soundmodem soft TNC and the VARA FM soft TNC happily coexist and the station seems to seamlessly support both VARA and packet with no difficulties. Adding VARA FM support has sparked a surge of interest in VARA locally and performance is dramatically better than 1200 baud packet. I encourage other operators to explore supporting VARA FM.

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