Hey look what just walked in from the door!

#zbitx #hfsignals #radioamateur #amateurradio

2/2

Based on the hard work of Adam, K6ARK I designed a PCB which does all the work of the connections and designed a case for it.

I think it looks like a Turret from the game Portal, hence its name.

https://shop.g7ufo.radio/products/assembled-g7ufo-turret-mini-microphone-for-qmx-trusdx-usdx-fx-4cr-zbitx-kx2-and-kx3

#Elecraft #KX2 #KX3 #QRPLabs #QMX #truSDX #uSDX #FX4CR #zBitx

@N2ADV Maybe it works for you. My brand-new #zbitx is, however, out for sale. I thought it'd be a nice #SOTA radio, but it is a bit too heavy, the screen cannot be seen in the sun, the current drawn is huge, CW is not usable yet, there's a strange RX delay, it does not keep time and needs to be wi-fi synced quite often, and it hangs up on its own after a while. Not a mature product.

Time to charge up some 18650’s… #zBitX #AmateurRadio

Tested DeepWiki to zbitx - repo and it looks pretty nice!

https://deepwiki.com/afarhan/zbitx/1-zbitx-overview

#deepwiki #genai #zbitx #hamradio #radioamateur #sdr

@brainofdane @N3VEM

Dude, that #zBitx looks like an amazing bit of kit!

Built in #FT8, too?!

Golf Tango Foxtrot Oscar with that thing!!!

#AmateurRadio

I ordered zBitx just for fun & testing and perhaps writing some code to it.

Only now I checked the source code of it: https://github.com/afarhan/zbitx

I must say Ashhar Farhan (VU2ES) is a crazy guy :D

There are "few" SW conventions that he could have used but never mind, that is just some hardcode C typing like a crazy. Not the beautiful way to do but I like his attitude to just get things working without looking at side mirrors :)

Keen to see the radio in practice.

#zbitx #vu2es

@ecloud @passthejoe
Exactly. #zbitx is not a SOTA radio, (except to warm your hands in cold weather as your 18650s drain). CW unuseable as of now: missed dits and dahs, strange echo after a few minutes (delayed RX processing?). Also, much heavier radio. Screen unreadable in a bright outdoors setting. Even with all the problems (birdies, unreadable in the sun, PCB-mounted connectors, less bands, etc.) my #trusdx is open-source and a better radio. No FT8 though (acoustically-coupled FT8CN).

#zbitx with a fan… sigh. I don’t like fans, especially noisy ones. https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:7015499

@passthejoe #zbitx is not a good portable QRP radio until it has more efficient finals though. Over 30 watts in for less than 5 watts out!?! come on. You run down your batteries too fast, just to overheat the radio and its insufficient flat-plate heatsink. I added a fan to mine to try to cope with that. But yeah, the rest of it is pretty cool. As with most things, there are disadvantages to be an early adopter, that's all. I ordered a #qmx+ kit in the meantime; too bad it's not open source.

I'm working on getting #sbitx and #zbitx running the same software, rebased on top of some bug fixes an improvements that are not in the earlier forks. I suppose I should get parts of them reorganized and upstreamed soon. https://github.com/ec1oud/sbitx But what comes afterwards is the more interesting part for me... working on that too.

While admitting that most of the Zero Retries amateur radio newsletter is way over my head — and I'm a General Class license holder — I was able to pull out of the most recent issue that THIS IS THE RADIO TO GET (and to beat):

https://www.hfsignals.com/index.php/zbitx/

https://www.zeroretries.org/p/zero-retries-0198?open=false#%C2%A7my-new-perspective-sdr-technology-is-the-imperative-for-us-amateur-radio

#amateur_radio #hamradio #zeroretries #zbitx #sdr

While so many other projects are working to enclose everything, it's so nice to see Farhan de-composing his sBitX instead.

The sBitX Hat extracts the sBitX SDR hardware as a DIY 24-bit 96kHz SDR dongle without the USB interface. We can plug it or its equivalent into whatever RF input and output amplification we can find buy or brew, install any software we like on the Pi, strap it into the user interface, and drive it from our phone. There's a lot to like and fork, here. #zBitX #sBitX #HamRadio

repo https://github.com/afarhan/sbitx
schematic https://github.com/afarhan/sbitxhat
discussion https://groups.io/g/BITX20/topic/fdim_2024_sbitx_hat_info/106374482?dir=asc #sBitX #zBitX

I'm excited about Ashhar Farhan VU2ESE's latest home-brew radio, chaining gloriously analog back ends through an open HW+SW digital front end into a web-first and mobile-first user interface.

His audience at FDIM got an sBitX Hat: a general-purpose SDR using an Si5351A local oscillator to heterodyne HF to an audio-range IF for a WM8731 audio codec. Everything else runs on a Raspberry Pi Zero 2. #sBitX #zBitX #HamRadio https://youtu.be/2MeFZb9Dxbg