W0CHP.net

Greetings gracious hams! As some of you know, I operate the XLX493 Reflector. Currently, it supports both DMR and YSF protocols. However, I do not posses the necessary hardware for trans-coding the D-Star protocol.

And since my reflector has been getting more traffic lately, I’m putting a feeler out there to other hams who run a D-Star-enabled reflector to see if they’d be gracious enough to peer with reflector (more specifically, Module E, since it’s the busiest module.

I keep/use a hotspot in my truck, and I’ve always wanted a way to manage/switch/connect/disconnect from reflectors, talkgroups, etc., hands-free; using only my voice.

I’ve begun work on a small project to allow me to do just that. And no, this is not an April Fool’s joke. 😆

Check it out…

For some time now, I’ve yearned for a way to quickly link to various XLX reflectors and modules on DMR, as well as unlink from modules to “mute” a busy reflector/module.

Recently, I’ve witnessed two networks suffer from loops, caused by mis-configured hotspots. Now while Pi-Star has some rudimentary checks in place (simply a warning message for hotspots configured as “Public Nodes”), I’ve improved W0CHP-PiStar-Dash to help prevent these loops even further.

The original Pi-Star (still) uses myriad HTML tables for layout (non-tabular) data. That’s a Bad Thing^™ And since my W0CHP-PiStar-Dash software is a fork, it inherited lots of that legacy garbage. However, I’ve begun the conversion from HTML tables for layout, to proper HTML(5) and CSS.

This is a UI/UX project that will be completed in phases as I get to them.

My XLX493 MultiProtocol Reflector is now peering/bridged with BrandMeister. What this provides, is a direct and easy link into XLX493, Module “E - W0CHP-PiStar-Dash”.

All you need to do is talk on TalkGroup 3170603 in BrandMeister, and you’ll automatically be connected due to the bridging/peering.

This is a very simple way to connect to the reflector if you’re looking for W0CHP-PiStar-Dash support, or just general chat about the software.

Since the birth of W0CHP-PiStar-Dash in ~2019, the “back-end” had historically used (and stuck with) the official Pi-Star binaries (the core third-party programs found in /usr/local/bin) compiled by the Pi-Star author Andy, MW0MWZ. This was deliberate…

Firstly, I really didn’t want to compile all of the upstream binary sources by-hand. And secondly, they were perfectly stable enough for daily usage and didn’t merit any changes.

However, as of 1/26/2022, that has since changed.

Since 2018, I migrated all of my code and repositories from GitHub onto my own on-premise, self-hosted solution which was based on the venerable Gogs software (proxied by an Apache web server).

While my solution worked quite well for some time, I had been meaning to migrate all of my code repositories to a different back-end.

W0CHP-PiStar-Dash has a new versioning & version display scheme…

Users may recall version information being displayed like this:

Pi-Star: 4.1.6 / Dashboard: W0CHP-20211226_01 / Branch: master

This versioning scheme required me to change the version number in the config file, albeit, it was an automatic process. However, the former “DATE_INCREMENT” scheme tells us nothing.

If you’re running a hot spot on a Raspberry Pi Zero rev.1 or rev.1.1 (1st gen.) board, consider replacing your Pi board with the new 2021 Raspberry Pi Zero 2. Especially if you’re using my W0CHP-PiStar-Dash version/fork of Pi-Star.