Ham radio; GPS for location?

[jetthanna]

New user, have the M5Stack and an RTL SDR on the way (can't find old one!) I successfully installed firmware, have looked at screens and I am very impressed with what I'm seeing. I'll test thoroughly after I have everything. I've had lots of fun with RTL SDR on computer and phone already.

I'm a ham, would be happy to give my two cents worth on ham related pages. In addition to AM and SSB, would be awesome to include the following:

Morse decoding
Packet radio/email decoding
APRS decoding/mapping
FT8 and other related decoding like WSPR

Decoding various digital voice modes on FM would be great too.

Wondering if location can be set with the addition of an M5Stack gps board? Can time be set from gps?

Looking forward to testing! How fun!

[hardcoreerik]

Thanks — and absolutely, ham radio is an area I want OrcSDR to grow into.

A few of the things you mentioned are already on my radar, but I also don't want to promise features before we've actually built and tested them.

Right now OrcSDR is receive-only. We have the beginnings of the HF/shortwave side, but the full AM/SSB experience still needs work. P25 Phase I receive/voice is working, and we've also been doing work on Phase II, although Phase II voice isn't complete yet.

The ham-related features you listed are all interesting:

• CW/Morse decoding
• packet/APRS decoding and mapping
• FT8/WSPR and similar weak-signal modes
• other digital modes
• better dedicated AM/SSB ham workflows

APRS in particular would fit OrcSDR really well because we already have mapping/location infrastructure.

GPS is also a good idea. OrcSDR already has a receiver-location system and the Tab5 has a hardware RTC. At the moment location can be set without GPS and the RTC can be synchronized over USB, but we aren't currently reading an external GPS module.

Feeding GPS position into the receiver location and using GPS UTC to set the Tab5 RTC would make a lot of sense. That's probably a cleaner solution than treating GPS as a completely separate dashboard feature.

And yes — I'd definitely appreciate ham operators helping test this stuff as it develops. Real RF testing and feedback from people who actually use these modes is much more useful than us just checking that a decoder compiles.

Once your RTL-SDR arrives, please keep the feedback coming. 🙂