Been using a Surface for years. Great little machines. Works like a champ doing POTA or FD. Pi's, laptops, Surface etc. all have their place.
Followed your videos for a while, this is the first that I wanted to comment on. A very well presented and narrated video that has given me some ideas for a low power holiday portable station in the future. Thank you.
That's a nicely produced, well written video. It makes my ATS-3 in an Altoids tin, "write in the rain" pad, and golf pencil seem almost spark-gap.
I like raspberry pi's. I have one with a touchscreen addon that makes in shorter and less wide than a phone (although it is more that 1.5 inches deep). Even so, I have experience using it for ham setups. We recently put up a HF6V Butternut vertical right outside our shop (not our normal setup) and, to run digital, we decided to use an audio patch by rubber-banding the mic to a headset and placing the mic that's on the headset close to the speakers. The radio is the IC-726, running 100 watts, and the setup is about 30 feet away from the antenna (there is a metal wall in between the rig setup and the antenna itself). Booted up the Pi, everything worked great, got fldigi running on it, and tried to call CQ. Then the troubles begun. 1. Before the antenna change, I was using a doublet. This was causing a problem with the keyboard not responding when I pressed keys. This started happening noticeably at around 25 watts, and by the time I was running 100 the keyboard would barely work at all. The same thing happened when I switched the antennas. It's a wired keyboard. 2. The mouse stopped working, the movement was too choppy to work with. It's a wired mouse. 3. The headset stopped working correctly. As I increased the power, you could hear the audio quality getting worse and worse until it was raspy and unintelligible. At first, these things were minor annoyances and could be fixed when I turned down the power. Decided to throw some chokes on them to cut down on the interference. All it did was make things 10 times worse, at least. When running 100 watts right out of the gate, these three things got so bad that the instant I keyed up, the headset, keyboard and mouse all crashed instantaneously. This is a problem with the Pi, and maybe the keyboard and mouse, because I was running the same rig with the same doublet at the same power, just with a laptop and a bluetooth mouse and everything worked fine, no interference. Antenna was about 25 feet away then, with nothing but thin air between the rig and the antenna. The only thing I can conclude is that either the Pi, or the keyboard and mouse are not ok with hi density of RF.
Very good video and you covered several things I've been thinking about regarding whether or not I should get a Pi4, screen, mouse, cables, etc., for portable use. The Microsoft Surface Go2 can be had as a refurb for about $299 US and considering the reduction in accessory clutter, and the increase in reliability, it's probably worth the extra $$. Thanks again!
For me, portable with RPi is a no. Too many wires and loose connectors. Relatively, it is a power hog. Much better to use a cheap tablet, or laptop devoted to "field use and abuse", in other words, consumable, disposable. But it's a problem to get anything with a screen that can be read in bright sun.
Julian, how do you get GPS with the Surface Go? Do you get the GPS info from the IC-705 via WiFi and transfer it to the PC? Or do you use a USB "hockey-puck" type GPS device/antenna and plug it into your USB port on the Surface Go?
The Pi seems best for headless operation as you have found. Plus I've always packaged mine in a way that makes them not so cheap. I did wonder when the cable complexity would drive you to something else. Thanks for finding it!
Very good and interesting video. All this equipment looks high professional and expensive. But nice to see that some people are able to use this in private.
I don't understand the fascination with using a raspberry pi for everything. I have two of them, they have their place. I was in I.T. for 30 years using unix/linux based systems and know them far better than windows. But when I can choose from probably a dozen 10-12" display ssd/emmc storage notebooks that run Windows 10/11 (the OS most of our software is written for) for under $300 and will fit in an oversized cargo pants/raincoat pocket, why in the world would I put myself through all of those headaches?
I tried a Pi3B for the fun of it. It's cool to see it running pgms with such a tiny form factor, but the crashes and limitations on high intensity programs are a pain and the need for peripherals will take up as much space as a decent small laptop. He proposes a Microsoft Surface Go2 for portable use in the video and a refurb is about $299, so that's a good replacement if a person needs to go mobile and run digital pgms.
Does the Microsoft Surface have a slot for a sim card ? I like my Samsung Galaxy Tab A7 SM-T505 Because of cell phone internet connectivity. It is hard to beat a Android. Hard to beat a RPi also. Different tools in the toy box are nice for play day.
