Re-using old computer hardware for mobile ham use

Hams, as you know, are renowned for making "old things" work for radio use. It occurred to me that there is a vast pool of old computer hardware, especially laptops, that are suitable for use for logging, digital modes, etc.

With this in mind, I thought I'd build a cheap system, for under $50, for satellite tracking, APRS, PSK31, RTTY, etc. $50 was a nice round figure, that if you lost it in the field, if it was damaged, or even stolen, it wouldn't hurt your bottom line, unlike a $600-900 modern laptop. Using a P233 MMX (MMX is a "must have" because of it's multimedia performance - ie, sound processing) IBM laptop, I started testing with Windows 95. This worked great, even with 32 MB of RAM, with Orbitron, Pizza, MMTY, Digipan and SeaTTY, although the odd "blue screen" error reared its head. $10 later, and 128 MB of additional RAM, I decided to try XP, which worked with multiple programs open, but was at times unbearably slow, especially running Agw Packet engine in combination with anything.

Not being satisfied, and still wanting to accomplish my goal, I found Digipup, a Linux distribution designed around Puppy Linux. (Don't worry, all the hard to find links for current versions will be at the end of this post)

The Digipup distribution has been around for quite some time, and Puppy has moved on and had many enahancements since it was built, so I decided to use the current distribution, Puppy 4.1.3, and incorporate "fldigi" digital mode software, "fl_logbook" logging software, "flarq" software based arq modem, and PREDICT for satellite work.

The whole thing fits on a CD and takes up 100MB. There is an unique feature of Puppy, that allows you to use a regular CD-R to boot, containing the whole operating system and software, and Puppy will WRITE YOUR FILES TO THE DISK when you save changes. Yes, a CD-R (as long as you have a drive capable of "burning" CD's)

I opted to install it to the hard drive, which is easy, and it found and configured my sound and Wi-Fi, although the sound did not work - which was not good, as this was the primary purpose of the exercise. However, after hours and hours of troubleshooting why the soundcard wouldn't work after each reboot, I found the fix in the machine's BIOS. To prove that it would work on other systems, I burned a distribution CD and booted several different computers, and the sound/network worked on all. All you have to do is disable "Plug and Play" in your BIOS to be sure that your sound works properly.

You can either go to puppylinux.com and download just the software you want from W1HKJ's Fldigi site OR you can download the entire package - operating system AND ham software all-in-one from HERE which is 110 MB in size. For APRS, X-APRS for X-windows works great, and can be obtained pretty much anywhere you hit on Google.


Also, a great new video on APRS can be found Hambrief.TV