ECOM Digital Station Part 1 – Basic Setup

I’ve been playing with various ideas for a portable digital station based on a Raspberry PI 3B+. My goals for this project are as follows:

• Wireless access point.
• VNC for using FL Suite of programs and JS8call.
• Pat for Winlink operations
• Radio interface for VHF and HF
• Independent IRC server with Web-client for messaging with in the command post.

I will be documenting this project for others and to keep a record for myself of what I did so I can come back and replicate what I did down the road.

I’m starting the project with a fresh install of Raspian Buster Release date 2019-07-10. For this step I’m working directly on the Raspberry Pi.

Once you have it installed and up and running for the first time let’s make sure it’s up to date

Now let’s set a few things up, open a terminal window and enter

Once in Raspi-config open the Network Options and set the host name you want for your PI

Now item 5 Interfacing Options and enable SSH, VNC and disable login shell to Serial but enable the serial port.

Once your done reboot the PI when it asks you to.

Next let’s move on to securing the PI I usually follow the steps on this page from Make. The only thing I do differently is I use ufw for the firewall for simplicity.

To install and setup ufw do the following

Now we have the basic setup the lets move on to setting up the AP in part 2.