JS8CallTools for Raspberry Pi

Posted on

You may already have seen some posts about the first of my JS8Call Tools – my GPS Utility for #JS8Call, its a python script with a Graphical User Interface that I wrote for grabbing my Location from GPSD running on my Raspberry Pi, it then translate the Lat and Long to a Maidenhead Grid and allows you to send it to JS8Call updating its Grid for use in messages, you can do this at the click of a button, or use the timer to update the grid every 10 minutes.

It also includes a button to send the GRID command to @ALLCALL using JS8Call which will be received by stations in the JS8Call network and reported to the APRS network.

This should be useful to Amateur Radio operators who are operating portable and mobile.

It has been tested on my raspberry pi, with the pre-requisites installed.

You MUST have GPSD installed and working with your GPS and you must be running JS8Call for it to work.

The link to the code on github is https://github.com/m0iax/js8calltools

you can download the code to your raspberry pi using the following command:

git clone https://github.com/m0iax/js8calltools.git

Enjoy!

73

Mark, M0IAX

4 thoughts on “JS8CallTools for Raspberry Pi”

  1. Hi-

    I was looking at trying to script this myself last week in perl. Glad that you beat me to it and that you added a GUI too. I’m having issues with getting the script to run. Hoping you can help.

    xgps is showing that I have a 3d fix, is displaying LAT/LON and can compute correct maidenhead. GPS receiver is a U-Blox7. Please advise if there is additional information that would help diagnose.
    ———–
    pi@radiopi:~/js8calltools $ ./js8callgpsUI.py
    Starting GPS Listener
    Exception in thread Thread-1:
    Traceback (most recent call last):
    File “/usr/lib/python3.5/threading.py”, line 914, in _bootstrap_inner
    self.run()
    File “/home/pi/js8calltools/gps_listener.py”, line 70, in run
    grid = mh.toMaiden(lat, lon, 4)
    TypeError: toMaiden() takes from 1 to 2 positional arguments but 3 were given

    Getting Grid from GPS
    Got Grid No Fix None
    ————

    Thx and 73,

    Tom

    1. I’m away for a couple of days but I’ll see if I can figure it out when I get back.
      First thought is something to do with the version of Maidenhead that you have installed, you could try rerunning

      pip3 install maidenhead

      And see if that helps?

      73
      Mark

    2. Hi Tom,

      Ive just updated my code to fix this, if you want to grab the latest version from github you should find that it works.

      Cheers
      73
      Mark

Comments are closed.