HP Laptop First Impressions

I've been getting back into ham radio lately and have a trip upstate planned for Memorial Day weekend. The two friends I am going with are also hams, so one of the activities we like to do in the evening is off-grid communication practice.

My specific interest is in digital mode communications, which requires either a mobile device or a computer to connect to the radio and run various applications. For field ops in the past I've used an iPad and an MSI Wind netbook. I traded in the iPad a year or two ago and the netbook is ancient at this point (plus has a small 10" screen) so I wanted something better.

My normal computer is an Apple MacBook Pro. However, I am not enthused about bringing a $3,000 laptop into the field, plus it seems like a lot of ham apps are better supported on Windows or Linux.

So, Friday after work I went down to Microcenter and picked up an HP 15-ef1072nr 15.6" laptop running Windows 10 Home for $400. The specs are decent for the price, IMO:

• Dual-core AMD Ryzen 2.6 GHz CPU
• 8 GB RAM
• 256 GB SSD
• AMD Radeon 3 graphics

As expected, the hardware feels a lot cheaper than my MacBook Pro. The Mac's case is machined from billets of aluminum. The HP's case is plastic. The keyboard is mushy but usable. The screen is nowhere near that of the MacBook Pro. Overall, the HP is much lighter than the MBP, which is nice.

Battery life seems good. It was partially charged when I brought it home. I plugged it in while setting everything up but then rant it down to around 10% over the course of several hours with web browsing, YouTube, and email. I repeated that on Saturday and probably got a good 7 hours before it went into battery saver mode.

The huge trackpad on the current MacBook Pros really spoils you and it is missed on the HP.

The HP's space bar is annoying. Pressing it towards the right end doesn't do anything. I tend to press the space bar with my right hand so this is a PITA and hinders typing.

Of course, one of the things I had to do was get Windows updated. Compared with Apple's macOS updates, Windows Updates remains a major PITA with multiple reboots required. Overall, it takes a lot more time.

It has been quite awhile since I used a Windows PC for desktop computing although I ocassionally have to login to a Windows server at work so the UI isn't totally unfamiliar.

Anyway, after cleaning up some of the factory-installed bloatware I loaded a number of utilites to make life easier:

• Notepad++ (In which I wrote most of this. On Mac, I use BBEdit.)
• Piriform CCleaner
• Piriform Speccy
• Replaced the pre-loaded Office 365 with Office 2019 Pro Plus
• Visio 2019
• Google Chrome
• iCloud for Windows so I can sync bookmarks with my Mac and iPhone
• nmap
• Wireshark
• Windows Subsystem for Linux with Kali Linux installed
• Signal
• ZOC terminal

And these ham radio apps:

• Fldigi
• JS8Call
• WSJT-X
• Chirp (For programming my Icom 7200, Yaesu FT-817ND, and Baofeng HTs)

The two Apple applications I'll miss most when using the HP are Messages and Facetime, neither of which are supported on Windows.

Incidentally, Microcenter limited the number of people in the store at a time, you had to wear a mask, and before going inside you had your hands sprayed with sanitized by an employee. Also, they are not taking cash, only credit or debit cards.

Testing WSPR and a New Laptop

I picked up a cheap HP laptop at Microcenter on Friday to run ham radio apps on in the field. I'd rather not take my $3,000 MacBook Pro camping, plus it's a fact that a lot of ham radio apps are better supported in Windows. Should something bad happen, it'll be a lot easier to swallow with a $400 laptop.

Anyway, today I was configuring the HP to work with my Icom 7200 using Fldigi, JS8Call, and WSJT-X, and tried out transmitting using the latter in WSPR mode. The antenna was my Hawaii EARCH 40-6M end-fed, strung approximately horizontally out to my back fence. This is far from optimal.

I transmitted on WSPR at 50W a few times and checked propagation using WSPR Watch on my iPhone. Not bad.

Along with a couple friends I'm heaing up to Tioga Country next weekend. We're all hams and off-grid operations are on the list of activities. One thing I want to try is a random-length loop antenna using welding wire, connected to my antenna tuner using an LDG 4:1 balun. My friend did this a couple years ago and it worked great, allowing him to check in on a north PA/south NY 160M net.

Pi-Top Raspberry Pi Laptop

Earlier this year I learned about the Pi-Top, a kit for turning a Raspberry Pi single board computer into a laptop, from a friend's post on Facebook. A portable RPi-based system is something I've been interested in for awhile, because if it has enough horsepower to run Fldigi, it would make a neat, relatively inexpensive system to run digital modes on ham radio while in the field with low electrical power requirements.

Last weekend I was down at Microcenter in St. David's, PA to return a cell phone car mount that didn't work out for me*, when I wander over into the DIY section. A few years ago, Microcenter decided to cater to the maker movement and has been carrying a lot of neat stuff. Its what Radio Shack should've done instead of trying to be another cell phone hawker.

Anyway, I saw that they had the Pi-Top kits for sale so I decided to get one. The Pi-Top kit does not include an RPi, so I also got a RPi 3 Model B, which included onboard Bluetooth and WiFi.

The Pi-Top was about $265, while the RPi 3 was on sale for $30.

Laptop guts on my dining room table:

The kit was well packaged in a cleverly designed box and came with an 8 GB microSD card pre-loaded with a version of Raspbian customized for the Pi-Top hardware. The instruction booklet that came with it was pretty good but lacked any info about the OS, except a pointer to the Pi-Top website. It didn't even include the default login info.

Closeup of the USB hub (left) and the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B:

The Pi-Top case is molded from plastic and feels about like what you'd expect from a $250 laptop. Assembly was pretty straightforward except that I initially mounted the RPi too far to the right in the case. The cables that link the RPi and the USB hub aren't long enough. This results in the RPi being inset to the left inside the case, which makes using the USB ports inconvenient. The case also blocks access to the Pi's onboard Fast Ethernet port.

Click on any of the pics to embiggen.

Boards mounted in the case:

The Pi-Tops 13.3" screen is decent. It's nothing to write home about, especially after one is used to a MacBook Pro with Retina display, but it ain't bad.

The keyboard is OK. I wouldn't want to do any extended writing or coding on it, however.

The shiny plastic cover at the top of the keyboard slides in and out from the right side of the computer. This helps when trying to connect something to the USB ports.

Side-by-side with my mid-2009 15" MacBook Pro:

Because of the plastic construction and a lot of empty space within the case, it's very lightweight.

The Pi-Top doesn't ship with a speaker, so as it comes there's no audio unless you buy the $20 add-on speaker, or run a cable from the RPi's audio jack to a set of external speakers.

After getting it up and running I naturally ran apt-get update and apt-get upgrade to bring the system up-to-date. Normally this wouldn't cause any issues but something related to dpkg got munged and I had to do about an hour's worth of troubleshooting to fix it and restore the ability to install or upgrade packages. Unfortunately I don't recall the specifics and didn't take notes.

Last weekend was ARRL Field Day, so I dragged my Icom 7200 and the Pi-Top out back on Sunday to see how it would fair as a portable digital mode laptop. It decoded PSK31 well, but the screen wasn't bright enough to use without a lot more shade than I had available, so I kept losing the cursor.

There are buttons on the keyboard to adjust screen brightness but they aren't working. I'm not sure if they would have worked pre-update, but they aren't post-update. Such is desktop Linux. Flakiness like that is why I normally run macOS as my desktop UNIX.

The manufacturer claims a 10+ hour battery life and from my testing so far, it sips power.

So, would I recommend the Pi-Top? It depends. If you're an experienced Linux user in search of a portable machine with low electrical power requirements, it's worth considering. Keep in mind that it's also a low computing power device. Web pages render relatively slowly. The OS includes Libre Office. I have not putzed with it yet but based on prior experience with that suite, it's going to run slowly on this hardware.



* Don't try to use a magnetic mount with an iPhone 7+ in a MagPul Field Case. The first bump in the road that you hit, and the phone will fall.

PA to MO on 5 Watts

Yesterday I spent some time out back with my Yaesu FT-817ND and laptop, playing with digital modes. I got a new Easy Digi interface from KF5INZ for connecting the FT-817ND to laptops and wanted to get it setup before taking it to Tioga County next weekend. I wound up having a nice rag chew with another ham who is located in Missouri, using the Olivia 16/500 mode.

I did a write up over on Survival Preps, here:

Backyard Digital Radio Practice

I also did a separate post on configuring a Mac to use the Easy Digi, FT-817ND, and Fldigi:

Configuring Fldigi on a Mac for use with an Easy Digi Radio Interface

Asus Transformer T100 Tablet/Laptop

My daughter Alexandra just got an Asus Transformer 10.1" tablet/laptop from Amazon. This post will offer my initial impressions.

A couple notes: First, this is the older model that comes with MS Office 2013, instead of an Office 365 subscription, which is a plus in my book. Second, she spent her own money on this. She already has an iPad but they use Windows in her school district.

Up until now I have not been a fan of Windows 8.x. Having used the Asus briefly, I can say that with a touchscreen it doesn't totally suck. If it was mine I'd still probably install Classic Shell so that I could have a Windows 7-like user interface, if my primary use involved the keyboard. Without a touchscreen, the Metro UI (or whatever MS calls it nowadays) blows.

During the initial setup I let it scan my home network, where it automatically detected my Brother HL-2270DW printer and installed it. Pretty slick.

You almost have to have a Microsoft account (e.g., hotmail.com, live.com, or outlook.com) to use the full features of Windows 8.1. I set Alexandra up with one and she got 15 GB of cloud storage for free. She's going to be using the Asus for schoolwork so by having her save everything to her OneDrive it will be automatically backed up.

I was able to set her MS account as a child's account. I'll get notified of her usage and they will filter inappropriate content. To do this I had to sign in with my live.com account and let them charge $0.50 to my Discover to confirm that I'm an adult.

Alexandra uses a GMail account and the Windows 8.1 Mail app was able to connect to it with no problems.

There's a USB 2.0 port on the tablet itself and a USB 3.0 port on the docking station/base/keyboard unit. The tablet has HDMI out, too. Network access is strictly via WiFi.

The machine seems to be pretty responsive. Considerably more responsive than my 2008-vintage MSI Wind U100 running Windows XP, 7, or Ubuntu. It came with Office 2013 Home and Student, and both Word and Excel launch quickly. The CPU is a quad-core Intel Baytrail and the tablet has 64 GB SSD, but C: shows a capacity of 49 GB, and about 35 GB free. It didn't come loaded down with too much bloatware, but there is a recovery partition.

The screen quality is excellent. Images are very sharp and text looks crisp.

It was about $350 after tax from Amazon. The combination of its size, light weight, and the ability to run most Windows apps is very appealing. It would probably make a good machine for portable ham radio digital mode use, or if you want something light for travel. Hopefully it’ll hold up well and the battery life will be good. Asus claims an 11 hour battery life, but I expect this varies widely depending on usage.

One caveat to be aware of with the Transformer is that if you put it in a case like this one and aren’t careful to reconnect the keyboard, you’ll have to reseat it firmly or you’re stuck with just a touchscreen. For that reason, for my own use I’d probably rather have a more conventional laptop if I could get it in the same size. It would be a great evolution of the netbook concept.

If the Asus develops any problems I’ll post a follow up.

Using Fldigi on a Mac to Control an Icom 7200

Ray, W3PRR, asked me for help on configuring Fldigi running on a Mac with OS 10.9.4 so that it can control an Icom 7200 radio. Here’s how I did it:

1. Get yourself a plain USB-A to USB-B cable, as used with most recent computer printers. This one at Amazon will work fine. The IC7200 has a built in sound card, and the USB cable will provide both rig control and audio input/output through the one cable.

2. Make sure the OS is up to date by running OS X’s Software Update.

3. You need to install the driver for the Silicon Labs CP210 USB-to-UART bridge, which is what provides the brains for the USB-B port on the back of the radio. You can download that here.

Note: Do not connect the radio to your Mac when you install the driver. Connect the radio after you install and reboot the Mac.

4. Download and install the Hamlib radio control libraries.

5. Download and install the latest version of Fldigi.

6. Connect and power on the radio to your computer using the USB cable. Make sure that the radio is in Data mode, and make sure that Data mode is set to U, so that it accepts audio and CAT commands through the USB port. See page 43 of the Icom 7200 Instruction Manual for details.

7.In Fldigi, under Configuration > Audio > Devices, select PortAudio, then USB Audio CODEC for both Capture and Playback. Click Save before you move to the next step.



Note: If the radio is not connected and powered on, the USB Audio CODEC option will not be visible.

8. Under Configuration > Rig use these settings.



Click Initialize, then Save, then Close.

At this point you should be able to see activity in the Fldigi waterfall (ASSuming there is anyone on frequency), and you should be able to transmit from within the program. The 20M PSK31 calling frequncy, 14.070 MHz, is a good frequency to use for testing because it tends to be active.