About
Est. 1970 — married, with six kids. A licensed amateur radio operator and GMRS licensee, operating from Summerfield in the North Carolina piedmont. Licensed in November 2024 as KQ4WSV, now holding the vanity call W9APZ — Technician class, working HF, VHF and UHF. GMRS as WSFH657 for the family radios and around the property.
Digital modes — and why AllStarLink
I’ve spent time on D-STAR and DMR. Both are clever bits of engineering, and both are worth learning — but each one ties you to a particular flavour of radio talking to a particular network. Change hardware and you start over.
AllStarLink is where I settled, and the reason is simple: it doesn’t care what you own. It’s ordinary analogue FM over RF into a node you host yourself. Any radio that can hit your node can reach the world — no proprietary codec, no vendor’s network in the middle, and the repeater is yours.
Proof of the idea: the Kenwood TH-D75A is my daily carry, but the handheld that talks to the node here at the house is a Baofeng M5R — one that costs less than dinner out. The good radios are lovely and they all get used; the node just doesn’t ask for them.
Where to find me
Three repeaters, and it works out about an even split between them — any of the three is a fair bet.
K4JDR — Raleigh
441.725 MHz · analogue · AllStarLink node 42235, on the Carolina 440 UHF link system. My node 63683 stays permanently linked here.
W4GSO — Greensboro
442.8625 MHz (+) · D-STAR · covering the Piedmont Triad. Sponsored by the Greensboro Amateur Radio Association, of which I’m a member.
N4IV — Madison
147.345 MHz (+) · 103.5 Hz tone · analogue · the 2 m machine of the pack. Rockingham County, north of the Triad, sponsored by the Rockingham County Amateur Radio Club.
Nets
- Carolina 440 net — Mondays at 19:30
- North Carolina D-STAR net — Tuesdays at 21:00
Carolina 440 is a non-profit network of linked UHF repeaters covering large parts of North Carolina, supporting SKYWARN, AUXCOMM/ARES and public service events across the region.
Station
Base
- Icom IC-7100
HF / VHF / UHF all-band, all-mode transceiver
Mobile
- Icom ID-5100
Dual-band mobile — in the truck
Antenna
- Diamond X300A
Dual-band 2 m / 70 cm base vertical
Handhelds
- Kenwood TH-D75A
Daily carry
Tri-band, D-STAR and APRS - AnyTone AT-D878UVII
DMR and analogue, dual-band - TIDRADIO TD-H8
Dual-band - Baofeng M5R
Works the home node - Baofeng UV-5R
The one everybody starts with
Infrastructure
- AllStarLink ASL3 on Raspberry Pi 5
- SimpleUSB radio interface
- Allmon3 dashboard
- Full transmission audio archive
Digital Modes
- D-STAR · DMR · APRS · AllStarLink
AllStarLink Node 63683
A full-duplex AllStarLink node running here in Summerfield. RF access is via an HSR USB Duplex Repeater hotspot — low power, local coverage for the station and the truck on the driveway. The interesting part is the link side: the node is open on AllStarLink, so anyone with a node can connect from anywhere in the world.
Being duplex rather than simplex matters more than it sounds. A simplex hotspot can’t hear anything while it’s transmitting, so on a busy hub you have to wait for it to drop before you can get a word in or send a DTMF command. Duplex transmits and receives at the same time — so you can break in like you would on a real repeater.
- Node number
- 63683
- Mode
- Full duplex
- RF interface
- HSR USB Duplex Repeater
- Audio IC
- CM-119B
- Channel driver
- SimpleUSB
- Host
- Raspberry Pi 5 · NVMe · ASL3
Live network map
Want to see what 63683 is talking to right now? AllStarLink draws the map fresh on every request, so it is never stale — out through the K4JDR backbone in Raleigh, up to the Cape Fear hub in Wilmington, and across the Carolinas. Click below and it will generate the current diagram for you.
How to Connect
Licensed amateurs are welcome. From your own AllStarLink node:
; connect, transceive *3 63683 ; monitor only *2 63683 ; disconnect *1 63683
Please identify with your callsign and leave a pause between transmissions so linked systems can key up.
Build Your Own AllStar Node
Short version: an AllStarLink node is a small Linux computer running ASL3, wired to a radio interface, registered with a node number of your own. Get those three things lined up and your handheld is talking to repeaters on the other side of the planet. A weekend project, and cheaper than most people expect.
The five steps
- Hold a licence. Amateur ticket required — the node puts RF on the air under your call.
- Register and request a node number. Free account, then ask for a number. It usually lands within a day or two.
- Flash the ASL3 image to an SD card or NVMe drive and boot the Pi. Raspberry Pi Imager, no compiling.
- Run asl-menu to enter your node number and password, and pick the channel driver — SimpleUSB for the interfaces below.
- Set levels, then connect. Tune receive and transmit audio once, dial *3 at a hub, and you are on.
The official documentation walks all of this step by step, and there is a deep bench of walkthrough videos on YouTube if you would rather watch somebody do it first. Both are linked at the foot of this section.
Three ways to get there
Full duplex — the one I run
A Raspberry Pi 4 or 5 paired with the HSR USB Duplex Repeater. Duplex means it transmits and receives at once, so you can break into a busy hub instead of waiting for it to drop. This is exactly what node 63683 is, and it is the build I would recommend to anyone who plans to actually rag-chew through it.
Compact simplex — one small box
A Raspberry Pi 3, a SHARI PiHat MOD2 radio card, and a case with a universal port to fit them together. The SHARI drops straight onto the Pi’s header, so the whole node is a single object the size of a sandwich — radio, interface and computer, no cables between them. Simplex, so it listens or talks but never both; for a compact, cheap, low-power node it is hard to beat.
Raspberry Pi 3 Model B → SHARI PiHat MOD2 → HighPi Pro case →
No soldering, no shopping list — buy it built
If assembling parts is not the fun bit for you, HotSpotRadios sell prebuilt hotspots and complete kits — the USB Duplex Repeater above, the ARiUSB5, and the HotSpotRadio line — along with individual parts if you only need one piece. You still register your own node number and run your own Pi; you just skip the part where you work out which cable goes where.
Whichever route you take, you will want a decent 5 V supply, a wired network connection if you can manage it, and an antenna with a bit of height. Everything else is software.
AllStarLink.org → Register & request a node number →
ASL3 Raspberry Pi install guide → Community forum → Walkthrough videos on YouTube →
Once it is running — install AllScan
Out of the box you drive a node with DTMF tones, which means remembering node numbers and typing them blind. AllScan is a small open-source web app by David Gleason, NR9V, that puts a browser front end on it: a favourites list you click instead of dial, live connection status, and scanning across the nodes you care about. It is the single thing I would add first — navigating AllStar gets dramatically easier.
Worth knowing: the same site hosts genuinely good build guides, including a full-duplex node for under $200 and a radio-less one for under $100.
AllScan → Full-duplex node under $200 → AllScan on GitHub →
Stuck halfway? Mail me — I have made most of the mistakes already.