I love cheap hacks and cheap gadgets. Don’t get me wrong: I also like the expensive good stuff, but if you don’t have a clear idea of what you want and need, spending a lot of money on gadgets just isn’t in the cards. But if the gadgets are cheap enough, experimentation becomes possible for money that would normally by you pizza.

Today’s musings came about by thinking about:
1. The Raspberry Pi ($35, and I have some already)
2. The Baofeng BF-888S, a single band HT that costs less than twenty bucks on Amazon

The question I had was: could I setup some kind of inexpensive simplex VOIP node (in ham radio we use Echolink and/or IRLP most commonl) that could use these two items? I live in the bottom of a small valley, and my coverage to nearby repeaters isn’t great. It would be kind of cool to make a little mini-node to allow radios in the
valley, and hop via the internet out to the broader world. And of course, when you look, you find:

KP4TR’s great site which seems like what I want.

I’ve bookmarked this hear for future exploration.