Get Started

Getting started with WPSD is reasonably straightforward. This section will prepare you and your hotspot or repeater for use with WPSD.

Note

The current documentation author, Lee (AA0NT), has a Yaesu FT-5DR and a duplex MMDVM board from BI7JTA and a Pi Zero 2W. Therefore, I have written these documents using those selections as examples. While many, if not most, of the steps should apply universally, I expect the ham reading this documentation to critically read and understand this documentation to avoid a mistake.

There are three main parts of WPSD:

  1. Your radio Yes, you must have a digital-capable radio. The radio is responsible for the digital encoding and decoding the voice streams. I know you are thinking you should be able to do everything with the Pi or a computer. Technically, you can, but if you are capable of that, you don’t need to read instructions like these. The radio encodes your voice digitally and then transmits it as an FM signal to be received by your MMDVM modem.

  2. Your modem The MMDVM or “Multi-Mode Digital Voice Modem” you have probably seen talked about. It is generally supplied as a HAT or “Hardware Attached on Top.” The HAT interfaces with the General Purpose Input/Output (GPIO) pins on the host.

  3. Your host This is a single-board computer (SBC) such as a Raspberry Pi. The host runs the WPSD software, which handles the configuration, user choices, and Internet gateway tasks.

Another way of looking at this configuration is that there is a radio and a hotspot. The hotspot combines the MMDVM and the host, often in a case with (optionally) batteries and a display. Neither the batteries nor the display are necessary, of course. The batteries can help you be more flexible, and the screen is preferred by those who enjoy visual feedback, such as seeing the callsign of the person to whom they are speaking.

We’ll approach getting you started with three main tasks:

Attention

Once you have your system installed and configured, it’s strongly recommended that you back it up and save the backup, along with your dashboard password, somewhere safe. WPSD has a comprehensive backup capability built into the dashboard. For help, see the Backup and Restore Configuration section under Maintenance Items in this manual.