After deciding last year to ditch all internet radio and concentrate only on HF, and then only on CW, I've come full-circle, and have now restored DMR, added YSF and last night I restored an analogue voice gateway connected to Echolink via svxlink.

The amateur radio hobby is just a hobby. Why limit what aspects of it I find interesting because of some feelings of nostalgia for the good olde days when radio meant only manual telegraphy on the HF bands?

I still love CW but it's just one aspect of a diverse hobby, which has many rabbit holes to explore. I've set up a DMR full-duplex hotspot, set up a second mobile/portable DMR hotspot and a third YSF/Fusion hotspot. I've had SSB QSOs on 60m. I am enjoying the various different parts of this hobby.

Since my 2m setup at home has fairly poor coverage due to the antenna location and the topography of the local area there now seems little point in continuing with 2m APRS. What to do with a 2m radio at home? An analogue voice gateway - now it's legal to do without NOV?

I found some Raspberry Pi SD card image files from the last time I ran svxlink and it didn't take long to clone a new Raspberry Pi SVXLINK gateway. I spent some time last night playing around with the configuration and set up audio levels etc. and it now seems to work nicely. I'll stick to 5W on 2m which won't give massive coverage locally but I'll be able to access from anywhere I can reach on foot and there will be a few more distant hills where access will be possible.

I had previously been connected to the svxlink reflector system run by G4NAB http://svxportal-uk.ddns.net:81/index.php but my previous password is no longer valid, but I'll approach Chris and see if I can get reconnected.

I'll try to keep a 2m radio close by whenever I'm at home, ready to answer any calls on Echolink.

I'm at Echolink Node GM4SLV-L / 886089 and might try connecting to Hubnet from time to time.

I'll add some new Wiki pages with the current config. to keep a record of the setup, for future reference.

Svxlink & Echolink