My plan is to develop a Ham Radio Fox like this one by @kmikemoo using the Nucleo-STM32WL55 board. My first blog was the unboxing and running of the demo software for the Nucleo-STM32WL55JC1.
Project14 | Sub-1GHz Band Challenge - Unboxing and running demo programs
My first issue was that the JC1 option is RF optimized for 865MHz ~ 928MHz and I needed the JC2 version optimized for
433MHz to 510MHz, so I ordered two JC2 version boards.
After finding only the blinky and Lorawan project code for mbed Studio, I switched over to STM32CubeIDE and found the STM32CubeWL set of examples to play with.
https://www.st.com/en/development-tools/stm32cubeide.html
After some get acquainted time with the new programming software, I managed to import and compile the examples for the Nucleo board in the STM32CubeIDE workspace.
The example I started with is called SubGHz_Phy_Per and is used to determine Packet Error Rates (PER) between two radios.
There are some configuration changes to make to the code for the RX board and the TX board software.
In subghz_phy_app.c the variable to determine the RX board from the TX board is:
#define TEST_MODE RADIO_TX (or RADIO_RX)
In the file subghz_phy_app.h the variable RF_FREQUENCY I set for 433.000 MHz for use in the 70cm ham radio band.
I flashed both the RX and TX boards and tested the configuration along with a spectrum analyzer and handheld ham transceiver set to 433.000.
The UART connections let me verify that the radios were transmitting and receiving packets correctly.
The following videos show the RF transmitted pulse on the spectrum analyzer at 433.000 MHz and the blue LED on the TX board is in sync with the red LED on the RX board.
The ham radio received a short blip when the VFO is set to AM mode on 433 MHz. The example software is selectable between LoRa and FSK modes, however, I need to transmit something that the FOX-Hunters can "hear" based on AFSK or "Audio-Frequency-Shift-Keying" So net next task is to format some FSK data that can be heard on the air.
Stay tuned to this channel.....
Scott
