Are you bored of staying in-doors, and watching the world go buy outside your window? Maybe you too want to know that there are other humans alive outside, well join the fun on 80m at 11:00am local time in the UK - the DX Commander Lockdown net, every day!! Joking asside this net has been some light relief in these tough times! Streamed live his youtube channel, and from my radio any time I am listening in too - you have no excuse for not listening in at least, no matter where you are. DX Commander's Youtube Channel: Here My Live Stream: Here

Available for download from today, version 4.1.0 is available for Raspberry Pi hardware. All the Pi-Star features you know and love, plus a new operating system, moving Pi-Star to the the newer "Buster" OS. 4.1.0 has the most up-to-date versions of all of the software used for digital comms, including some customised versions in some cases including DMR2YSF cross-over code that should help those users using reflectors that link back to WiresX. Cross-Over modes are generally better in Pi-Star 4.1.x and have much improved code, making it possible to drive the YSF platform from the radio, such that when you use a YSF2xxx cross-over mode, the commands are properly passed into the sub mode. For example using YSF2DMR, you can choose the YSF2DMR mode from your Yaesu radio, and then choose the talk group and link to it. This makes using these cross-over modes a joy rather than a hastle. The move to "Buster" has been painfull, issues with time sync and WiFi and Pi4 hardware support was troublesome, however every cloud has a silver lining and the lessons we learned here will be crucial to Pi-Star versions in the future.

It's finally happened, 3.4.1 has been released, I'd been trying not to release images at quite the previous release cycle pace, and its been almost a month since the last new build, but there was finally a reason to get another build out; Pi-Star now has remote control! Much like the features in DStarRepeater, Pi-Star now has similar remote- control abilities for MMDVMHost, giving keepers the ability to restart services, or the whole OS. However, that is not the limit of the possibilities, if you can call it from a script, you can call that script over RF, now thats giong to be some fun!

Pi-Star V3.3.7 brings some interesting changes to the back end, ircDDBGateway now only runs when it needs to, rather than all or the time. The update process, has been overhauled and simplified, still some work to do here but its getting to be much better than it was. The major improvements are in the dashboard, 20170519 brings some extra functionality for P25 and YSF users, the start reflectors for both modes can now be set from the dashboard. Timezone related issues with using Pi-Star outside of UTC/BST should now be a thing of the past. If you havnt yet done so, join the facebook group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/pistarusergroup/ and let me know what you think of Pi-Star and what we can do to make it better for you!

Pi-Star V3.3.0 was quite a sizable release, since then there has been a period of relitive stability, however there have been some new features of note that have been added in the 3.3.x train. 3.3.3 brought some significant P25 / YSF improvements, and at the same time new additions to the dashboard to also support P25 correctly. 3.3.4/3.3.5 are just checkpoint releases that include the current OS updates and include the current (at the time of release) dashboard versions. I have modified the dashboard to support alternative timezones, this has been problematic for anyone more than an hour away from UTC, however I believe I am mostly through those issues, the dashboard currently appears to work like it should do. More for fun than for any practical reason, the update process now looks more like a Linux / Unix terminal (green on black) and scrolls in the browser, rather than just filling up the page. Keep having fun!!