The Psion Revo and Amateur Radio Use
 The Psion Revo is a small PDA that fits in your pocket.
It is one of the few PDA's available that has a full QWERTY keyboard.
It also has quite a few tricks up its sleeve.
The Revo comes complete with a docking station which has a 9 pin D-Type connector attached, thus giving the Revo an RS232 comport to connect devices such as GPS and packet radio TNC's to. It also allows external telephone modems and some models of mobile phone to be connected (Nokia 7110's have worked perfectly!)
The Psion Revo comes in two versions, the 8 Mb Revo and the 16Mb Revo Plus.
Either of these are perfectly capable of running all the software below although having the extra RAM means more storage. Yes that's right, the Revo's don't use hardisk's
or data cards. Thankfully the EPOC32 system is very much more efficient than the PC stuff and the code to run a fully featured graphical web browser such as Opera installs only about 150Kb of files !
Everything is also stored and executed in the RAM and as such the speed of the Revo's is also much more efficient than it's PC counterpart. A 36Mhz CPU in the Revo runs more like a 266Mhz Intel chip.
Psion officially stopped producing Revos a couple of years ago, however they are still selling them and supporting them and they are often found used for a reasonable price.
The 16Mb version when new was £450 - not cheap but once you've used one you'll realise why. Nowadays an 8Mb version should set you back no more than £75 and £150 for the 16Mb
version.
PACKET RADIO
The only native EPOC (Psion's operating system) packet terminal is called PocPag by G0HZK. This is a basic terminal program which works very well. It does not offer anything in the way of FBB compressed forwarding etc. But text capture and sending is available and connect lists.
There is one small minor niggle that I personally have, and that is that there is no receive window scrollback, which makes it impossible to review text off the screen. You'll just have to use the capture file later on. Remember the Revo has a mono display.
You will have to make or buy a null modem adapter to be able to connect the docking station to the TNC.
I built my adapter (applicable to the UK) with parts from Maplin Electronics. They can for 99 pence supply a D-TYPE box that houses the two d-types and the actual d-type connectors are approx £1 UKP. Cheap.
Here's the pin-outs to make a "null" modem adapter assuming your PC has a 9 pin serial port.
[9PIN D-TYPE MALE] [9PIN D-TYPE FEMALE]
PIN(1)------------------------------------------(PIN7 & 8)
PIN(2)------------------------------------------(PIN 3 )
PIN(3)------------------------------------------(PIN 2 )
PIN(4)------------------------------------------(PIN 6 )
PIN(5)------------------------------------------(PIN 5 )
PIN(6)------------------------------------------(PIN 4 )
PIN(7 & 8)-------------------------------------(PIN 1 )
The other way of getting packet and other software running is to use the XTM PC Emulator, available as a shareware download. This allows you to run DOS on your Psion. Any DOS will do. It allows 80187 CPU emulation, the original PC CPU all those years ago. Any programs that use instructions for Pentium or 266, 386 etc will propably not run.
Thankfully the majority of DOS programs don't use them so we don't have to worry.
Below is a screen shot of XTM running DOS on a Psion Revo. You'll notice that along the top are the F-Keys on the touchscreen. XTM is available from NB-INFO.
Here's a screen shot of DOS running on the Revo.
Here it is running Paket V6.2 (previous versions will work too).
Of course any DOS software should work, just remember its a small screen on the Revo! That also means most of the usual dos utilites can be used such as 7 plus or UUCODE and PKUNZIP (try PKUNZIP JUNIOR).
Now of course, many amateurs have been experimenting with HTML bulletins. The Opera web browser which came on the PsiWin CD works fine for viewing these bulletins so long as you have the bulletin as a capture file and view it as an .HTM file. You can use the same HTML Library files that Winpack uses.
All you do is make a folder on your Psion called HTMLIB and throw the library files in it - easy. Below is a screen shot of one my own packet radio bulletins. The library files can be sought from www.winpack.org.uk these days.
Here's a screen shot of Opera the web browser displaying an HTML Packet bulletin.
PROPAGATION PREDICTION
I use an excellent HF Propagation program called Multiprop for DOS and run it with the XTM emulator. Here it is in action.
You can of course use other DOS programs, I use some old QBASIC program and QBASIC works fine on XTM emulator.
So as you can see, this humble PDA can do a lot apart from it's usual Filofax duties! These are just a few examples to whet your appetite. Another good thing about using the Revo is it's very quiet from the point of view of radio noise (EMC).
So if that old PC in the shack is spoiling your dx reception, try a Revo instead.
I've also had the G8BPQ packet node software running on the Revo, G8PZT's XROUTER and APRS software and many other DOS programs.
It's also good at running its own built in spreadsheet program, for which I've also produced some spreadshets for various RF calculations.
Just copy them to your Psion using the supplied PsiWin software and away you go...
To download the speadsheats, click on this link RFCALC.ZIP
Andy G0FTD
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