Using my Chromebook with my Ham Radio

Last weekend I had the pleasure of staying up all Friday night and helping with the Wasatch 100 ultra marathon. It is something my wife and I do every year around this time. We volunteer our evening and help provide the race officials with the times that runners enter and leave our checkpoint at the 63-mile mark known as Scott's Peak.

I have a portable ham-radio box that contains 2 different radios. One radio we use to communicate with race officials using voice. The second radio is connected to some additional equipment that allows us to send data to a server. Using both radios allows a lot of flexibility. Rather than tie up the airwaves speaking racer numbers and times, we just enter that into the computer and transmit it more efficiently. We still make a few mistakes and have to correct them but it is a lot better than doing everything by voice.

In years past, I have used a full-blown laptop as the computer to connect with the ham radio. This is because I have needed special software to interface everything. I started noticing others talk about using tablet computers and figured I could probably get away with using my Chromebook. While my laptop has a good 5-hour battery life, my Chromebook has more than 3 times that amount.

Using some spare time over Labor Day weekend, I connected my Chromebook to my radio gear and worked through all of the bugs to get everything functioning properly. I had to run through a number of different terminal programs as some will not interface directly with my USB connection but eventually I found one that worked. After using it for the evening, I will try to find something else for next year as it did have a problem or two. The most glaring one is that I could not set the backspace key to control-h like the radio software expected. Any time I made a mistake typing, I had to use the control-backspace combination and sometimes that didn't work. Given a bit more time, I'm sure I could have found a terminal program that worked better and will look into that for next year. On the PC I can just use Putty.

I have to say that I am happy I did a bit of playing around before the race. My Chromebook is significantly less expensive and much lighter than my laptop. It worked almost as well and we got our runner times entered efficiently. I wonder what I can do next year to improve our setup? I'm sure I will come up with something.