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In February 2026 I bought a Hermes-Lite 2 from MakerFabs, along with Jim Ahlstrom’s N2ADR filter board and IO board. I wrote a blog post about it and said the community support was thin. I hoped my notes would help someone, maybe even me.

I didn’t expect those notes to turn into seven months of writing software.

Spring: taking ownership

It started small. In April I forked MI0BOT’s Hermes-Lite 2 build of Thetis and spent a day making GitHub Actions build it. The installer had to come out of CI rather than off somebody’s desk. Getting there took four commits, each fixing whatever the last one broke: a WiX version pin, a toolset mismatch (v145 vs v143), and an installer project the runner didn’t know how to build.

The Hermes-Lite 2 (HL2) is a low-cost, open source HF SDR transceiver. This is a truly fantastic radio it competing head to head with the Flex radio. The whole project – hardware and software – is fully open source, led by Steve Haynal (KF7O). Although this radio has been around for years the community support is poor. My hope is this post will help document what I’ve found for my own use and maybe help others.

Not your father’s radio!

I’ve started with a couple of new radios for this round of Ham Radio projects.

A Radioddity G90 and their GD-88. As a fan of SDR, I’m using digital modes with both. FT8 on the G90 and DMR on the GD-88. I love the way FT8 cuts through the noise when signal are low.

But I can’t yet say I’m a fan of DMR. It seems like a radio build by a government committee that didn’t know anything about it. Oh… because it was. The process needed to get your DMR radio working is very technical and bureaucratic.

If you need to program your HT for a local area, look no feather than RepeterBook.com.

After creating an account, you can build a list of repeaters based on your location and export it to many common file formats, including Chirp and CSV.

W5TSU