Seven Months, One Little Radio

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.

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Hermes Lite 2

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.

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AM broadcast band filter

For the W5TSU.net:8030 receiver I build a broadcast band filter. This should front end overload and intermod created by these stations and allow for better Ham band receiption. I also wanted to learn how to build my own coils.

I found a design at the vk3il blog. This filter was modeled with the ELSIE (free version). It is a 7-pole Chebychev filter with cutoff frequencies of 1.7MHz.

Scmatic

I started by winding some coils from 22, 26 and 30 awg magnet wire. I use a MingHe model LC100-A meter to masure these coils. I found holding the coils with my fingers didn’t make a sizeable different in the coil. What did make a difference was how tight the coile was wound and the lingth of the wire used. The size of the winding did make some difference but not as much as the amount of wire and how stable the winds where.

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KiwiSDR (UPDATED)

Start here:

I have a new radio. I picked up a KiwiSDR (http://kiwisdr.com/) receiver from Seeed. (https://www.seeedstudio.com/KiwiSDR-Kit-p-2725.html).

The KiwiSDR was developed by the Funkamateur John Seamons ZL / KF6VO, is a branch of the OpenWebSDR project and realy started life as a kickstarter project.

This is the best HF (10kz-30mz) receiver I own. With the propagation so bad (its 2017) hams are using web based SDR receivers to make contacts. I share my SDR because I use other’s SDRs. Check out the list at (http://sdr.hu).

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