Change bands on the SparkSDR based on time

So I have been using my Hermes Lite SDR for the past few months with SparkSDR and been having a lot of fun with the combination.  One of the things I have been wanting though is the ability for my SparkSDR receivers to change bands based on the time of day. (e.g. 80,40m night, 10m,17m day). 

With SparkSDR you can enable rig control over a tcp port in the receiver settings, and with a little bit of code we can take advantage of that.

$ echo "f" | nc -w 1 localhost 51111
7074000
VFOA

With the above command we have gotten the frequency of the receiver on port 51111.  We can also set the frequency with the `F` command as follows.

$ echo "F 7075000" | nc -w 1 localhost 51111
RPRT 0

With the following we can use these commands plus a few more to write our program that will change each receivers frequency based on our settings. And once we have our program we can set it to run at pre-defined times with crontab.

0 20 * * * rigcycle run night
0 6 * * * rigcycle run day

 To download the above rigcycle tool you can visit the github repository for the project at https://github.com/nricciar/rigcycle.

New Toy - Hermes Lite

So I picked up a new toy in the last group buy.

The Hermes Lite has quickly become my new favorite radio.  Being able to listen in on 4 bands at once with FT8, PSK, and more all running on those 4 bands is quite an amazing trick.

Also a big shout out to the amazing software SparkSDR.  Having an all in one solution for PSK and FT8 without having to setup virtual audio cables, etc is so nice.