I've been playing with POCSAG and DAPNET in Pi-Star on my little Chinese-made MMDVM simplex hotspot (based on a Pi Zero W with a generic STM-32 DVM GPIO hat) and have been having great fun with it even though I don't have a pager yet (I ordered one from China but shipping's delayed due to the Chinese New Year celebrations they just had. Hopefully it will arrive next week.) I'm in the Philippines and I've been trying to come up with use-cases that may be of interest to Filipino hams. To that end I've had the good DAPNET admins at hampager.de add several APRS weather stations in this country to their aprs-wx rubric and have recently gotten them to create a brand-new rubric that uses mqtt.pskreporter.info's live stream of text-base PSK Reporter spot reports for digital modes, configured to retrieve five reports at a time for stations in the Philippines. This would, for example, let someone who's sitting around watching television in the evening know that (as a hypothetical example) 40 meters is wide open to Europe from the Philippines so they might want to think about turning their radio on and making some juicy DX FT8 contacts.
Now that this rubric is up and running I'm also planning to cobble together a wide area DAPNET transmitter using an old Pi 3B+ that's just sitting here (my old ADS-B feeder from a couple of years or so ago) along with one of those radio-less MMDVM hats that instead just has a female DB9 connector, homebrewing a DB9 male to RJ-45 cable, and hooking it to my little Retevis RT95 dual-band 25W FM radio's mic jack (it doesn't have a data connector, it's a very simple little radio) using only the hotspot's audio output, PTT and ground. This would allow hams in range of me, up to around 10 kilometers more or less, to receive DAPNET pages and rubrics without having to also buy a hotspot, just a pager (and get a user account and RIC from hampager.de) plus perhaps allow me to receive the pages when I'm out shopping or something. It should be a fun little project. I couldn't do it without Pi-Star's POCSAG support!
