There’s a couple of places around Brisbane in signal shadows that used to have those antennas. A small area on Stafford Road and The Gap come to mind. The Gap was a bit of a nightmare with TVQ and ABQ towers straight up the hill flooding the suburb while Nine on the other side of the mountain was invisible.
Just as a bit of an FYI, I’m having trouble with my webserver TEF, the ESP32 driving the whole show has had its Wifi chip fail. I’ve had to connect it via USB which got it working but now has a squeal in the audio. The webserver is still up for now but I’m hoping to replace it in the future (when cash allows) with a headless TEF from the FMDX discord.
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My non-headless TEFs had the same issue. For me, thee thing that solved it was setting the screensaver to turn off the screen entirely (rather than dimming). Once off, the squeal went away.
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I locked it to try for MS for one night, since there wasn’t much good tropo around
It’s not locked anymore
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Good idea, I knew this trick from using the Deepelec on AM, but it did not do any difference with the silver TEF sadly. Somebody on the FMDX discord in the past suggested it helping with the SPI speed, this changed it somewhat but didn’t totally eliminate it
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I have temporally connected my headless TEF6686 to a Raspberry Pi using the image on Discord
It is a very basic webserver with a few plugins but does work well.
The Raspberry Pi is running Linux Diablo with no GUI I am completely unfamiliar with it.
I am not sure how new plugins are added I assume via the command line. so I am only running what was embedded in the image.
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Hi @cmoore, have you used linux before? CLI interface is jumping in the deepend but worth it for servers. Debian is a great distribution that I’ve used for ~25 years. I run mine on a headless Orange Pi Zero which I manage over SSH. Here’s very briefly how I install plugins:
The plugins are listed here:
Assuming you have terminal access, install Midnight Commander for much easier file management, and nano incase you need to edit text files.
sudo apt update; sudo apt install mc nano
Move to the directory where FM-DX-Webserver (probably is!) is:
cd build/
List the directory to see what you have
ls -l
total 68
drwxr-xr-x 4 fraser fraser 4096 May 21 17:07 DX-Alert
drwxr-xr-x 5 fraser fraser 4096 Aug 14 22:57 dx-retro-font
drwxr-xr-x 8 fraser dialout 4096 Jun 8 21:08 fm-dx-webserver
drwxr-xr-x 4 fraser fraser 4096 May 5 22:53 FM-DX-Webserver-Plugin-Spectrum-Graph
drwxr-xr-x 5 fraser fraser 4096 Jul 17 23:46 FM-DX-Webserver-Plugin-Station-Logos-OCE
drwxr-xr-x 9 fraser audio 4096 Jun 8 21:08 librdsparser
drwxr-xr-x 5 fraser dialout 4096 Feb 2 2025 node_modules
-rw-r--r-- 1 fraser dialout 50 Feb 2 2025 package.json
-rw-r--r-- 1 fraser dialout 891 Feb 2 2025 package-lock.json
drwxr-xr-x 2 fraser fraser 4096 Feb 26 21:40 TMP-plugins
-rwxr-xr-x 1 fraser fraser 1198 May 21 17:14 updateallgit
drwxr-xr-x 4 fraser fraser 4096 Jul 17 23:46 URDSupload
drwxr-xr-x 4 fraser fraser 4096 Mar 8 19:21 webserver-audio-recorder
drwxr-xr-x 4 fraser fraser 4096 Mar 31 12:25 webserver-logger
drwxr-xr-x 4 fraser fraser 4096 Jul 17 23:46 webserver-scanner
drwxr-xr-x 4 fraser fraser 4096 Feb 2 2025 xdrd
drwxr-xr-x 7 fraser audio 4096 Feb 2 2025 xdr-gtk
Use git to download the plugin you want:
git clone https://github.com/ryanginn/dx-retro-font
Cloning into 'dx-retro-font'...
remote: Enumerating objects: 170, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (170/170), done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (123/123), done.
remote: Total 170 (delta 41), reused 105 (delta 22), pack-reused 0 (from 0)
Receiving objects: 100% (170/170), 527.49 KiB | 2.57 MiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (41/41), done.
You may want to do the file copying in mc (midnight commander)
But for example you need to copy dx-retro-font/plugins/ to fm-dx-webserver/plugins/
Use Tab to complete directory names
cd dx-retro-font/plugins
ls -l
cp -a retro-font.js ../../fm-dx-webserver/plugins/
cp -a retro-font ../../fm-dx-webserver/plugins/
Then you have to restart the webserver:
sudo systemctl restart fm-dx-webserver
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Thank you very much for the informative tutorial .
It will give me a base to start from a big learning curve,
I have one localised station logo plugin I need to import but no big deal
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Hey Everyone, it’s been a while,
I’ve finally got my Sydney TEF Web Server back up at
Please let me know if there are any issues.
Cheers,
Cam.
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Always nice to see more Austrailan servers online.
I notice there’s also a node in Bribie Island, QLD now too.
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Still missing a SA node, though the Mildura node gets plenty of Croweaters.
I’m amazed that there’s nothing in NZ nor the west coast of the US.
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Based on the reception, I guess the antenna might be pointing to the west.
In the last few days one has appeared on the US West Coast. I haven’t checked it out personally so don’t know if reception is good or bad.
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Nice. Do you know what antenna it’s using and/or which direction it’s pointed in?
I have just been told it’s not his, so no idea who this one is setup by
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I currently have my portable server running in Canberra (Woden), it’s using the tunnel so its not as responsive as the standard servers
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Just a heads up. My server sounded distorted (like peak clipping), with a recent update. I had audio boost turned on, as recommended for headless TEF. But I have now turned it off and restarted the server and the audio is back to normal. Anyone else noticed anything?
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Just an update for those who use it, my silver TEF running my webserver has finally lost its wifi module altogether now. Can’t get it to connect to any network, it started doing this after I shut it off for a storm that passed through on the weekend. Until I get a pair of headless TEFs it’ll be off for the foreseeable future. On occasion I might put on the Deepelec, but this is only going to be adhoc.
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The TVCL TEF servers have now been reconfigured:
- TVCL North:
- Northeast (~10°) – 7-el. Yagi (H)
- Northwest (~320°) – 7-el. Yagi (H)
- TVCL Southwest:
- Southwest (~220°) – 7-el. Yagi (H)
- West (~270°) – 7-el. Yagi (H) [Faulty balun – not operational]
- TVCL East:
- Southeast (~120°) – 3-el. Yagi (H)
- TVCL Omni (V):
- Northwest (~330°) – 3-el. Yagi (V)
- From what I’ve seen of 3-element Yagis in vertical orientation, they’re not really particularly directional, so I’m just using it as the omni antenna.
- Northwest (~330°) – 3-el. Yagi (V)
- TVCL AM:
- MLA 30+ for MW/SW
- South (~206°) – 3-el. Yagi (H)
- The FM antenna on this TEF isn’t advertised on the server list, but acts as an alternative/backup to the main SW antenna.
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