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I've seen lots of Pi400s in stock at Digikey, but they all have non-US keyboards. But there's a trick -- the Raspberry Pi USB keyboard ($17) is available with the US layout, and it uses the same keyboard top as the Pi400. So I've been buying the Pi400s and swapping the tops to get a Pi400 with US layout for less than $100.

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Phil - - apologies for the late reply comment. That's an elegant hack to make better use of RPi 400s!

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May 29, 2023Liked by Steve Stroh N8GNJ

Congratulations on issue 100.

I couldn't agree more on the Facebook thing. I was frustrated to find AREDN information was being posted there and not the website.

Your point about website news sections hit home as well. I take care of the website for our local club and the news section doesn't get much love. I've tried to make a point this year to publish something each month, even if it's just a copy/paste from the club newsletter. That way the public can see that the club is alive and doing stuff.

73,

Ben KU0HN

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Ben - apologies for the late reply comment. One of the surprising things is that publishing something on social media isn't perceived as writing - just "posting" or "commenting" and that's something that many folks do all the time. But point out that duplicating such info on a website gets the response "Oh, I'm not a writer". Puzzling (to me), but very real. Websites are this era's brochure that people check out first when they're curious about an organization. Dull, dated website with no updates (news) tends to indicate a stale organization.

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May 30, 2023Liked by Steve Stroh N8GNJ

In reference to the SA878 Open modules for the M17 project. I've been hanging in the Matrix channels. They don't have any current documentation. It's very experimental at the moment. But they are moving forward, I'm not sure what is supported. I may order some of the open modules to experiment with. One of the leads on that seems to be working on a motherboard of sorts that will host the SA878's or even a pair of them for full duplex operation.

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John - apologies for the late reply comment. It's always "interesting" with these sorts of products. I've lost track of the number of interesting products I've stumbled into and tried to find documentation only to find that the only documentation, of sorts, has been developed by enthusiastic users. The SA878 Open seems like a promising development - it might be hard to develop new firmware for it with little documentation, but (non-programmer that I am...) that seems better than trying to "fight through" undocumented existing firmware that must be worked around.

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