Orange Pi as an alternative to Raspberry Pi

[Ole Saastad]

Hi,

as the Raspberry Pi 4 is very hard to come by I have started to explore the possibility to use Orange Pi as an alternative to RPI 4. I have used Orange Pis in the past and are very happy with quality and selection of boards, from small to large (Orange Pi 5 is the latest).  I have used an Orange Pi 4 LTS which is a very nice board with eMMC 

memory and a 6-core processor, probably overkill for this use, maybe Pi 3 should be ok.

I opted for Ubuntu 3.0.6 Focal from Orange Pi makers. The image and software can be copied to the eMMC elimiating the need for the TF card. 

The utils, flrig, fldigi, hamlib compiles without any issues. ARDOP compiles without any issues. I used the ARDOPC which I hope is the correct one. 

As for pat I used the 64 bit package posted here earlier (pat_0.12.1_arm64.deb) It did install and run nicely on the Orange Pi, as one might expect. However, testing all functions still remains. 

As for VARA the story is very different, it require a 32 bit build environment and I'm still working on this. It seems that Orange Pi makers are not to happy with 32 bit support. Not all packages are available as armhf (the 32 bit). Some serious work should be done with VARA.

For those who would like to try an alternative to Raspberry PI 4 I have some writeup here:

https://github.com/olewsaa/amateur-radio/blob/main/OrangePi/README.md

LB4PJ/Ole