It is small, inexpensive and incredibly versatile. Both at home as the main computer in the shack but also on the road. The Raspberry PI 3+4 has proven itself as an amateur radio computer. December 2020 in General by Karl-Heinz Krawczyk If you buy a tablet with at least an i5 mobile processor you should be fine.29. Applications like Winlink and Fldigi run perfectly fine on tablet-class hardware specs. Most ham radio programs are what I'll call 'low intensity' applications - they don't tax the system capabilities like gaming software does. Suffice to say, you won't be playing Call of Duty on a tablet, at least not for very long. These devices necessarily run at lower speeds and with lighter weight processors just to keep from melting down. Remember, there's no cooling fans on tablets, and more processing power = more heat. And because most manufacturers don't see tablets as general purpose computing devices, you normally get a lower system capability set - slower, mobile CPUs, less RAM and less storage than you'd get with a laptop of the same screen size. They also don't stand up by themselves very well - you end up having to prop it up against something, or get an add-on stand like a RAM Universal Stand. You'll need a port expansion dongle or a docking station. Most rugged laptops come with only one or two USB ports, and no HDMI port. Four Microsoft Surface tablets - a Surface Pro 5 & 7, a Surface Go (original) and a Surface Go 2.Three Panasonic Toughbooks - two CF19s (early and late models), and a CF31.At least two Dell laptops - a plain-jane Inspiron and a ruggedized Latitude 5420.This is what I call the 'ham radio software stack'. I have to say that, with two exceptions, every computer I tested worked just fine as a device for running ham radio related software - Winlink, JS8CALL, Fldigi, Ham Radio Deluxe, Icom's RS-BA1 package, Ion2G ALE, RT Systems rig programming software, and more. I've bought, borrowed or re-purposed over a dozen different computers over the past few years in search of that 'perfect' computing device for use as both a general purpose shack computer and as a deployable, rugged, EMCOMM computer. I've mentioned in a recent post that I've been around the world and back again with computing devices for Amateur Radio.
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