A Raspberry Pi is an essential part of my mobile setup. The first was a Pi 3 Model B I got in 2017 for $35. Currently using a Pi 4 Model B that I got in 2020 for $50 that is in use to this day. I was still using Raspbian Buster until recently, and while stable in 2026 it was quite far beyond end of life. It took a long time to get that build working however, as I had to compile and configure many things from scratch, which I hate doing and am not good at. There was a lot of time invested in getting it working, and the fear was thinking a new build would take as long.

Once I decided to upgrade, I ran the Raspberry Pi Imager to put the latest version on the SD card. As usual with any OS upgrade I ran into a few snags, but overall this install was a fraction of the time it took 6 years ago.

I am installing headless. On Ubuntu 24.04, when I installed rpi-imager from the repository, it was so out of date that it didn’t install the current Raspberry Pi OS correctly. Just download the appimage from the website directly, right click and go to Properties, and make Executable. I was able to enable wifi from there and get everything setup.

Small things when setting up WSJT-X the first time for FT8:

• It defaults to RRR instead of RR73. Double-click Tx 4 to make the switch
• Turn ‘Hold Tx Freq’ on – it is easier to find an open space and stay there than it is to hop around for each contact
• Set the CQ dropdown to your preference, I prefer ‘CQ: Max Dist’ – it took me a minute to figure out why WSJT-X wasn’t responding to those answering my CQ

Overall things work good and it took a total of 15 minutes to set everything up. Far faster than it took in 2020, so a huge win. Maybe I’ll upgrade faster in the future.