I made my own HamClock and it was easy

I wondered just how difficult it would be to put together my own HamClock. It wasn’t difficult at all but there was a “gotcha” along the way.

Instructions & hardware

The instructions from inovato are available at https://forum.inovato.com/post/making-your-own-hamclock-pc-13757619

For hardware, I bought this Android TV box for $35 (Amazon affiliate link):

Android TV Box 4GB RAM 64GB ROM, Smart TV Box H618 Chipset, 4K, HDR10+, Wi-Fi 2.4/5.8GHz, Bluetooth 4.0, USB 2.0/3.0 100M Ethernet Android 12.0

It came with a remote but as far as I can tell, after flashing the microSD card and running HamClock, the remote is useless. The device also came with an HDMI cable and power adapter.

Using the instructions at https://forum.inovato.com/post/doing-a-factory-restore-13366418, I burned the Quadra 4K firmware to a 32 Gb microSD card with balenaEtcher.

Setup and wifi

I plugged in an Ethernet cable, connected the HDMI cable to my smart TV, and connected a keyboard and mouse to the Android TV box. Then I powered it up.

Setup went smoothly and in a few minutes, I had my own HamClock on the TV screen.

One gotcha was configuring wifi. I couldn’t find where to do that in the HamClock interface. Finally, I clicked the padlock on the HamClock screen and selected Exit HamClock. Once I dropped into the main system screen, I clicked on Applications and found Advanced Network Setup. Then I added a wifi connection, entered the credentials, and unplugged the Ethernet cable. And I had a wifi connection.

By the way, this is also how you get to other applications included in the Quadra/Quadra4K package: exit HamClock. Then you’ll see other apps such as WSJT-X and FLDigi.

Testing in a browser

Finally, I found the IP address of the HamClock, and connected to it with a web browser by added :8081/live.html to the IP address. (By the way, the :8081/live.html opens the read-write version of the HamClock, and :8082/live.html opens the read-only version.)

Here’s what I got in my web browser:

All in all, this went about as smoothly as one could expect. If you missed buying an inovato Quadra or Quadra4K HamClock, it’s not difficult to make your own. You don’t have to dedicate a monitor to it (unless you want to, of course). I’m running mine “headless” and have a link to it added to my computer desktop.

Summary

That’s it. For $35 and a microSD card, you can easily build your own HamClock that you can access on your local network with a web browser.

Updating and upgrading

Afterwards, I SSH’d into the box and did the sudo update and sudo upgrade dance to bring the system up to date. There were a lot of packages that needed upgrading — 183, to be exact — and since this is not a fast system, it took a while. I answered yes to a question about starting iperf as a daemon. The system worked after updating, so that answer must have been okay!

(In Debian, iperf3 is a command-line tool for measuring maximum bandwidth on IP networks. I’m sure I could have responded “no” and HamClock would run just fine.)

After updating/upgrading, I rebooted the HamClock (sudo reboot now).

Installed Tailscale, too

Once that was done, I installed Tailscale so that I could reach my HamClock remotely. This was simple with a curl command:

curl -fsSL https://tailscale.com/install.sh | sh

After installing, you start tailscale with this command:

sudo tailscale up

That brings up a URL in the terminal which you paste into a web browser to authorize adding the machine to your Tailnet. To connect to your HamClock over your Tailnet, use the Tailscale IP address of your HamClock and add “:8081/live.html” to that.

And done.