Field Computers: My Current Setup

hello again everyone and welcome back to the underground today I thought I would answer a fairly common question and discuss how I have my portable comms and sort of second kit set up it's nothing particularly special but a lot of people have had questions about how to set up something that is usable in the field without having a bunch of Tangled wires as anybody who gets into radio or siggins kind of stuff knows using delicate Electronics under field conditions is really difficult sometimes especially when you're having to deal with consumer grade products which are not exactly the most durable so what I use works for me and keeps things nice and tidy so that I don't lose anything while at the same time having a self-contained package that I can just throw into a bag or throw around my neck and go this makes it really easy to move around and plug in where I need it so let's get right to it and talk about what has worked well for me all right starting with the sort of chest rig set up here we've got kind of a lot going on here first of all most of these attachments I'm kind of still still working on but this is usually what I'm working with for right now and it works out pretty well so the main case here is not really a dedicated chest rig it's just a gigantic admin pouch wow which works really really well for holding the tablet computer on the inside this is the Mega admin pouch from Zulu nylon gear it works out really well it's just a perfect size for holding the tablet computer I was originally using something from Hill People Gear but I found that it didn't really work out super well because I I didn't want to invest in a smaller size I wanted to invest in something that has specifically these pouches on the outside because on the outside pouches I usually like to keep my weather sensor so this is best served to be tucked into a pouch on the outside of the gear so that when I'm wearing it and when this is kind of slung around my neck or clipped into a backpack pouch the weather sensor will still work quite effectively it's still kind of exposed to the elements so I can gather weather data as I'm moving along also on the outside is a regular strap cutter that I just added a little Molly thing to to just kind of stick it on the top there no big deal just stuff you might want to keep with you and then on the outside here in this admin pocket this is where I usually store pens and pencils and stuff so notepad and a little mini bluetooth keyboard for the computer on the inside this is very handy if this is strung up inside a tent or something and you want to be able to kind of mess around with your your computer and then use a mouse pad as well see I just normal pins and pencils stuff like that in this outside pocket here on the bottom of the the pouch here I'm still kind of debating if I want to keep this here or not usually I try to keep it here but inside this small pouch is the 12 volt charger for the tablet computer for the Panasonic tablet in there it's got a cigarette lighter adapter that can fit into all my solar panels so I can recharge this on the go one of the biggest problems with tablet computers that are Windows tablets not Android not iOS specifically Windows based systems the Chargers are usually very very big or unique in some way and they're kind of a hassle so for Windows tablets Panasonic tablets or the you know Microsoft Surface tablets I try to keep the Chargers for those directly with the device itself because you're not going to be able to find a charger for those kinds of devices very easily if you happen to leave one behind so I always try to keep it with it this position here however is kind of awkward so when the tablet's open and you're looking down on it like from a chest rig perspective this kind of kind of rubs you a little bit the wrong way and it's not really convenient but I'm still looking at a solution for that and then on the bottom side here I just have a small rain cover for this whole thing so that if it's raining I can I can put the cover over the whole thing so if it's raining I can put this cover over the whole thing and it allows the rain water to kind of mostly miss the PC on the inside uh just kind of a quick little DIY solution for that looking at some of the other things we have on the outside we also have here this this gigantic tube here this is my primary adsb antenna this is the adsb X boost antenna it's kind of pricey for what you get you'd think that it would be a lot more effective considering it's approximate 50 price tag however this fits perfectly I didn't want something that would jut out and kind of stick out and be kind of obvious as to what what it is here on the outside of this device now of course when it comes to adsb and receiving antennas you want those antennas to be as far away from your body as possible and you know as high up in elevation as you can get it right this is not a perfect solution and I don't like having the antenna mounted here on the front but it is at least a few inches away from my body here at least someone wearing it on my chest and moving around and I found that in my area when I'm when I've got this clipped into a rucksack which is usually what happens when I when I use this clipped into the front of a rucksack is like a little mini chest rig I can still get about 10 to 15 miles range of receiving aircraft with this antenna in this configuration obviously if I take this whole thing off and just kind of hang it in a tree even at the same level as you know maybe five or six feet off the ground the reception is infinitely better it's easily double and I can usually get about 150 miles of reception with this antenna in this configuration if it's not directly on me over here on the other side we've just got a stylus for the tablet that I usually try to keep it tucked internally because so I don't lose it but it ends up usually just getting tucked there because I use this all the time now here on the back is where I mentioned this can be clipped into a rucksack now I just have this this piece of webbing here maybe a couple of feet long just as a simple neck Loop now I don't often recommend doing that you you obviously want to use these kind of standard Clips here to clip in to either like a placard system or some kind of dedicated chest rig harness if you want to get like a micro harness of some kind you can use this as a dedicated chest ring obviously if you're not curing any kind of mags or anything like that you're just out for a hike or something this works really well as a dedicated chest rig however most of the time it's going to be clipped into my backpack straps using these two clips here so it Clips right in assumes the space of kind of a chest rig and then if I wanted to if I'm moving really fast I can clip in these extra side clips here no big deal it's just some simple webbing on the top row of Molly here nothing super tactical I also try to keep a climbing rated Carabiner just because these things are also always handy to have and this is going to be helpful for hanging this thing up either in a tree or in a tent or something when we get to the inside also here on the outside this is kind of a temporary solution until I figure out something better this is a power extension Outlet so this right here is where I can plug in the power charger here so if I wanted to I could string a solar panel on the rucksack that I'm wearing run the power cable down one one shoulder strap and then plug it in here right at the top and then secure it with either some kind of gear tie or tape or something that way I can charge the laptop the the tablet that's in here as I'm moving because this thing is going to eat battery power a lot more than you might you might want it to sometimes especially if it's running adsb software so this actual extension here runs all the way down here to a small hole that I poked in the bottom of the admin pouch right here so let's go ahead and open it up take a look at what looks what it looks like on the inside if we open it up it's just a standard clamshell arrangement I have this to where it doesn't open very far it's not a full 90 degrees because usually I don't need that I just need a quick peek to take a peek at what aircraft just flew over me or what aircraft was detected and then I can close it right back up I don't want this thing to flop Way open and then reveal the the light source of the tablet and the screen uh to to just whoever might be looking at me right so usually it stays fairly close and if I need to open it up I can always just just open it up a little bit more now for cable routing one of the main reasons I decided to go with this setup is because there's a lot of different ways of routing a lot of cables so they don't come undone one of the worst problems ever with dealing with sdrs and tablets and computers out in field environments is the USB connection USB type A connections they just come undone all the time and all you need is for your adsb thing to just jiggle loose a little bit and it disconnects so you've got to start all over again and that's infuriating so this is what seems to work for me right now so let's go ahead and pull the tablet out of here talk about what I've got going on here so we'll unplug that for now and then on the other side I have a 90 degree angle USB connector here unplug that so the tablet aside for a moment this is just a USB splitter it's just a simple uh sort of extension that allows me to have two different USB ports now sometimes this plays havoc with what you might want to be doing um but for me uh this tablet only has one USB port and I want to usually do a lot of different things with it so for right now having an adsb SDR dongle and having a dedicated GPS dongle as well seems to work very very well finding the internal GPS chips for these is is uh not super easy but in order to for me to use GPS to set things like clocks on radios and to set things like my PC clock for things like JSA call you need GPS that's one of the things I see left out a lot of times is some kind of way of setting your PC time without using the internet and one way to do that is with GPS so you can use the GPS on a lot of different radios like the ic705 you can do it that way or you can do it with a simple little GPS gloness USB device so that's what I use cheap cheap device so you can use it for a lot of different stuff so that's plugged in to one one side of the USB splitter I have another cable here is this kind of a uh an extension to go inside one of the pockets here and that is where my radar box adsb flight stick is plugged in you you can use pretty much any SDR device you want to track aircraft however this one I like because for whatever reason the reception is a lot better uh I think it's most likely due to the internal filter on this so this is really just for dump 1090 or RTL 1090 kind of stuff so your experience may vary you can with an RTL SDR get the Str itself and then a filter but it won't fit inside this very well I've tried it it comes loose it's just not not a very good way of doing things so this seems to be a very good solution for me right now though I tend to also carry along other different kinds of SDR so if I want to do something else I've always got one or two of these hanging around so that is tucked inside one of the pockets here on the back side of this and I have found that if I shove this up here to show you how it's plugged in a lot of times I like to just tape these uh take these closed so that when it's seated in that USB outlet it doesn't jiggle back and forth as I'm moving along for whatever reason this seems to work for now just tucking it in like that and then tucking all these cables in and making sure that they don't jiggle loose see that's really how all the cables are routed in here I can plug in this GPS device again right here and this is also another uh USB device so that I can plug in like a thumb drive or something to transfer files to this while it's inside the case interestingly enough uh you're going to have to do a little trial and error if you want to use a USB splitter with something like adsb in theory you could have two SDR dongles using one for purely adsb reception and the other for like scanning or doing stuff with like SDR sharp or SDR angel or Dragon Os or something like that however it's a little wonky and I've I've found that I tend to to stress this tablet pretty hard so usually I just run adsb stuff if I'm on the move like I mentioned other SDR devices can get tucked tucked down in there and a lot of times also carry a spare 1090 megahertz antenna just in case this one fails but honestly I don't really need to carry this anymore because this uh this antenna right here on the outside has been very very effective then back here in the back I just have a hole over from some stuff I've been working on uh just uh some strips of M9 and M8 uh NBC paper uh chemical detection paper chemical detector paper uh I've been trying to keep some kind of NBC capability with my weather stations uh maybe I should talk about whether stuff separately but since this kind of lives with me and weather and comms and Sig and stuff kind of all goes hand in hand for me at least I just kind of leave that there but it's it's not obviously not necessary it's just really a specific use for me uh here in one of these Pockets I also carry a few different adapters for using different kinds of antennas if I needed to to change something around I can easily do that right here some just really common SMA to BNC kinds of adapters then on the tablet itself if we look here at the back I put velcro strips on the back here so that it can actually stick to the velcro part of the admin pouch here just as a way of making sure that it doesn't come loose now for the battery I tend to use these uh larger extended life batteries for these Panasonic laptops they're not cheap however usually the batteries that come with these Panasonic tablets are garbage when you get them so or at least that's been my experience I had to buy a new one anyway and when I do that I put a piece of Velcro on it one two to make sure it doesn't fall out but I also buy some of these little cheap uh smartphone kickstands and it takes up no space uh just a cheapy little you know Chinese grade phone kickstand it works really really well with these and then I also have the same thing but one of those little rings that you put on the backs of smartphones I put it here on the barcode reader so that if I wanted to I could take this out of its case and hang it somewhere so that I could see the screen if I'm like laying in a tent trying to get some rest or something but I still need to see what aircraft are around this works really well for that however usually this thing doesn't ever come out of its case and I'll show you why here so let me put this back together there you can put our power cable back together use our little jury rigged piece of tape there to hold it together and our USB thing here just like so just like that now usually what I'll do is I'll keep it decently tight like so and what I've done is I have sewn on the inside of the zipper lip here a very small one inch section of paracord and I looked a piece of paracord through it tying it to here this little webbing Loop here and this little webbing Loop here these two Loops here are really used for the Paracord to hold this clamshell open and closed so all I did was create this Loop what that does is that allows me to take this Carabiner here and clip it in and now I can hang this entire thing uh from a tent or from a tree or something like that hang it from from a central point and now I can have a desk to work from so I can set my keyboard here and keep everything out of the mud out of the rain and it works out really really well I didn't think I would end up using this but I could hang it you know on the wall uh back in you know a civilization back in your house or something like that and it sits flat up against the wall and it's a nice little way of keeping an adsb receiver running at all times this is also a great way of storing the device so usually what I will do is get back from the field or wherever I'm whatever I'm doing and I will just unzip it and hook this to a hook on the wall and plug in the charger I use just a normal wall outlet you know AC charger here plug that in there it goes to the charging port so this is a great way to keep this thing running at all times and the reason you might want to do that and allow for the this thing to hang on a wall or a tent or something and have it be open is because this thing gets really really hot in the summertime you might not even be able to use this because it gets so hot in the winter time or really I should say like late spring or early fall where your ambient temperature is outside are going to be maybe 70 degrees or so this thing will get up to maybe 135 degrees like the screen here will get that hot so what I like to do is just leave it open let it hang where it's Gotta where it's going to hang and just kind of air cool that way cooling these things is not easy I've tried all different kinds of options but they're just not meant for that they're meant to to have air circulating around their kind of you know magnesium magnesium cases so this is what's worked out well for me when it comes to average everyday usage from for adsb and other stuff like that you can easily easily easily do many things with this at the same time the reason that I like using a dedicated Windows tablet is what I can do is set this up with my Icom 705 and run JSA call on this at the exact same time as picking up aircraft via adsb and if I wanted to also scanning with a dedicated SDR dongle or something else like that this little PC will handle it it may be a little stressful for it but but I run js8 call and plain plotter on this at the same time all the time it's nearly constantly running both of those at the same time and because the ic705 has a Wireless feature I don't even need to plug in my ic705 it can use the Wi-Fi chip that's in here to control the 705 which is a really really cool feature otherwise you'd have to plug it in and there's mixed results with doing that at the same time as an adsp receiver that is really the overall view of the chest rig setup now obviously things change quite often especially Communications gear this setup was more of a Baseline and really more of a way to use a Windows based tablet in a field environment without getting the things too confusing right without having too many cables and being able to quickly just zip a pouch closed and go at an absolute minimum I need to have the ability to track aircraft via adsb the ability to control an HF radio for data modes and some limited second slash comment collection capability in the form of a simple wideband SDR if I am planning to set up an electronic listening post I obviously would take more stuff along like a dedicated scanner or a better SDR stuff like that but this is a good option that has worked for me and since you all asked about it I thought it would be helpful to share especially in today's age where we really have to learn a lot really quickly so hopefully this helps flatten the learning curve for anyone interested and I'll also be talking about my specific Radio setup as well for those interested in what that looks like but for now this is a good start and very helpful for fighting in the shade