RS1 and RS1M have prices, a specification and a page that looks like a product. So it is fair enough to assume you are looking at a company. You are not, quite.
My professional work is IT and cyber security, and that is what pays for things. This — the radio, the solar, the enclosures, the code — is the other half of my life. I built IKARA because I live in a unit and wanted to be on the air, and then helped build ALAMO with Ed, K5YZW, because he had the same problem in a Fort Worth apartment.
What I actually want is more operators on the air and happy with their station. Selling boxes is a means to that, not the point of it.
The intention is to publish RS1.CORE — the actual architecture the whole thing rests on — and the modules that sit on top of it, so you can build your own station without buying anything from me at all.
RS1.CORE is deliberately small. A Raspberry Pi at the site that owns the hardware, a small VM in a data centre near your satellite downlink, and a private tunnel between them so the site never has to accept an inbound connection. That is it. Everything else in the list below is a module installed on top.
The parts list is already public — it is on the RS1 page, component by component. Nothing in it is exotic and you can price it yourself. The hard part was never the shopping. It was making the pieces work together, unattended, for months. That is the part worth giving away.
These are the modules running on IKARA and ALAMO today, not a roadmap of things that might exist one day.
Keep It Simple, Stupid
The whole design brief, in four letters
The observation that started this: most remote station builds are far more complex than they need to be. Parts from everywhere, each with its own interface, its own app, its own account and its own way of failing — until nobody can hold the whole thing in their head, least of all at three in the morning when it has stopped working.
RS1 deliberately goes the other way. There is:
There is one Raspberry Pi at the site, beside the radio — and, where a Maestro console is used, one more in front of the Maestro at your operating position. That is the whole of the computing. Everything else is the minimum hardware needed to deliver the modules listed above.
It is deliberately an older board: a Raspberry Pi 3B+. That is the model most commonly used in industrial IoT deployments, which makes it well understood, widely available and predictable — three things that matter far more than raw speed in a machine that has to run unattended for months.
The only reason a Pi is there at all is that the FlexRadio will not do the functions the Pi provides. If FlexRadio were open to it, we would happily work with them to put that functionality inside the radio itself — and cheerfully delete a box from the design.
Where a module genuinely needs hardware, it gets hardware: an antenna switching module needs an actual antenna switch, and there is no way around that. But wherever an addition can be trivial, it is kept trivial. Site environment monitoring is a couple of inexpensive temperature and humidity sensors, not a sensor platform with a subscription.
The result is a station you can keep in your head, and hand to somebody else. Not a spaghetti of parts and pieces from a dozen vendors speaking a dozen protocols, but one machine doing a defined job. Simple enough to fix is worth more than clever enough to impress.
ALAMO has a whole page on this principle, if you want the longer argument: alamo.k5yzw.com/kiss.
Both are legitimate. I am genuinely not trying to push you toward one.
Download the core and the modules, buy the parts wherever you like, and put it together. Ask me questions along the way — I would rather help you get on the air than sell you anything.
I build it, configure it, test it and hand it over on air. You own every part of it outright from day one — no rental, no subscription, no shared access.
Some people want to build the thing. Some people want to use the radio. After thirty years around this hobby I have stopped believing one of those is more virtuous than the other.
Two stations are running and documented in public. The module list above is real and you can watch most of it working right now on the IKARA and ALAMO sites.
The open-source release is intent, not a download link. The code exists because two stations depend on it, but publishing it properly means documentation, sane defaults and taking my own site names out of it — and that is work I have not finished. I would rather say that plainly than put up a repository that wastes your weekend.
Exactly how the free and paid halves sit together is still being worked out. Free core with paid hardware, or a supported build, or something in between. If you have a view on what would actually be useful, I would like to hear it — that is not a throwaway line, it will shape how this goes.
As of September 2026 I am open to working closely with three stations — sharing the code, the plans, the wiring, the mistakes and everything I have learned building IKARA and ALAMO. Not a mailing list. Actually working together on your station.
One in each. It could be you, or it could be your club — a club station with a noise problem and a few willing hands is exactly the sort of thing this suits.
If you think that could be you, do reach out. First in, first served — and I would rather do three of these properly than thirty badly.
Put your hand up →Three places · Australia · New Zealand · United Kingdom · First in, first served
Building your own and want a hand? Or would rather one arrived working? Either way, say hello.
ian@iangilchrist.net