What it is

OE5XRX is a young amateur radio club in Upper Austria building **modular remote stations** — full radio sites you operate over the network — and deploying them at good locations across Austria. The priority isn't spec-maxing. It's the unglamorous stuff that decides whether a remote site survives in the field: **easy to build, easy to maintain, easy to repair.**

Why modular

The best antenna locations are usually the worst to drive to. When something fails at a remote site, "fix it" can mean hours on the road — so a fault should mean **swapping one board, not recovering a monolith**, ideally done by any club member with no special gear. Everything is open source, so other clubs can replicate a proven site instead of reinventing it.

Architecture

Each function is its own board, validated on the bench before it goes into a station:

• Bus board — the backbone that ties the modules together
• Power board — supply and power management
• CM4 carrier — Raspberry Pi CM4 as the compute and control core
• FM transceiver — the radio front end
• Device tester — a bring-up jig to validate each module on its own

Built AI-assisted — the honest part

What makes this personal for me: almost all of the software, infrastructure and tooling was built AI-assisted, in a tight loop with Claude Code — station control, deployment, even the docs site. The honest exception is the hardware: KiCad at this scale is still too much for that workflow, so the board design is done by hand. I document that boundary as I go — where AI genuinely carries real embedded work, and where it doesn't (yet). No hype, just the actual line.

Status

Early days, and that's the fun part. Modules are in development and bring-up, the documentation site is live (oe5xrx.org, in German), and the project has been featured in Austria's QSP magazine. We're still shaping the station concept, so ideas and input are genuinely welcome.

Get involved

Open source — contributions and questions welcome. If you're in Austria and want to help build or host a site, the club is open for members (details on oe5xrx.org). Follow along here to watch the modules go through bring-up one by one.