@croyle Sounds like ARRL planning to me, yeah.

What confuses me is why they need so damn much downtime to do this. It makes me think that they're still running on that same obsolete RHEL or whatever box, with absolutely no spare hardware or capacity.

@N1ZZZ ngl, that's when I'd be heading straight to solid-state devices that dump as little waste heat as possible =)

Stay cool, or at least cool enough to be safe.

@K0UWU My pleasure: it seems to be very well-received, so I'm delighted to spread the joy around.

(Also, the mojibake really brings the page together. So good.)

I tuned my websdr over to 40m SSB for a little bit and it was all just people talking about antennas. It was a little island of neuroatypical normalcy in the world around us.

I stayed off of 80m, lest I ruin the moment.
#HamRadio

The perfect QRZ page doesn't exis…
https://www.qrz.com/db/VB2CATGIRL

Also, Canada's ISED is now the coolest radio regulatory body in the world, at least in my book.

H/T @K0UWU #HamRadio #MemeAppreciationMonth

@tk "Oh, we'll just change the allocations then."

This post from @kb6nu is a couple years old now, but it's still an on-going conversation: https://www.kb6nu.com/stock-traders-petitioning-for-high-power-access-to-shortwave-frequencies/

@yuubi @rrmutt Man, QST used to be cool.

@F4EGX_Nico I am reminded of this excellent dataset from @gsuberland : https://github.com/gsuberland/switch_bouncing

But I am now wondering if maybe the glitchy knob on my 817 would benefit from the same sort of LPF treatment.

@dc1tc Welcome to CM87! I hope you get a chance to enjoy more of our beautiful parks. The terrestrial weather is looking pretty good for the next little while, and with any luck, the space weather will clear up soon.

SF's Presidio (US-7889, in US-0647) is probably my favorite spot. There's parking, bathrooms, and tables near The Warming Hut. And a little further in is Fort Point (+US-0819), but it's more challenging to operate, with only a bench.

Best of luck, I hope you enjoy the Bay!

@wb2ifs I've recently been tuning in to a whole different wavelength, which the teenager finds a lot more interesting than the ham bands.

Building a telescope body around some off-the-shelf mirrors has been really fun.

So many photons, which have careened through so much of the galaxy, only to end their decades-long journeys by being absorbed by our eyeballs.

@jeffpc I dug up my old notebooks, and I don't have any "eureka!" moments in there, sad to say. There was a fun bit of chickenscratch sorting out the epicycles of CNT values to use to keep the bit periods lined up, which brought back some memories.

I hope the tests go well, and that you find the last few gremlins. I don't think I know of anyone who's had an easy time implementing APRS, so at least there's camaraderie to be had here =)

@jeffpc I spent a looong time listening to APRS, so I know exactly what you mean. I'm trying to remember what else I had to monkey with to get this to work on-air.

Do you have a long enough preamble? I seem to remember that being a problem. IIRC I had to mess with which frequency I started with, but that might have been a red herring.

I might try doing a local over-the-air receive test, to build more confidence in that piece. If that works, it's down to AX.25 shenanigans.

@jeffpc Sounds like a radio connection problem, or maybe a header/routing issue. Have you monitored your transmissions via a receiver? That was a problem I ran into when I was doing my own AX.25 modem on AVR a while ago.

I haven't tried using this code in roughly a decade, but it ran a weather station at my last house for years that showed up on aprs.fi. I'm pretty sure the code isn't helpful, but just in case: https://github.com/jbm9/ArdX25

@N3VEM I was going to make a joke about letting kids that small watch MTV unsupervised, then remembered that MTV hasn't shown music videos in decades.

@df7cb Thanks for the info! FWIW, I have an older Pluto that I picked up secondhand, and it's pretty annoying to work with. The newer ones seem less troublesome.

I know @destevez has had good luck with at least one of the little Chinese Pluto-with-ethernet clones. I should bought one when they were still free to import.

(I miss last year, when QO-100 was one of the top reasons I wished I lived in Europe.)

@k0in Oh! It occurs to me that I left out one important part! I have some homebrew filters to cut out random bits of crap. They're little milled PCBs with very simple filters on them. I'm sure they cost me a lot of signal strength, but they were also roughly free.

I could probably whip up a few more of them if you needed some. I'll have to find a Hawkeyes-branded tin to put them in, though, which may be difficult to do here in San Francisco.

@df7cb Is that a B210 at the center of things? Is it a clone? I'm curious how those are faring nowadays, since they're a lot cheaper than the Ettus ones, and I don't think NI employs anyone who worked on the original design at this point, so I don't feel bad changing vendors.

@k0in My home websdr/RX station is a cheap commercial discone and a couple of the RTL-SDR dongles with built-in upconverters (and a little resistive splitter). It does okay, despite living in a very noisy city: https://pskreporter.info/pskmap.html?preset&callsign=aj9bm&timerange=86400

@ai6yr I want to believe that these are going to be nicely broadband as a sort of poor/cheap man's cage dipole.

But they're so short that they might actually not work as cage dipoles.

Now I want to go buy two matching trashcans….

@k3fnb Congratulations! I'm in the same boat, but on a previous go-round =)

My academic background includes a linguistics degree, where my focus was cognitive stuff (syntax/semantics, with an interest in language acquisition). Trying to learn Morse is making me wonder if I have a learning disability that doesn't show up in other domains. If I had gone into academia instead of returning to software, I'd probably write a paper on this.