What and Why? Back in the 90s when I was at NYU, I got into using GNU/Linux systems. This was largely due to my digital signal theory professor who would carry his tower to class to demonstrate things on Matlab because there were no computers available that could do what he needed done. There was…
What Are We Doing? This blog exists for me to catalog sucesses and failures. The other thing it does is provide me with a place to put things so that I can get to them no matter where I am assuming – an internet connection. The topic for today is a refresher on my setup…
After my switch over to Ubuntu on my Surface Go 2, I went on the hunt for a way to continue my Winlink Wednesday check-ins and, more importantly, maintain my ability to use email from the field. I’ve chronicled some of that success here. In the end, I settled on using ARDOP with Pat as…
It took a minute, but it works. The last week or so has been a lot of fun diving into some software and tweaking things to get them where I need them to be. There are some really great free options out there for radio communications that do not involve MS Windows or any proprietary…
“Broken Window” by akeg is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0. A Little History A couple of years back, I decided that I wanted to spend more time on the air and less time playing around with IT nonsense for radio. The quickest path to that, it seemed at the time, was to jump in and…
Here We Go Again… One of the reasons that I rebuilt my Surface Go 2 recently was that Winlink was exhibiting some behaviors that were incompatible with sending and receiving email via VARA HF. When software doesn’t do the one thing that I need it to do, well, something has to change. Prior to re-loading…
The Issue: In the world of ham radio, we have what I consider to be a bit of a problem. We have a very deep addiction to the Microsoft Windows ecosystem. Why is it a problem? Because Windows itself, in 2023, is not much better than windows 10 years ago. Which wasn’t that much better…
A few months back, I hit a real snag in my Winlink setup. At some point, my Surface GO 2 – post Win11 update – created a situation with Winlink where I couldn’t get the window to open reliably when establishing a VARA HF connection. The symptom was that the entire menu system in the…
A couple of posts ago, I wrote about a script that I cobbled together to pull live activator data from the POTA website and push to a console and to the Mac notifications (assuming I hit a station in a state I’m looking for). As I was working through my CW studies last night, I…
I found myself poking at the POTA APIs yesterday and decided that it’d be neat to bang out a quick script that might tell me from a CLI (or over my Mac notifications) whether or not a state that I’m hunting on FT8 is on the air. The API is simple enough. So why not?…