“ At this point, since Ubuntu is beginning to look like a really viable alternative OS, the next big issue is whether it will support the ham radio applications that we want to run. Fortunately, the answer to this question is — yes it will.
My Ubuntu Hams badge. Some nerd bling just in time for hamfest.
ARRL Field Day
For some amateur radio operators, the annual Field Day is a big deal. Here in Madison County, Al we put on a pretty big effort, and get to practice our rapid-response skills and be competitive at the same time.
If you are at all curious and want to see a lot of different aspects of Amateur Radio all in one place, come visit this weekend. There will be lots of hams there to talk to about everything that’s going on, and non-hams can even talk on the air, under the supervision of a licensed operator.
While the on-air competitive portion of field day starts Saturday at 1:00 PM and ends Sunday at 1:00 PM, we’ll be starting work at 1:00 PM Today (Friday, June 25th) - putting up four 50’ antenna towers, a satellite ground station, and a VHF/UHF station.
Our location is 250 Business Park Blvd, Madison 35758, just south of I-565.
Ubuntu-Hams - great week, first on-air nets
It’s been a great week for the Ubuntu-Hams team. We’ve had a lot of activity on IRC for weeks, but we finally set up some scheduled nets, and had the first of those this week.
Of the four nets on the schedule, we managed to have two - the 80m net ended up moving to 20m because it just wasn’t working for us on 80, and we had a nice round-robin net until the band closed on us. Today we had our first echolink net. There were only two of us, and it was a chance for me to hear the voice of 9W2PJU in Malaysia. Due to his location, power and band limitations, it’s not likely that he and I will be able to make an actual rf contact for a long time.
If you’re an amateur radio operator or want to be, and you are interested in Linux in the ham shack, check out the team page and join us on IRC.
Ubuntu Hams - our first UDS session was great
The Ubuntu Hams team was started a year ago, and has seen a lot of membership growth since then. We just finished the first BOF session we’ve ever had at an Ubuntu Developer’s Summit, and it was a lot of fun. As soon as I can I’ll email a summary to the team mailing list. The discussion was wide-ranging, from enabling translation of amateur radio packages, to increasing the number of upstream maintainers that we engage with.
We decided to begin having monthly meetings on IRC for Ubuntu-hams, as well as starting to have some HF nets. If you’re interested in following this, join the team and subscribe to the mailing list. We’ll be having followup discussions there.
This what you get when you have a product ecosystem dependent on a single proprietary piece.
Ubuntu Developer Summit keysigning
If you’re attending the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Brussels May 10-14, you’re welcome to participate in the openPGP keysigning party on Wednesday evening.
Call for participation - creation of a specification for interoperability of amateur radio applications
Calling all developers of amateur radio software …
Recently there has been discussion in several of the amateur radio development communities that I participate in about establishing standards for interoperability of amateur radio applications.
Discussion has been around protocols and data formats for amateur radio applications, to be used both on a local host and for interaction with web-based applications.
In the last week, the discussion gained enough momentum on the linux-ham mailing list that it was suggested that interested participants take the discussion to the arswd Yahoo group:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/arswd/
The informally stated purpose is to create an open cross-platform specification that will allow interoperability of applications. This is not aimed at any particular operating system or distribution.
This is still in the stage of having people gather for further discussion, so it’s wide open for contribution.
it would be great to have participation by the principal developers of various amateur radio applications, no matter which O.S. your applications run on. No one knows better than you what would help you make your app work better. No matter what your area of knowledge - logging, sound card modems, satellite comms, contesting … there are probably unique aspects of those applications that should be accounted for in the spec.
I personally see this as a step toward some amazing amateur radio applications, suites, and web-based applications.
Steve AI4QR
When open source is outlawed …
Bobby Johnson writes a nice piece here about pressure for U.S. trade representatives to consider countries using open source technology as enemies of capitalism. Here’s a great quote:
“I know open source has a tendency to be linked to socialist ideals, but I also think it’s an example of the free market in action. When companies can’t compete with huge, crushing competitors, they route around it and find another way to reduce costs and compete. Most FOSS isn’t state-owned: it just takes price elasticity to its logical conclusion and uses free as a stick to beat its competitors with (would you ever accuse Google, which gives its main product away for free, of being anti-capitalist?).”
I agree. Open Source is free choice and open markets in action. The reason it’s getting this sort of policy level attention is that it breaks the game that the the big-dollar interests have been playing with the “free market” system.
Disclaimer: I earn a living working on free software, as do a lot of people I respect who work for companies that ostensibly compete with my employer (Canonical) and with each other. The majority of them work for companies who get paid by other companies to provide good and services, who then pay their employees to do the actual labor of producing those, and we in turn spend that money locally just the same as anyone working in any other field. That’s pretty traditional capitalism.
Noise Floor
Last weekend I went on a two-night backpacking trip in the Sipsey Wilderness Area with ten scouts and a couple of other adults. We had a great time, with two nights with sub-freezing temps. For me this was a milestone, the first backpacking I’ve done in years since knee and shoulder surgeries.
I had forgotten a couple of things - The first was just how many stars (and other objects) you can see from earth when you are far away from light pollution. Adding to the clarity we had clear, cold air overhead from the front that had just passed through. The second thing I hadn’t thought about in a while was how much lower the rf noise floor is away from my house and urban areas. I had my Elecraft KX-1 along, and threw an antenna up into a tree. I ended up not trying to make any contacts because a) It hurt to take my hands out of my gloves and b) there was a CW contest on, and I was not very confident that I could copy well enough. So I spent several hours just practicing copying CW, and made some real improvements. I was amazed by what I could hear! Just like realizing that there are so many stars you normally can’t see, there were an incredible number of signals out there.
I need to get out more often.
