“ 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.
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
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.
I’ve been thinking about how to optimize antennas for HF at my location, which is on a hillside. This provided me with some insight. I’m not sure what I’ll end up with for propagation to the East (over the hill), but to the West I can probably end up with very good results. Modeling will help. I’ll post more when I get to that.
fldigi presentation at HARC meeting
On November 6th I’ll be helping Dave Freese, W1HKJ make a presentation about fldigi to the Huntsville Amateur Radio Club. Fldigi is an amazing open-source cross platform application for communicating using sound card digital modes on amateur radio.
Dave is really knowledgeable about the encoding and error correction used for the various modes, and I learned a lot by helping him with a similar presentation at the Huntsville Hamfest this year. Our demo was cross-platform between Windows and Ubuntu Linux.
There are some really interesting uses being made of fldigi and some companion applications - sending digital files error-free by amateur radio. This is useful for emergency communications in post-disaster situations, when information must be accurately transmitted. Some of these applications do not use point-to-point connections, and therefore allow a file to be received by multiple stations at once. That way, if any station fails to receive the file correctly, they can get a “fill” from any other station who did get it.
It’s possible to perform these file transfers simply by holding the microphone on an FM radio near the computer speaker, and to receive them with a computer microphone near the receiver!
This should be a worthwhile presentation for people with any level of interest or experience in digital sound card modes. For more information see Dave’s excellent web site. Don’t miss his sights and sounds of digital modes page, especially if you’ve been listening to the sounds on the ham bands and wondering what modes they are.
The presentation will be November 6th at 7:30 at the American Red Cross chapter house, 1101 Washington street, Huntsville, AL. This is the regular weekly meeting place and time of the Huntsville Amateur Radio Club.
Two new Linux/open source amateur radio projects
I just noticed a couple of new Linux amateur radio projects. The first is a D-Star compatible repeater - More info Here and the project page is here . I see no mention of source code or a license for the repeater code, but it is apparently based on Centos. The second project is an APCO-25 decoder, and is clearly available under the GPL.
