Capital A Amateur
What counts as Amateur radio? Is meshtastic on ISM to be considered ham radio?
Latest news
Building a presentation- Going to do the hardware mods for MD-380 and MD-UV380
- Should get grant money soon.
- Emailed the VBand folks about what I built.
- Satellite tracking/pass prediction
LoTW PKI
ARRL’s Logbook of the World has a full public key infrastructure.
This can be handy if you need to bootstrap some kind of auth or PKI from a large group of existing users.
Ham Clubs, Ageism, Attitudes
When I was looking for ham clubs, age difference wasn’t the underlying problem. It was the attitudes. Any number of them.
Docker multi-platform fails
Docker won’t run cross-platform containers any more. What gives?
A few pictures
Worrying everyone
Continuing the paragliding, skydiving, and being recently unemployed trend of worrying my parents and friends, I bought a motorcycle.
VMW M&A - hire me!
I got laid off! Along with a huge chunk of the company.
Turbulence
Really cool example of turbulent air caused by some mountains. Ran across this and I’m keeping it here as a cool way of showing just how big turbulence can be.
Throw it!
(Paragliding) This is a must-watch video on throwing the reserve where we see the generally poor safety culture in paragliding get a massive kick in the butt.
Why M17?
M17 is an open source land mobile radio digital voice and data protocol, and the M17 Project is a worldwide community implementing that protocol.
M17 is fully open including the voice codec. Competitor protocols have proprietary codecs, which limits their hackability and your freedoms.
This is M17. Experiment, innovate, learn, build and fix at your own will.
Benefit from others doing the same thing. Repeat!
I need your stars! (DMR.Tools)
Hi everyone! I made and maintain https://dmr.tools/ and would like your feedback on it, especially if you’ve been using it over the years, and your stars on the github source
Chip's Open Letter to MMDVM vendors
Chip posted this the other day titled “Open Letter to MMDVM Board/Hotspot Vendors”.
I don’t have much to add. I’ve been bitten by this too. Many hotspot vendors are skimping on quality or other various aspects, or otherwise sell you something that is artificially limited.
I figured I’d link his post for what little extra attention it might gain his message, and mention a couple sellers that are good while I’m at it.
LMR Channel Representation Standard
In land mobile radio, it can be handy to have a legible shorthand for describing a channel. Over time we’ve seen one evolve, that I’ve formalized a bit to implement in dmr.tools.
Yaesu FTM-300 and Module17
Yaesu’s FTM-300 mobile VHF/UHF radio has a bug related to decoding digital data from the data port in the back.
How to best run an open source project
Daniel Stenberg’s guide and writing are excellent.PD362 Cable diagram.
I discovered the hard way that the cable for Hytera PD362s from BlueMax49ers was not correctly made on multiple levels. (Written early June 2023)
M17: Modding the MD-UV380
This applies exactly as well to the MD-UV390, RT3S, the GPS variants, etc, as they are all the same radio. Is this advice for you, or reminders for me? Hard to tell sometimes. Recommended tools Hot air, for desoldering, or good quality desoldering tweezers. Stereo microscope (!! very important !!) finest tip for your iron you can find no caffeine, good nights rest, an hour after eating (otherwise your hands will shake a lot more) antenna washer removal tool Taking it apart Buy that $15 antenna washer removal tool.FCS-152 inside pictures
The FCS-152 is a visual clone of the PRC-152 that offers FM analog VHF/UHF voice communications.
DCS World Buffeter
If you play the flight simulator DCS World and happen to have a bass shaker or buttkicker handy, and are comfortable with Python, you’ll want this.
M17 Quickstart TX HackRF
This is meant to be a series of short and sweet guide to a few ways to run M17 over RF today. This one focuses on transmitting and receiving M17 with m17-cxx-demod and GnuRadio. This’ll require a little more Linux familiarity than the OpenWebRX guide, but it’s not too bad.
I’d say the hardest part is making sure you have the right dependencies installed - on some linux systems it can be a real bear. If you run into any troubles, make sure to ask for help and we’ll try to sort it out and get it documented.
State of the Projects: August 2021
What’s new?
M17 Quickstart OpenWebRX
This is meant to be a series of short and sweet guide to a few ways to run M17 over RF today. This one focuses on receiving M17 with OpenWebRX.
State of the Projects: April 2021
What’s new?
M17:
CW/Morse:
OpenRTX:
DMR.Tools v0.7.5
I’ve just pushed the first version of DMR.Tools with a backend server. The highlight for this release is the easy firmware upgrade to OpenRTX releases, and the easy flashing of OEM firmware. There’s a LOT more coming, (codeplug editing!) but it’s not fully ready so it’s disabled right now.WebUSB TYT radio firmware updates
I got firmware updates through WebUSB working for 1st and 2nd gen TYT radios last night. Previously it onl;y supported 1st gen (single banders).
DMR.Tools/ProgramRadios.com 2021 New Year update (And launch!)
2020 has been a hard year. With family medical issues, a dying (and now passed) dog, the end of 2020 was particularly rough.
There’s one bright point - I soft launched DMR.Tools, specifically to help my first user.
reversing file formats
Sorry, not up to writing a blog post about this. It works great though. tarxvf: I made a thing (still needs polishing but PoC works great!) that takes snapshots of a file every time it’s saved. This means you record your screen while editing the codeplug and verbally describe what you’re doing. Make one change per saved file. Extract the audio, use whisper-timestamped to get a transcript. If you say ‘mark’ every time you save a file, you know where things will line up.ProgramRadios Update 2020/11/19
Some new updates for ProgramRadios/DMRTools involving encryption keys.
M17 and ORI
Open Research Institute (ORI) has sponsored us (M17)!
Check us out on their projects page, and keep reading to see why this is good for M17.