ham radio
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🔖 Skills for Revolutionary Survival: 5. Communications Equipment for Rebels –
Face the facts. We are tied to our devices in ways that are incredibly useful for organizing, but that also expose us to isolation should the state and companies take away these technologies. Cell phones and the internet rely on corporate infrastructure and is subject to both government surveillance and service denial. What do we do when social media bans anti-capitalists and anti-colonialists? What do we do when our cell phones fully become monitoring devices we willingly keep by our side, all to the benefit of state intelligence services? What happens when our cell phone numbers are blocked from service? How will the revolutionaries continue to communicate locally, regionally, and internationally?
These are the questions that have been left in the dust, forgotten or ignored in favor of more romantic visions of armed struggle. People forget; no struggle has ever been successful without robust communication networks that are not subject to state control. From the French resistance in WWII to the Zapatistas in the Lacandon Jungle, communications matter!
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Last night’s AX.25 failures turned into success! I followed K1CHN’s second post on using the TH-D74A’s TNC over Bluetooth, and successfully made my first connection to a packet BBS, N6ZX-4 on Kings Mountain.
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I bought a second-hand Kenwood TH-D74A recently (through Craigslist). I’ve messed about with APRS on it, used it for my first SOTA activation, and now am trying to get it hooked up to my Raspberry Pi to use its built-in KISS TNC for Winlink and packet BBSes. K1CHN’s post has been useful. However, shortly after connecting something is leading to it “disconnecting” over USB, with
cdc_acm ...: failed to set dtr/rtsshowing up in the kernel message and (re)adding a new device for the radio. My first guess is that it might be resolved with a choke on the USB cable, but I might try Bluetooth first… -
First SOTA activation
About a month ago, I got my ham radio license, and soon after I got pretty curious about Summits on the Air (SOTA), an award scheme focused on safe and low impact portable operation from mountaintops. While I like to hike, I’m arguably a pretty casual hiker, and living in California provides a surprising number of options within 45 minutes driving time for SOTA newbies.
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Created a new Homebrew tap, anarchivist/homebrew-hamradio, for installing ham radio packages. FYI: Building Direwolf on macOS is much easier on the dev branch.
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Even though the air quality is really poor, I stepped outside for about 15 minutes to see if I could hear any ham radio signals from the International Space Station. For just a tiny bit I was able to copy some QSOs on the relatively new cross-band repeater. A little too hectic for me to jump in since I couldn’t remember my grid square…
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🔖 Packet Compressed Sensing Imaging (PCSI) –
Presented by John Howard (@HowardPhotonics) at the TAPR/ARRL Digital Communications Conference (which I missed); this looks really neat, with a proof of concept released under GPL.