Amateur (ham) radio ports

PacketMan

PacketMan

Good day everyone, happy Friday!!

I've gotten into ham radio, and I got to say:
  • there has never been a better time to get into the hobby
  • there has never been a better time for FreeBSD ports for the hobby

I wish I had, had, more time to become a code writer / ports developer. I really regret not being able to do that. There are a lot of cool things going on inside the ham radio world these days; its not just aging men talking to one another by bouncing signals off the sky. And a lot of these things are being enabled by linux and/or Raspberry Pi projects/kits, etc.

Holding fast to my strong belief that FreeBSD makes an excellent server / appliance machine, FreeBSD sure can be an excellent foundational component to these new things in the ham world.

I realize everyone is busy doing their own thing, but I did want to put it out there: if you want to have a ton of fun doing really cool stuff then here is your recipe: amateur radio + FeeeBSD + ports development.

Check out these URLs:
APRS Direct
APRS.fi map

Their online maps that shows ham stuff all over the world, each individual radio contributing to the global state. And this is just the beginning!
 
There are some FreeBSD users, etc with ham license in North America. I can't dox them here, but you can search for them on twitter: #FreeBSD #RF OR #Ham
Some of them have their "call sign" written on their profiles/bio(s).
TwiT podcast used to host the "Ham Nation" with "Bob Heil" (famous Heil microphone) podcast/show on their network. Not anymore, but archive is available.
73
 
I heard U.S. female NASA Astronaut Shannon Lucid broadcast over ham radio from the MIR Space Station in 1996 using a dipoloe antenna and handheld Radio Shack wide range scanner on my end.

Before computers, it was radio. Mostly police scanners and shortwave. I have a Radioshack DX (50?) or something shortwave radio that was one they used to mod.
 
I got my Novice license in 1966. Worked my way up to Advanced but couldn't maintain 20wpm to get the Extra. Did Field Day with the St. Louis University club W0FLN (Free Love Now).

Was heavily involved with the Net for United Ten Meter Support (NUTS) when there was a scare we would lose 10 meters due to inactivity. Met a few of my best friends there.

Became pretty inactive by the mid 1990s and let my license lapse.

Here's a related thread from long ago.
 
I spent a lot of time back then looking at ads for computer based radios they sold as $1000 laptops wishing I had one.
 
Sidenote, when I was young, once there was a meters long wire coming out of my window. My mother, what are you doing ? Neighbours looking.
I was receiving on low frequencies so I needed a very long antenna.
PS : I wonder if there is software which allows your soundcard in your pc to do keying or sideband stuff in software and not in hardware with transistors.
 
Your computer monitor will act as an AM transmitter short distances with audio/tempest_for_eliza:

Tempest for Eliza is a program that uses your computer monitor to send out
AM radio signals. You can then hear computer generated music in your radio.
It teaches you that your computer can be observed. Tempest for Eliza works
with every monitor, every resolution.

WWW: http://www.erikyyy.de/tempest/
 
  • Thanks
Reactions: a6h
By the way, I think kids under 20-25 are less into !smart-phones and playing more and more with ham/RF, MCU/SoC.
It is not stats, just an observation, which means more electronics guys, and that's good. There's hope!

PacketMan: Look out for non-FreeBSD ham's program and if you can port them in FreeBSD. Major ones are already here, but there are more.
 
Number Stations were a big thrill to catch. Once in a while there would be a magazine article about them that discussed the difference in number sets, male vs female speakers, noises heard in the background, etc.

People listened to cordless phones all the time. The 800MHz band for cellphones was blocked. A dual-conversion scanner's Intermediate Frequency times 2 added or subtracted to the actual cellphone 800MHz frequency gave you a clear image frequency outside the blocked range they said you could listen to. On a number station message I decoded.

I still have my Radio Shack 200 channel handheld Pro60 wide range scanner hoked up but don't turn it on often. It has the following ranges in AM/FM/WFM:
30MHz-512MHz
760MHz-824MHz
849MHz-869MHz
904MHz-999.9875MHz
 
vigole said:
By the way, I think kids under 20-25 are less into !smart-phones and playing more and more with ham/RF, MCU/SoC.
It is not stats, just an observation, which means more electronics guys, and that's good. There's hope!

PacketMan: Look out for non-FreeBSD ham's program and if you can port them in FreeBSD.
Click to expand...

I know of teens that spend more time goofing around with circuit boards, Raspberry PIs, old PCs just trying to do stuff. Yeah they got a cellular phone in their pocket but they are not glued to it.

I don't know how to port code. Yeah I know the "how to" documentation exists, but I never did get into it. I am planning to pursue the CISSP certification this winter. Later I just might try to get into porting if I find some great existing code. Again FreeBSD makes a great heavy-duty server/appliance machine and it's very likely if I did something for the HAM hobby it would be a server type role, and not a desktop type role.

I've been using ports/net/syncthing on FreeBSD with solid success, and I said to myself gee it would be cool if I could get that to work on a HAM network. I think it's very likely it could never work, but if it did it could be sure cool.....slow, but cool. :) What ever I do it would be something that adds value, purpose, usefulness, meaning, etc to HAM radio. It could be an add-on to APRS, or something else, not sure yet. Need a "ah ha" moment.
 
SirDice said:
It's quite busy around here: https://aprs.fi/#!lat=51.9594&lng=4.4913
Click to expand...

WOW, many many ships, I didn't expect to see that. Isn't this sort of thing cool?

I knew the HAM ports category existed SirDice. All I was trying to suggest was there has never been a better time for folks to be developing and porting software for HAM radio. I see ports/comms/aprsd is in there. And there are lots of Software Defined Radio ports too, which is awesome since SDR is a whole new paradigm for HAM.
 
PacketMan said:
WOW, many many ships, I didn't expect to see that. Isn't this sort of thing cool?
Click to expand...
I kind of expected it, Rotterdam is a large harbor city, so plenty of boat traffic around here. The bigger ships stay to the left of Rotterdam (Maasvlakte, Europort) but I didn't expect to see this much traffic in Rotterdam itself.

PacketMan said:
And there are lots of Software Defined Radio ports too, which is awesome since SDR is a whole new paradigm for HAM.
Click to expand...
I've been thinking of getting one of those cheap RTL-SDR dongles. Rotterdam-The Hague Airport is really close by, I was thinking of setting up a display which shows the transponders of the airplanes around here. Maybe also pick up some air traffic control chatter.
 
SirDice said:
I've been thinking of getting one of those cheap RTL-SDR dongles. Rotterdam-The Hague Airport is really close by, I was thinking of setting up a display which shows the transponders of the airplanes around here. Maybe also pick up some air traffic control chatter.
Click to expand...
If air traffic control chatter can be picked up, they need to encrypt their communications. That's a safety hazard in the wrong hands.
 
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