This is an update of some of our activities for the month of August, 2024.

More experimenting with steel 17 foot telescopic whip antennas. Findings: using an antenna like this from a car works, but it’s not as nice as playing radio out in nature.

Heavy work on a 100Ah solar generator this month. Nearly finished. A full writeup is in the works.

ARRL paid a million dollars to hackers to get their jank shit back online. https://virtualattacks.com/american-radio-relay-league-paid-1-million-ransom/

While the million dollars in ransom they paid to the hackers is “mostly” covered by insurance, everything about that story is so frustrating when you consider that that’s one year’s dues for nearly 17,000 people. Maybe this is what insurance is for, but people pay their dues to that organization and trust that the ARRL knows what they’re doing when they set up server networks and lobby the federal government on the behalf of radio operators.

It’s pretty unfortunate that this group is the only thing standing in the way of the FCC just selling off yet more of our (everyone’s) RF spectrum to private corporations, but that’s pretty much what we’ve got. This time it’s the 902-928 MHz band, which is an ISM band used not only by licensed amateurs, but by scientific and medical workers, as well as un-licensed amateurs such as LoRa (and) Meshtastic users. https://www.arrl.org/news/arrl-urges-protecting-the-amateur-radio-902-928-mhz-band

If you care to, and you can bring yourself to navigate the criminally byzantine FCC website, there is a way to submit your opinion about this problem if you follow the link above.

If that’s not your style, you can fire up your Meshtastic node, message your friends, and occupy the band! Do it while it’s legal, I guess.