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.

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

It’s hot as fuck outside, and the engineers are overworked.

CW studies continue.

Experiments with 17-foot telescopic whip antennas continue.

One of us is building a 12v DC refrigerator and a large backup battery box. Writeups with images will follow, assuming these projects ever get finished.

The biggest communications-related story this month is obviously the massive Crowdstrike failure. A faulty update on July 19th caused the largest IT outage in history.

While the popular takeaway from this story is that tech workers should not deploy on Fridays – a take which implies that blame rests solely on one person or a small team – we think the larger lesson here is that modern Capitalist industrial infrastructure is an albatross. It’s large, unwieldy, and contains many single points of failure. Too much rests upon the shoulders of too few people.

And no, ham radio is not the answer to this, but it could be part of a solution. If telephone and Internet systems had blacked out, even on a local level, it would be important to have a backup. Whether that’s a blister pack FRS radio or a full blown HF base station or anything between, that set of skills and equipment could be part of an ad-hoc communications infrastructure with no possibility of this type of cascading failure for everyone who uses it.

It should be noted that while the Crowdstrike outage seems to have impacted “consumer” level communications much less than commercial, industrial and government systems – the issue of corporate consolidation of local mass media has been quite the can of worms for a long time and does have a major impact on local communities.

To be honest, it would be easy to point to this incident and say “See? This is why you need to get into ham radio, or solar power, or canning vegetables…etc.” But the truth is that most of this stuff works for most people, most of the time. So we don’t really want to sound alarmist. But it’s also true that we started to see the cracks in these systems years ago and they’re getting bigger with climate change, the housing crisis, and massive wealth disparity. The bigger these cracks get, the more people are going to fall through (as hundreds of millions already have), and the more we’ll need to rely on ourselves and each other when we fall through these cracks.

The apocalypse is here. It’s just not equally distributed. ~Margaret Killjoy

So what can you do? Short of setting up a separate “air-gapped” Windows computer in case this sort of thing ever happens again, it may be more worth while to learn how to use other systems such as Linux. Maybe set up a flash drive with different operating systems on it ready to install in case of a prolonged outage or outright destruction of your primary operating system, or just in case some other kind of bullshit happens to your computer and you can’t afford Windows. And it should probably go without saying: Back up your shit!

(and have a backup power source as well as lights and fans…and a water filter…and fix your bike…and grow food…and have a potluck…)

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

Field Day was June 22-23. Some of us helped with organizational duties, made contacts, and helped troubleshoot antenna problems at our various clubs’ Field Day locations.

We have noticed an increase of local Meshtastic activity, although there seems to be a dearth of actual conversations happening. It’s cool that people are excited about expanding the network, and using nodes as beacons is cool, but do y’all maybe wanna…talk to each other?

One of us did a POTA with the 17′ telescopic whip. Despite forgetting to bring the NanoVNA to check the SWR, the fully extended whip with four 16 foot radials was perfect for the 20 meter phone portion. The SWR bridge built into most HF radios does come in handy, as it turns out.

The ARRL’s Logbook of the World is back up, after an apparent cyberattack caused it to shut down for several weeks. LotW is now working through an intense backlog of QSOs. Some have questioned whether the cyberattack may have originated with a disgruntled employee, or whether the long outage may be being used as a prelude to rebuild LotW from the ground up and start charging money for its use. Such questions are fueled by longstanding complaints of a lack of transparency and recent dues increases coinciding with cutbacks to member services.

We question if such a large online system for verifying ham radio contacts – the albatross that is Logbook of the World – should be centralized in the first place. Doubtless we are not the first to think of this, and someone is likely working on a decentralized alternative as we speak.

This is an update of some of our activities from the month of May, 2024.

First, we hope that everyone had a happy May Day filled with whatever pleases you. For us, it was very nice to see that someone ran a special event station for International Workers’ Day during the first week of May.

We also welcomed a new comrade this month. They are a longtime community organizer from the Pacific Northwest who is passionate about radio as a community tool for building connections and emergency response networks. They are currently learning Morse code and scheming about the next antenna build.

One of our comrades has been studying CW and following this pretty decent YouTube series. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=irpAeqkr11Q&list=PLuvVda3FOP_2dkB4pyY7LplwxG1nNJ01J&index=1&pp=iAQB

At least two of us have acquired – or will soon acquire – a 17 foot stainless steel telescopic whip antenna. This is a very versatile piece of equipment which can be used in many configurations. Fully-extended, such an antenna is resonant down to the 20 meter band, and can be shortened to be resonant up to the 6 meter band. However, there are many supplementary pieces of equipment that can be DIYed from basic hardware store material such as PVC pipe and copper wire. Air core inductors for bottom- or top-loading the antenna, clip-lead wire extensions, and transformers could all be used to extend the useful bandwidth of the antenna down to the lower bands from 30 and 40 meters down to 80, 160, and conceivably even lower if the radio equipment supports it.

This one piece of equipment could be used to build modular portable kits akin to commercial alternatives provided by Chameleon Antennas and Wolf River Coils, but with more versatility, creative potential, and at much lower cost. We look forward to writing about our experiences with this in the future.

The Lilygo T-TWR Plus seems to have potential as a lower cost Bluetooth packet TNC for APRS, as well as having some other potential for experimentation. We’ll relay anything of interest after the unit arrives.

One member’s direct drive 3D printer upgrade should make printing weatherproof parts easier and more reliable. Thoughts and prayers as always for the fickle 3D printing process.

This is an update on some of our activities for the month of April, 2024. Hopefully everyone had a nice May Day! 🏴

Two comrades had a QSO on 20m SSB one evening. Distance approximately 600 miles.

	RST	Antenna	Power
Station A	5-5	EFHW inverted-vee	20w
Station B	5-8	Random wire sloper	100w

Two more comrades had a QSO on 40m SSB one evening. Distance approximately 1500 miles.

	RST	Antenna	Power
Station A	2-2	EFHW inverted-vee	100w
Station B	5-5	shortened EFHW	100w

One comrade made their first HF contact on 10 meter SSB phone, at a distance of over 2,000 miles at 100 watts.

One of us upgraded from Technician to General class license. They and a few others are studying for the Extra exam.

It’s definitely antenna season! One person has built a shortened end-fed halfwave and another is working on a 20 meter dipole.

A few air-core variable capacitors have been obtained for cheap from a hamfest. These are useful for building manual LC antenna tuners, crystal radio receivers, and probably a lot of other stuff.

We now have a PeerTube channel! There’s nothing interesting on there quite yet, but plans are percolating. In case you’re not familiar, PeerTube is a decentralized and federated video hosting platform. Think of it as the Fediverse alternative to YouTube.

A power supply upgrade has allowed one of us to finally make use of a cheap (~$75) 100 watt HF linear amplifier. While it does not appear possible to use digital modes with the amp, it has made SSB phone contacts significantly easier than in the past when limited to 20 watts. These PA-100 amps can be found on eBay from several different sellers. Some 50 watt kits can also be found for less money. Voice contact was made with Slovenia on 20 meters using this amp. Distance approximately 5,000 miles.

This is an update of some of our activities in the month of March, 2024.

Two new comrades have joined us this month! One from Appalachia, and another from the DC Metro area.

One was actually heard hunting POTA on 20 meters, after which we decided to connect over IP. Turns out he’s a long standing IWW member.

The other is a new ham with an interest in queer liberation and providing emergency communication support to the queer community.

We made use of webSDRs to remotely troubleshoot line-of-sight antenna setups.

One of us began construction of a portable 2 element Yagi antenna for the 10 meter band.

We experimented with multiple digital voice modes over both RF and IP, including DMR, YSF, Echolink, and M17.

Our comrades in the Midwest have constructed one fully functioning solar-powered Meshtastic node, and several portable nodes have been obtained by comrades there. Training and practice will commence when weather and schedules allow.

License exam study books have been scanned into digital formats for distribution throughout our networks.