This is an update of some of our activities for the month of November, 2024.
One of us talked to a mutual aid group about ham radio. About 50 people were in attendance. Recorded audio of the talk is being edited.
A member from the Great Lakes region passed their Technician’s exam.
Blackblogs.org went down for about a week in November. These things happen even to the best of services. But due to a perceived increase in instability of IT infrastructure across the wider Internet, we have decided to mirror this site on anarchistrrl.noblogs.org. We may also mirror the site in some Smolweb form such as Gemini or a BBS as well, but mostly just for fun.
Crimethinc has an excellent article on an Anarchist response to hurricane Helene. Excerpt about radio below:
Radios, especially ham radios, are another important means of communication that should be arranged in advance with people who already know how to use them. Our mountainous terrain limits the distance that radios can broadcast, but it would still have been helpful if we had possessed ham radios.
ID: BW SSTV mage distorted by Baofeng UV-5R clipped to the top of a wooden fence.
That ridiculous looking 42.5 inch collapsible antenna sold by Abbree is actually pretty good, at least for RX. This makes sense as it’s approximately 1/2 wave on the 2 meter band.
This is an update of some of our activities for the month of October, 2024.
A demo was held at an Anarchist book fair where we made voice contact with a comrade about 950 miles (~1529 KM) away on the 20 meter band.
We have been joined by new comrades from Australia, northern Europe, the East coast, Southeast, upper-Midwest, and West coast of the so-called “United States”. Among these comrades are people connected with Mutual Aid Disaster Relief. We are forming plans to share knowledge and resources in the near future.
Archive.org was hacked and came back online 12 days later. 31M user accounts and hashed passwords were stolen. This was a pretty considerable disruption to many online activities, including the ability to archive news articles, political commentary, and to fact check claims about – among many other things – Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinian people.
And while this didn’t happen in October, obviously most of us woke up yesterday morning to find that Donald Trump had been elected to be the next president of the so-called “United States”. Whether you voted or not, and regardless of your feelings about the opposition, now is yet again – and still, as always – the time to prepare, and to protect and uplift one another.
Use Signal, use Tor. Build community, grow food, train up, get comms. We protect us.
“It is our suffering that brings us together. It is not love. Love does not obey the mind, and turns to hate when forced. The bond that binds us is beyond choice. We are brothers. We are brothers in what we share. In pain, which each of us must suffer alone, in hunger, in poverty, in hope, we know our brotherhood. We know it, because we have had to learn it. We know that there is no help for us but from one another, that no hand will save us if we do not reach out our hand. And the hand that you reach out is empty, as mine is. You have nothing. You possess nothing. You own nothing. You are free. All you have is what you are, and what you give.”
As another powerful hurricane approaches Florida, many mutual aid organizations are doubtless bracing for impact and poised to help residents recover in the aftermath.
It is predicted that Hurricane Milton will make landfall in as little as a few hours from this post.
Given the rather large role that radio continues to play throughout recovery from Hurricane Helene, some might be interested in listening to the Hurricane Watch Net on the 20 and 40 meter bands.
The Net will Activate Tuesday at 5:00 PM EDT (2100 UTC) on 14.325.00 MHz (USB) and 7.268.00 MHz (LSB)
If you do not have an HF or shortwave radio, you can tune in via a web SDR.
If you do have an HF transceiver and you are not in an affected area, it is important that we LISTEN for information that could be useful to mutual aid disaster relief and recovery efforts.
Florida also has an interesting statewide linked repeater system called SARnet, which also has a Broadcastify stream.
We post this information in the sincere hope that it will be useful for those affected by these hurricanes, and at least educational for those who are not directly impacted.
This is an update of some of our activities for the month of September, 2024.
This month started off uneventful, but it sure didn’t end that way.
At the top of many peoples’ minds right now are of course the people impacted by Hurricane Helene. Rather than try to write something to try and jam this situation into a ham-radio-shaped narrative, we’ll just re-post some links to mutual aid disaster relief efforts you can donate to and/or get involved with however you can, as well as some interesting stories we’ve seen come up in our feeds.
AI6YR as always, has been posting a lot of great information on the hurricane and recovery efforts.
We have witnessed, both on HF and web SDR, folks in affected areas relaying traffic for loved ones through radio operators who in areas that were not hit and still have electricity and working phones.
Screenshot of an Instagram post from Meshtastic. It says: We wish to express our deepest sympathies for everyone impacted by Hurricane Helene. Our hearts go out to all those affected , and we hope for the well-being of everyone during this difficult time. <br> To our community, we ask that you refrain from responding to posts about the situation with comments like “this is why you need Meshtastic.” While we understand the value of our platform, these types of comments can come across as opportunistic and may not be helpful at this moment. <br> Instead, let’s focus on supporting those in need right now. There will be a time to educate others about Meshtastic, but for now, compassion and direct support are most important. Thank you for your understanding. –Meshtastic
IF this event has motivated you to prepare for disasters by getting into ham radio and/or other autonomous communications technology and techniques, that’s cool. Here are a few things to check out.
The Baofeng UV-9R seems like a nice and cheap handheld radio. It’s waterproof and charges via USB-C, which are both good and useful features. You can find it on that site where everybody buys all their shit. Once you get the radio, program it with FRS, GMRS and MURS frequencies.
Go to hamstudy.org to study for the ham radio license exams. It’s free. They really have made much simpler what used to be a pretty daunting bureaucratic process.
If you’d like to study with a book, do that. There are a lot of good ones out there. Your local library probably has one.
Take a look at our zine. It’s not a study guide, but it’s got a lot of information in there if your just curious what ham radio is all about.
Contact us! Seriously. We like talking about this stuff and we want to help anarchists get on the air.
In other news: On September 17 and 18, thousands of handheld pagers and hundreds of handy-talkies exploded simultaneously in an Israeli attack. As of September 22, several people had died including 2 children, and thousands were injured. We’ll leave exact numbers to the journalists, as there are likely to be fluctuations and discrepancies in reporting.
Initial suspicions were that the Israeli government somehow remotely caused the batteries in these devices to explode. This is quite obviously not what happened. The devices were intercepted by the Israeli government at some point en route to Lebanon and were filled with explosives.
The Israeli government has been committing war crimes and genocide before this attack (and before October 7, 2023), and now the mind is boggled even further by people who still believe this kind of behavior is justified.
Just to be clear: No borders. No nations. Nobody gets an ethnostate. Period.
Should you worry about this type of supply-chain attack?
Short answer: No, probably not.
Longer answer: No, probably not. But you can probably open up your radio with a screwdriver to check on that sort of thing. But basically, no.
As for what we’ve been up to:
winterizing our antennas
a little bit of POTA
voice contact between comrades from the East coast to the Midwest
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.
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.
Solar generators are great disaster preparedness tools that are worth getting if you can afford them. But they have a few problems.
They’re expensive.
They’re hard to modify. They lock you into a particular set of features that’s hard to expand on without buying a dozen different adapters, or taking the whole thing apart to cannibalize parts, and re-building the whole thing into a configuration you actually want with a lot of probably pretty sub-standard components. This is because they’re made by capitalists who will often cut corners to give you the cheapest (for them) version of the very expensive thing you think you’re paying for.
They lack creativity.
If you can’t afford one of the myriad battery boxes you see advertised all over the place like Jackery and EcoFlow, building one yourself can save you some money. To be honest, even the components for DIY projects are getting so expensive that sometimes you save more money by buying something pre-manufactured. And I’m not even talking about “if you factor in the time you spend building it”. That’s just how fucked the supply chains are.
But DIYing a battery box offers a couple of advantages that the manufactured ones don’t.
Less money all at once: You are able to spend money on one or two component at a time, rather than surrendering your whole paycheck to Jeff Bezos.
Modular: You can configure these components in any way you want. You can add and remove parts, or you can easily cannibalize the whole thing later on if you need parts for a more pressing project.
Repairable: If you know how to build it, you know how to fix it.
Ice fishermen have been building battery boxes similar to these for a long time. There are some significant differences in the end products because they’re built for different purposes. But if you want to build your own battery box, they might be a good source of information for you.
TOOLS USED
drill
step drill bit
Oscillating tool / box knife
wrenches/pliers
Ratcheting wire crimpers
Ratcheting PowerPole crimpers
Automatic wire strippers
THE BATTERY
The most important component of the battery box is obviously the battery. Lithium Iron Phosphate (LiFePo4 or LFP) has pretty quickly supplanted Lead-Acid batteries and pretty much all other battery chemistries in the realm of amateur radio. The advantages of LiFePo4 over lead-acid are many:
3X higher energy density,
more charge/discharge cycles,
you can actually completely discharge a LiFePo4 battery without damaging the cells, unlike a lead-acid battery which can be damaged if discharged to below 20%,
pretty constant voltage,
no hydrogen gas or other fumes
not made of literally brain-destroying lead or bone-melting acid.
And if you wonder why we didn’t choose Lithium Ion or Lithium Polymer batteries for this build, it’s because even though LiIon and LiPo are a little cheaper and have a higher energy density, LiFePo4 has a major advantage when it comes to safety: This type of battery does not catch fire nearly as easily as liIon or LiPo batteries.
Tesla Cybertruck on fire
A 100 Ah LiFePo4 battery is about the size of a car battery, but weighs only about 9kG (20Lbs). Unfortunately, there are about a thousand different brands of LiFePo4 batteries and only a few of them have “good” reputations, which are far more expensive than the other unknown brands. Long story short, quality control is kind of a crap-shoot on this stuff if you’re trying to save money, but the good news is that due to the LiFePo4 battery chemistry being very safe, your house (probably) won’t catch fire if it fails. But don’t worry, we’re going to take other precautions as well.
BTW, you can also build your own LiFePo4 battery from individual cells and a BMS, but that’s a whole other very deep topic, and something we haven’t tried yet.
In any case, we weren’t about to spend $900 on a fucking battery. We found a 100 Ah battery from a company called WattCycle for about $165. There weren’t a lot of reviews, but you can’t trust reviews anyway due to enshittification. There were no reports of explosions and it seemed like a decent price.
This battery can allegedly handle a maximum continuous discharge current of 100 Amps, which means it could discharge 100 amps for about 1 hour before the battery dies.
(Or 50 amps for 2 hours, 25 Amps for 4 hours, 12.5 Amps for 8 hours, 1 Amp for 100 hours, etc. If you don’t know what the Amp-hour rating on a battery means, now you know.)
We don’t really trust that statement, because that would mean that the wires going from the cells to the lugs would be at least 4 AWG copper wire, which is kind of expensive. We suspect that the people who made this battery are a little “smarter” with their money than they are with their mouths.
But it doesn’t matter, since we don’t expect to pull even half of that from this battery at any one time, and all connections will be fused anyway.
We’re using 12 AWG copper wire for most connections to the battery. 12 AWG wire can handle a maximum current of 20 Amps. And since none of these circuits should really pull any more than 15 Amps, that fits well within the 80% Rule. Our panel has 5 switches, and there’s another switch for the 20V circuit as well. Assuming each circuit would be On and pulling their maximum current of 15 Amps (a pretty unlikely scenario), that means that the maximum possible load we could put on the battery is 90 Amps which is ~allegedly~ well within the 100A spec for this battery. Furthermore, some of these circuits will actually have 10 or even 5 Amp fuses, so really we should be pretty safe.
Because of that potential 90 Amp total load, we actually need to use much larger wire to connect directly from the positive terminal of the battery to the 100 Amp cutoff switch, to the fuse block, and then to the negative side of the battery.
The battery’s BMS does have over-current protection, but it’s apparently programmed to quite a high current so we’re better off relying on our fused circuits. In theory, the BMS could be re-programmed, but it’s locked inside the plastic case and we don’t want to compromise any waterproofing that may provide.
The battery has high-temperature and low-temperature protection as well, because running the battery outside the -20°C to 60°C (-4°F to 140°F) range can cause damage to the cells.
BATTERY MONITORING
It’s important to have an idea of the battery’s state of charge, how much load is on it, and how much longer it can run. There are a lot of battery monitors out there. Mainly there are types that use a shunt, and there are types that use a hall sensor. Some even have Bluetooth built in so you can monitor the battery from your phone, but who needs another app.
We chose a pretty cheap shunt-type battery monitor. There are instructions on the back that show you how to wire it up to a battery.
VERY IMPORTANT about these types of battery monitors: The battery monitor should be fully charged when you wire it up, otherwise the monitor will just assume that it’s fully charged when it’s not, and that could create problems and confusion down the road.
Another important point about these shunts, at least with a battery as large as the one we’re using, is that it took a VERY long time for it to “learn” what the capacity of the battery was. It needs to stay connected while it slowly counts how many miliAmp Hours the connected battery has.
THE SOLAR CHARGE CONTROLLER
Solar Charge Controller
A solar charge controller is a device that sits between the solar panel and the battery and makes sure that the battery doesn’t get overcharged and that current flows only from the solar panel to the battery, and not the other way around.
There are two main types of solar charge controllers: PWM and MPPT.
PWM stands for “Pulse Width Modulation”. PWM charge controllers tend to be cheaper than MPPT, but they’re less efficient and they have a tendency to generate RF interference. Think of PWM as a switch that automatically turns off and on extremely fast in order to prevent too much power from getting to the battery and overcharging it.
MPPT stands for “Maximum Power Point Tracking”. These are much more efficient charge controllers that, generally speaking, generate less RF interference, but they tend to be more expensive.
There are exceptions to the RF interference. The PWM charge controllers sold by Bioenno have been shown to not create RFI, while the opposite is true of some of the cheaper MPPT controllers that are available. I myself have bought a 2-pack of PWM controllers, one of which created interference, the other of which did not.
The box we’ve chosen is a Bauer modular rolling toolbox from Harbor Freight.
You can and should use whatever kind of container you want, but we think that due to their relative weather resistance, these modular stackable toolboxes – of which there are many brands, none of which are compatible with each other, of course – hold the potential to expand into a mobile modular system for different purposes such as ham radio, computer networking, or even a cooking station for a squat, encampment, or commune.
But if modularity and weather resistance is not something you need, you could easily build a similar system into a plastic tote, an old suitcase, or a wooden box. It’s up to you. Other types of containers would certainly fit better on a bike trailer than what we’ve chosen here.
“PANEL MOUNT” EVERYTHING
This is a “5 Gang ON OFF Toggle 12V Car Switch Panel Dual USB Socket Charger…” yadda yadda etc. according to the online listing.
The trick to finding all the little ports you want on the outside of the box is to search “panel mount” or “chassis mount” in front of everything you need. Panel mount USB C, Panel mount Power Poles, Panel mount switches, Panel mount battery monitor, etc.
If you’re in a situation where you can’t have things delivered to you, look for an RV or boating supply store you can get to. They should have a lot of this stuff.
We bought most of these components on AliExpress. We know people have feelings about that sort of thing, but it’s the same place Amazon buys it from before they double the price.
WIRE AND FUSES
We went with 12 AWG silicone-jacketed copper wire for all the connections from the fuse box to all the connectors and devices. The maximum current rating for this wire is 20 Amps, which according to the 80% rule means we should really stay under 15 Amps for each circuit anyway.
We used 4 AWG copper wire for the main circuit between the battery, cutoff switch, and fuse block.
The 4 AWG ring terminals had to be filed down so that they would fit on the cutoff switch.
There are several tools for crimping large gauge cables like this. The best is probably a hammer crimp tool, but one of us already had a table vise so we used that instead.
If you are wiring two or more batteries together, you should definitely use at least 4 AWG wire or possibly even 1/0 welding cable in the shortest lengths possible between the batteries.
The manual for our battery actually lists 12AWG wire as having an ampacity of 25 Amps. This may be true in most situations, but given that most sources say the ampactiy of 12AWG copper wire at 60 C is 20 Amps and we don’t really know how hot it might get inside this box, it’s just safer to go with the lower estimates.
Using wire that is too thin in any of these circuits creates a fire hazard!
So the “hot” side of each circuit will have a 15 Amp (or lower) fuse going directly to the positive side of the battery. It’s really a good idea to also fuse the negative side of each circuit as well, but 99% of problems that could cause a fuse to blow will occur on the positive side of the power source.
A mini-rant about Copper-Clad Aluminum (CCA) wire
TL;DR, Use pure copper wire if you can. Don’t use CCA wire if you don’t have to. If you do have to use it, use thicker wire than you think you need.
There was a short period of time in the 1970s in the so-called “US” when buildings were being built with copper-clad aluminum electrical wiring due to being cheaper than pure copper wire. The practice was generally abandoned after it became apparent that CCA wire tended to get much hotter than pure copper wire, creating a fire hazard. But it’s not like this was made illegal or anything. In fact, CCA wire is being used again in some newly-constructed homes, saving future slumlords literally TENS of dollars per McMansion.
CCA wire is also available online to regular people working on their DIY electronics projects, and it’s not always obvious what you’re getting. There is some math you can do to figure out what gauge of CCA wire should be used safely for a given current, but as far as we can tell it’s based on a combination of rules-of-thumb and straight up guessing the ratio of the copper-aluminum composition which doesn’t seem to be standardized. So it’s best to just look carefully and make sure you’re using pure copper wire.
THE INVERTER
We’re using a 500 watt “pure sine wave” inverter. This actually isn’t a very good inverter, but we really should only use the inverter as a last resort anyway.
The reason to avoid using an inverter as much as possible is because generally speaking, at least 10% of the energy is lost in the conversion (or inversion, as it were) from DC to AC. That might not sound like a lot, but when you consider that most of the small appliances we use on a daily basis actually convert the Alternating Current coming out of the wall into Direct Current, you’re basically simulating that same process by converting the DC of the battery to AC, and adding a whole new layer of inefficiency by turning that current back into DC so your device can use it. It’s an enormous waste of energy for most applications, but sometimes you have to do it.
This could be the difference between running a CPAP machine for one night or running it for 3 nights by using a DC-DC converter, so it’s important to think about this stuff.
The inverter came with its own 12 AWG wire and two 45 Amp fuses, so we ran this directly to the battery and ran a panel mount 120V AC receptacle to the front of the box.
Buck-Boost converter and a pair of blue and black Power Pole connectors mounted into the plastic box.
Due to the relative inefficiency of AC inverters, and an abundance of DC devices that require voltages other than 12V or 5V, we decided to do something we haven’t seen on other battery boxes. We’ve added a constant-current (CC) constant-voltage (CV) buck-boost converter. This is an adjustable DC-DC converter that can step the voltage up or down from 12V and supply it to a device at a specified current.
Mostly this is for laptops and power tool batteries which require about 20V DC.
There are a lot of guides out there on how to convert older hardware to be compatible with USB C and therefore be able to automatically negotiate voltage between source and load, but it’s a hell of a lot easier and cheaper just to snip off the cables that go to each of these devices and put Power Poles on them. In order to hopefully avoid confusion, we used blue Power Pole connectors on the positive side of the 20V leads, so that they are different from the red leads of the more common 12V connection.
The first thing we did was decide where the main switch panel would go. We laid it on the front of the box and marked the holes for all the switches with a pencil. Using a stepped drill bit, we cut the holes for the switches.An oscillating tool was used to cut an opening for the battery monitor, but a box cutter can also be used.cut a piece of scrap plywood to fit on the back side of the box, and pre-drill holes so that it could be bolted on later. Lay out the fuse box, solar charge controller, and inverter, and mount them to the plywood.
A group 24 battery tray was adhered to the bottom center of the box, and the battery was placed inside.
inside of the boxcompleted solar generator
Aside from a lot of wire cutting, terminal crimping, and making sure the wires all go to the right places, that’s pretty much it! We would provide wiring diagrams, but they would probably just be more confusing than helpful, both for author and audience. Even though it looks like a mess in there, this stuff is not too hard to figure out once you’re sitting in front of it.
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.
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.
Earlier this month, from May 10 – 13, the Earth was struck by the most powerful solar storm since 1989. This event caused radio blackouts on the HF bands, as well as disruption to the GPS network.
GPS disruptions forced farmers to halt planting for the entire day, as large-scale automated agricultural equipment relies on GPS for navigation.
Aurorae were visible in the Northern Hemisphere as far south as the Yucatán Peninsula, and as far north in the Southern Hemisphere as Queensland, Australia.
In comparison to the legendary Carrington Event superstorm of 1859, the solar storms of May 2024 were only about half as strong as the minimum estimated strength of -800 nT, and about 23% as strong as the maximum estimated strength of -1750 nT. The May 2024 solar storms reached a peak Dst index of −412 nT at 03:00 UTC on 11 May.
Please note that none of us are sun scientists or whatever. Here’s a video from Tamitha Skov, who understands this stuff way better than we do.
In the realm of amateur radio, good programming software is clutch. If you’ve ever spent hours tediously manually entering frequencies, offsets, and repeater codes, you know tools like CHIRP and RepeaterBook are essential. If you haven’t used these tools, check out some YouTube vids for CHIRP!
CHIRP supports a large variety of radios and is multi-platform, free, open-source software. If you can use it, you definitely should. It allows you to pull saved memories from your radio, import / export lists of entries, and pull from RepeaterBook to snag all the repeaters in your area (with slick filters for the band, mode, etc). So for example if we want all the 2 meter and 70cm repeaters using either FM or D-star within 20 miles of Atlanta, GA, we can pull that list and throw it on our mobile radio in seconds instead of spending error-prone hours of adding these manually on my rig.
So… good programming software for radios: clutch! The happy path? Dope. But not everything goes this smoothly; enter the cycle of frustration…
One of our members recently acquired an ICOM IC-7100. It’s a beloved options since it is dubbed an “all-band” transceiver. In addition to the HF bands, it also supports VHF/UHF and it has two SO-239 coax ports on the back so you can have both your HF and VHF/UHF antennas connected to the same radio. This “all-band” option is relatively rare and it makes for a great “shack-in-a-box” as some of the ham nerds refer to them. (We put all-band in quotes cause it supports all of the common amateur radio bands, but not literally all of them)
When our comrade excitedly began setting up their rig, it became rapidly apparent that CHIRP wasn’t going to happen. While support has been added for the 7100, there were some errors, missing fields, no way to work with multiple memory banks, etc. Of course within the open-source world, one should file a bug, give detailed steps of the issue and how to reproduce. We want tools like CHIRP to continue to grow and improve. But our friend was impatiently looking to other more immediate options to get on the air stat.
After some searching, multiple sources were pointing to RT Systems software for the 7100. Some YouTube videos showed a nice interface and pretty comprehensive support for all major settings / memory management. The downsides:
costs money
proprietary software (source code is not open)
not general purpose (separate software for each radio for some reason?)
does not support Linux
The last one was the real show stopper, but that was not gonna deter our automation-hungry anarcho ham. They took a gamble, threw down $25, snagged that disgusting .exe file, and crossed fingers. Running via wine was the first step. Misc errors, would kinda launch, then crash. Apparently the RT Systems devs said running this way is not possible. Next stop was VirtualBox (to run windows in a virtual machine and install on there). This worked! Well, the program installed and opened. The next problem seemed to be the usb connection to the radio was recognized on linux but not the Windows VM. After some fiddling, the key resolution was to:
1) install the Virtualbox extension pack (unsure if this step is actually essential)
2) determine device location of the usb radio connection (this is possible using CHIRP; download data from radio on there and the device file will look something like /dev/ttyUSB0)
3) Edit VM serial device settings. Choose COM1 for port num, port mode: Host device, port/file path: /dev/ttyUSB0 (or whatever you determined from step 2)
Now when you start the windows VM and launch the RT Systems software, make sure to select the appropriate port in the Comm port setup under the “Communication” menu setting. And then we can properly sync to/from radio!
So, in conclusion, proprietary windows-only software sucks. It is unfortunately quite common in the ham radio programming software ecosystem. As anarchists we vociferously advocate for free, multi-platform, open-source software, but sometimes compromises are inevitable when you’re impatient and just want to get repeaters on your goddamn radio. We hope this helps anyone facing similar frustrations!
