Invisible Conversations [066]
Greetings from the shack...
HERE
I’m in the shack… for now.
(That’s not my dog. It’s a bonus dog we are looking after for a couple of days.)
So much has happened since my last post. Not just Christmas and New Year etc, but my QTH that I have lived at for the last 15 years is up for sale.
We are hoping to move ‘up north’ but there is certainly a heavy dose of trepidation when it comes to saying goodbye to my station and a garden full of antennas.
We have somewhere in mind. Somewhere we have visited more than once, but I can’t help but wonder if my place in the flat lands of Cambridgeshire is more conducive to radio as opposed to a hillier landscape.
I’d always envisioned the next move would be to a hilltop with great take off in the middle of nowhere. But it’s not my decision alone. ;-)
If we get some offers on this place I will elaborate more on the move.
THERE
As it’s been the time for gathering and doing family stuff I’ve been pretty local apart from a trip to Paris. Once again I took my Meshtastic node and Yaesu FT5D. I even managed to bag a top floor AirBnB with a balcony.
Apparently there are eight repeaters in Paris but I have a feeling they favour French speaking radio operators. And why not, because round my way I can’t imagine anyone attempting to welcome a new Ham speaking anything other than English. I think I could hold a decent QSO in French, but the one repeater I found people on went silent when I called in. They might have thought there was a lift and headed over to the calling frequency.
Also for the five days I was there I left my Meshtastic node in the window and even with the height I failed to pick up a single node.
Quite a few people round my way seem to be ditching Meshtastic in favour of LoRa APRS on 439.9125 MHz
While in Paris, as I was not that far away, I did attempt to find the infamous Parisian Radio Boutique, but I’ve a feeling it is no more.
GEAR
I bought that EcoFlow River 2 battery which seems sold out everywhere at the moment. But got the bigger 160W panel which was half the price it is now. Am very happy with it although I keep the battery topped up with the two panels in the top photo and saving the folding panels for working portable while camping.
A little while back I got the RigExpert Stick Pro on loan from RigExpert who were very kind to lend it to me for a while. To my shame, life, travel, holiday, sickness, etc got in the way and I have only just got it out of the box. In fact the first thing I did was take it down to the local club as I knew that Rich, M0OFF already has one and could show me the ropes.
All Richard needed to do was show me how simple it was… and it is. Here is a video walkthrough of the menu. A few minutes later and I felt I had a decent grasp of what’s possible.
I’ve had a lot of fun today testing all my antennas to see what’s performing the best.
It’s a fantastic bit of kit and I’m hoping I get a little more time with it so I can try it out in the field.
There are a few specs available and it looks like the prices have recently dropped.
The only radio related purchase for me recently was this KSUN network radio.
More on that in the next section.
ONAIR
Ok. Once upon a time… Before I was licensed and not long after I joined Zello in 2018, I spotted some POC (Push-to-Talk over Cellular) radios and thought… “What’s the point? Where is the Hamradio-ness of an internet connected ‘radio’? How is it going to help you in an outage, or teach you how to make antennas? Why not just use the Zello app?” POC radios felt like cheating. But this week something clicked and I understood the interest.
In the spirit of experimentation, and contemplating how I might keep in touch with my friends should I have to pack the station away for a house move, I bought the KSUN radio and connected it to my WiFi.
Initially, I liked how it still felt like radio and kept my phone free for all the other things. I could turn it on and monitor a number of places, or just leave it on our little channel of likeminded radio operators.
I have a similar group accessed via a XLX Multiprotocol Gateway Reflector but have no idea how Andy M1NER set all that up for us. It gives a handheld access via a Raspberry Pi hotspot to a multitude of ham focused places. But if you mostly want to connect with a bunch of friends across the world, a piece of hardware like the KSUN running Zello is far easier to set up.
Once you have the radio to log into wifi (or add a sim). Log into Zello and all the things in your account pops up on the radio. All you then need to do is mute the places you are not really interested hearing all the time and just like radio, choose when to actively engage. Same as in the socials. But there’s no need to check for likes and no endless scroll.
If you’re interested you can see how many people are on channel, but like me they might just be on stand by. Knowing someone is out but doing their own thing.
The a-ha moment for me was when I choose to throw out a thought like I would a status update on Bluesky. A quick test of our ambient connectedness. And just as I appreciate someone coming back to me in the socials, it was the same here, but in audio it feels far more special…
Thanks to Gavin M7UQT and Lee M7APO for coming back to me and letting me share this audio.
This feels so much like ‘normal radio’ but with friends in places all around the world. All are able to chat via a simple handheld.
This takes nothing away from the joy and challenge of analogue radio. For me it’s not an ‘instead of’, it’s an ‘as well as’. A resilient, global radio community backchannel that guarantees long-range comms. Why use messaging apps when not in the shack, when you can have push to talk synchronous comms with unlimited range?
The radio uses very little data and the battery lasts for days on standby. Rather than tether the radio to my phone I found a cheap UK SIM card costing £1.15/month for the first 6 months. Anything to not have to keep adding wireless logins.
I’m Documentally on Zello as I joined before being licensed. It might be I start a group for this newsletter. Not sure how much time I will be able to devote to it but might be fun.
ELSEWHERE
A fun video on looking for space pirates.
Over the last few months there’s been some questions about the future of Meshtastic. What are your thoughts on this?
My friend Merv G4KLE made a morse key from lego.
I shared this this global radio station visualisation in my other more regular, non radio focused email.
Amateur radio operators detect signals from Voyager 1
LiTEfoot: Ultra-low-power Localization using Ambient Cellular
Online resources for all your SOTA needs.
The bands are singing.
An anthem for the SOTA activators
FINALS
Thanks for reading and I hope subscribing.
And welcome new readers. Feel free to say hello in the comments if you like.
Also it would really help if you could share this wherever you think it might resonate.
You are some of the more curious people in radio ;-) And I thank you.
Over
73 de Christian G5DOC
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