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EHAM QTH QRZ ARRL HRO ICOM KENWOOD YAESU ELBO ROOM COMMENTS
WEEKEND EDITION: Another day of fog and raw seacoast weather... DXtra.com Announces New FeaturesThe following is a list of new features announced by DXtra.com:
Amateur Radio
Newsline Report
FRIDAY EDITION: We are fogged in here on Cape Ann, 49 degrees and raw on the water... How Long Can a Quadcopter Drone Fly on Just Solar?
The dream of fully powering everything from aircraft to cars on just the power generated from solar panels attached to the machine remains a tempting one, but always seems to require some serious engineering including putting the machine on a crash diet. The quadcopter that [Luke Maximo Bell] tried to fly off just solar power is a good case in point, as the first attempt crashed after three minutes and wrecked its solar panels. Now he’s back with a second attempt that ought to stay airborne for as long as the sun is shining. Among the flaws with the first prototype were poor support for the very thin and fragile PV panels, requiring much better support on the carbon fiber frame of the drone. To support the very large solar array, the first drone’s arms were made to be very long, but this interfered with maneuvering, so the second version got trimmed down and the array raised above the frame. This saved 70 grams of weight from the shortened tubs, which could then be added to the new panel supports. After an initial test flight resulted in a crash when the PV output dropped, the need for a small battery buffer was clear, so this was added, along with a reduction of the array to 4×7 panels to get the same 20V as the battery. The array also had to be reinforced, as the thin array was very wobbly in addition to making it impossible to fly with any significant wind. During the subsequent five hours long test flight it was clear that the resulting PV-powered drone was at the limits of its performance, with even some mild cloud cover forcing the battery to provide backup power. For the test location a tree-sheltered site far away from windy Cape Town was also selected to provide the best possible shot, as keeping position with this drone was very hard. With the low weight and the big surface area of the solar panel array catching any little bit of wind, the GPS-based position keeping was essential. Unfortunately a few hours into the test this feature failed. Manual position keeping is definitely possible, but [Luke] had to constantly counteract the drone wanting to drift off somewhere else. Ultimately the test flight ended when it was still very much a sunny South African summer’s day, due to the current provided by the array no longer keeping up with the power demands of the motors. What this perhaps demonstrates best is that if you want to use PV solar power for your flying drone – especially with a significant payload – it’s probably best to use it for recharging while idle, or to extend the battery life by an appreciable amount. That said, props to [Luke] for persevering and making it work in the end. Balloon Launch with Amateur Payload set for April 18thEdge of Space Sciences (EOSS) and Intro2Space will launch a balloon with an APRS payload on April 18th. The balloon will launch from Metro State University of Denver in Colorado and carry an APRS beacon utilizing callsign AEØSS-4. In addition to the APRS playload, the balloon will carry an ADS-B beacon and sonar experiment. The predicted flight path can be viewed here. A preflight net will take place on the Fun Machine linked repeater system, TGIF talkgroup 815, and Echolink node CANONCTY.
THURSDAY EDITION: We all hope MFJ sells the Ameritron division soon, it still sells a viable amplifier option at a more reasonable price than what is currently available...
Have you seen the price of eggs...I spent extra time yesterday checking all my options.. Forgotten Sci-Fi Thriller 'Frequency' Deserves Your Attention 26 Years LaterDennis Quaid's heartfelt performance anchors this unique time-travel mystery. Back in 2000, the sci-fi thriller Frequency starring Dennis Quaid, Elizabeth Mitchell, and Jim Caviezel flew under the radar despite its clever time-travel premise, emotional father-son story, and thrilling murder mystery. Over two decades later, this forgotten gem deserves a fresh look as an underrated example of how the genre can blend high-concept ideas with relatable characters. Why it mattersFrequency stands out from other 90s sci-fi movies by grounding its time-travel conceit in the personal relationship between a father and son, rather than focusing on futuristic settings or alien encounters. The film's blend of genres - part mystery, part family drama - makes it a unique and compelling watch that showcases Dennis Quaid's talents as a leading man. The detailsIn Frequency, 36-year-old John Sullivan discovers he can communicate with his father Frank, who died in a fire 30 years earlier, through an old ham radio. As they work together across the decades to prevent a series of murders, their actions have unexpected consequences in each other's timelines. Director Gregory Hoblit keeps the fantastical premise grounded and the characters relatable, with Quaid delivering one of the best performances of his career as the loving, baseball-obsessed Frank.
I never saw one of these and I thought I had seen everything...
WEDNESDAY EDITION: No work at the club today, making up a stock list to get going on Thursday. We will install a new fiberglass handicap door first and then frame the ramp to get the deck height inline with the door. Onward and upward....Step into the unintentionally hilarious world of security camera footage... ITU Corporation Re-purposes Linton Armory Facility to House Iconic Amateur Radio Manufacturing- Hy-gain and Cushcraft
n a major
expansion of its
Indiana footprint,
ITU Corporation has
purchased the former
Linton National
Guard Armory to
serve as the new
manufacturing hub
for Hy-gain and
Cushcraft. By
acquiring these
legendary brands
from MFJ
Enterprises, ITU is
centralizing
production at the
15-acre Linton site.
This new endeavor
will bring between
20-50 new jobs to
Linton. One Less Option – The deadline to purchase repaired Econco tubes is approachingAn important source for rebuilt power tubes is going away. Microwave Power Products plans to close operations at the former Econco facility in California, ending its program for rebuilding the tubes used in vacuum tube-type transmitters, as our Nick Langan reported last month. MPP said operations at the Woodland manufacturing site will cease on Sept. 1 as it consolidates operations to Palo Alto. As part of the transition, the company will discontinue repair services for Econco Power Grid tubes, though it will continue to manufacture new tubes. The move also ends Econco’s “bank” program, which allowed customers to store non-working power grid tubes at the Woodland facility to be rebuilt and made available for future purchase. The deadline to purchase repaired Econco Power Grid tubes is May 12 at close of business. According to the release, failure to confirm a purchase or request the return of non-working tubes by that date will be treated as consent for MPP to dispose of property remaining in the Bank program. Read more – RadioWorld: https://www.radioworld.com/columns-and-views/from-the-editor/one-less-option TUESDAY EDITION: Demo video at the radio club yesterday getting ready to build the new handicap accessibe ramp...Hmmmm... Morse code event to honor Titanic heroAn event is to be held to celebrate the birthday of a Surrey man who tried to save the Titanic. Jack Phillips, from Godalming, worked on the ship as its chief wireless operator when it hit an iceberg in the early hours of 15 April 1912. Phillips sent out distress calls and advised on the latest position of the ship until it foundered. While more than 1,500 people died, 705 people were rescued on to the RMS Carpathia, which was sent thanks to Phillips’ messages. Read more – BBC: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cevk8rvl78jo MONDAY EDITION: I heard Jimmy- W4AMP on 3927 the other night with Tom Whatley-N1FM. I haven't heard Jimmy on the air for years, we keep in touch by email on occasion. Jimmy was a part of the 14313 crowd way back when with the infamous Rich- WB2OTK SK. That crew had the FCC on double alert with Donnie dumbass- N4TAT earning license suspensions and continued warnings, whatever happened to old Donnie? A Voltage Regulator Before Electronics
Did you ever wonder how the mechanical voltage regulator — that big black box wired up to the generator on a car from the ’60s or before — worked? [Jonelsonster] has some answers. For most people in 2026 an old car perhaps means one from the 20th century, now that vehicles from the 1990s and 2000s have become the beloved jalopies of sallow youths with a liking for older cars and a low budget. But even a 1990s vehicle is modern in terms of its technology, because a computer controls the show. It has electronic fuel injection (EFI), anti-lock braking system (ABS), closed loop emissions control, and the like. Go back in time to the 1970s, and you’ll find minimal electronics in the average car. The ABS is gone, and the closest thing you might find to EFI is an electronic ignition where the points in the distributor have been replaced with a simple transistor. Perhaps an electronic voltage regulator on the alternator. Much earlier than that and everything was mechanical, be that the ignition, or that regulator. The video below the break has a pair of units, it seems from 1940s tractors. They would have had a DC generator, a spinning coil with a commutator and brushes, in a magnetic field provided by another coil. These things weren’t particularly powerful by today’s standards and sometimes their charging could be a little lackluster, but they did work. We get to see how, as he lifts the lid off to reveal what look like a set of relays. We’re shown the functions of each of the three coils with the aid of a lab power supply; we have a reverse current relay that disconnects the generator if the battery tries to power it, an over-current relay that disconnects the field coil if the current is too high, and an over-voltage relay that does the same for voltage. The regulating comes down to the magnetic characteristics, and while it’s crude, it does the job. We remember European devices with two coils and no field terminal, but the principle is the same. There is never a dull moment when you own an all mechanical car.
South Korea
just opened
the world's
first fully
self-powered
solar panel
factory
where every
step of
production —
from raw
silicon to
finished
panel — is
performed by
robots
running
entirely on
solar
electricity
generated by
the
factory's
own roof
Hanwha Q CELLS' Jincheon facility covers its 180,000-square-meter roof with 22 megawatts of its own bifacial solar panels, generating more electricity than the factory consumes during daylight production hours. Inside, 340 robotic arms and automated conveyor systems handle every stage of panel manufacturing without human intervention on the production floor — silicon ingot slicing, cell diffusion, metallization, encapsulation, and final quality testing all performed and monitored by robotic systems. Human workers manage quality oversight, maintenance scheduling, and system optimization from glass-walled control rooms above the automated production floor.
The factory
produces 3
gigawatts of
solar panels
annually —
enough to
supply major
solar
installations
across Asia
and Europe —
while its
energy
self-sufficiency
means every
panel
manufactured
carries a
genuine
near-zero
manufacturing
carbon
footprint.
Battery
storage
covering 48
hours of
factory
energy
demand
ensures
production
continues
through
low-generation
periods
without any
grid
electricity
purchase.
Production
cost per
watt reaches
0.09 US
dollars — 68
percent
below the
global
average —
achieved
through
automation
eliminating
labor costs
and
renewable
energy
eliminating
electricity
costs
simultaneously.
Source:
Hanwha Q
CELLS South
Korea, Korea
Energy
Agency,
Korean
Ministry of
Trade
Industry and
Energy, 2025
WEEKEND EDITION: I bet 90 percent of America was watching the Artemis II splash down. I was a little concerned when the third parachute seemed to have trouble opening but all was well. I think I would like to buy some of that parachute cord for my antennas, that must be some strong stuff.... When The Government Really Doesn’t Want You To Have CBIn the mid 1970s there were a spate of movies depicting the romance and lifestyle of truck drivers in the southern half of the United States. Over on the other side of the Atlantic these were naturally received not as works of drama but as documentaries, and thus began a craze for British drivers to do up their Ford Capri so in the right light and with your eyes nearly closed, it almost looked like Burt Reynolds’ Pontiac Trans Am from Smokey and the Bandit. Such a fine automobile was of course incomplete without a CB radio, highly illegal at the time, which led to an underground CB craze and its eventual legalization in 1981. [Ringway Manchester] is here with a tale from that era, of 934 MHz CB, an odd and underused allocation that was eventually phased out for commercial services. When UK CB was eventually legalized by the government, it was very obvious that they really didn’t want to. Brits got 27 MHz as FM only with meager power and a weird set of frequencies that nobody else had, and a second band way up in the UHF range, at 934 MHz. We remember they originally tried to make a UHF band the only allocation on purpose because it was nearly useless for mobile operation, and Brits only got 27 MHz by fighting back in the political lobbying space. The video below tells the story of the band, with relatively scarce and expensive equipment leading to it being an exclusive band more similar to the amateur bands, with little resemblance to its raucous 27 MHz counterpart. How much activity there was depended very much on where in the country you were, which of course wasn’t where your Hackaday scribe was as a teenager even if it had been affordable. Eventually the government saw the little flashing pound signs and grabbed it back for a mobile radio service that never materialized, and now the frequencies are part of the mobile phone spectrum. Have a watch for an odd bit of UK radio nostalgia and some 2020s illegal CB’ers, and if you want more it’s a subject we’ve touched on before.
Amateur
Radio Newsline
Report
FRIDAY EDITION: 44 and sunny, it looks like a good day to thatch the lawn with the tractor..... FYI: Young, eligible men will be automatically registered for the military draft pool starting in December as part of a measure tucked into the annual defense policy bill Congress signed into law late last year. Men ages 18 to 26 must already register for selective service in case a draft is required. The last time a draft was in effect was February 1973, during the Vietnam War. Seacoast Amateur Radio Flea MarketThe Port City Amateur Radio Club hosts an annual hamfest and flea market in April at the Saint James Masonic Lodge on 77 Tide Mill Road, Hampton, NH. Admission is $5 per person and children under 12 are admitted free. There are hourly door prize drawings as well as a grand prize drawing. All ticket holders are eligible to win, additional prize drawing tickets may be purchased for $5 each. We have indoor and outdoor table space available and pre-registration is recommended. You can purchase table space using the seller’s application found at the bottom of this page. Join us on Saturday, April 11, 2026 for the next Port City ARC hamfest and fleamarket. The flea market runs from 8 am to 12 pm. A VE Session will follow right after the flea market beginning at 1 pm. Open HamClock Backend now Independent of Clear Sky Proxy DataOpen Hamclock Backend is now fully independent of the original source and does not proxy any data from the Clear Sky Institute server. When the original backend server goes offline in June, anyone using OHB will find their HamClock will continue to work. We’ve also made some improvements over the original, especially in terms of CPU and memory use. It is now more efficient, so anyone hosting it on their own hardware will see instant improvements. We have two more items of exciting news to share: We now have a publicly available OHB server which anyone using HamClock is welcome to use. Just point your HamClock to: ohb.hamclock.app:80 This server is dedicated hardware hosted in a commercial datacenter and is free for all HamClock users to enjoy. We also now have a website where you can keep track of the latest releases, find instructions on how to use OHB, see who is behind the initiative, as well as how to contact us to provide feedback and ask for assistance:
THURSDAY EDITION: Kriss- KA1GJU made it non-stop from NH to the Florida airshow, that is quite a drive solo... The Shockley 4-Layer Diode In 2026
The physicist William Shockley is perhaps today best known for three things: his role in the invention of the transistor, his calamitous management of Shockley Semiconductor which led to a mass defection of employees and precipitated the birth of the Silicon Valley we know, and his later descent into promoting eugenics. This was not the sum of his work though, and [David Prutchi] has been experimenting with a now-mostly-forgotten device that bears the Shockley name (PDF), after finding one used in an early heart pacemaker circuit. His findings are both comprehensive and fascinating. The Shockley diode, or 4-layer diode as it later became known, is as its name suggests a two terminal device with a 4-layer NPNP structure. It can be modeled as a pair of complementary transistors in parallel with a reverse biased diode, and the avalanche breakdown characteristics of that diode when a particular voltage is applied to it provide the impetus to turn on the two transistors. This makes it a voltage controlled switch, that activates when the voltage across it reaches that value. The PDF linked above goes into the Shockley diode applications, and in them we find a range of relaxation oscillators, switches, and logic circuits. The oscillators in particular could be made with the barest minimum of components, important in a time when each semiconductor device could be very expensive. It may have faded into obscurity as it was superseded by more versatile 4-layer devices such as the PUJT or silicon-controlled switch and then integrated circuits, but he makes the point that its thyristor cousin is still very much with us. This appears to be the first time we’ve featured a 4-layer diode, but we’ve certainly covered the genesis of the transistor in the past.
WEDNESDAY EDITION: Safe driving Kriss on the road trip....For me, the club for coffee and donuts and the Elks for lunch on the ocean... Ham radio operators in Waldo demonstrate emergencyWALDO, Fla. (WCJB) -When power lines go down and cell service fails, amateur radio operators are often the last line of communication. That’s the message members of the Gainesville Amateur Radio Society (GARS) shared this weekend during their annual Summer Field Day event. The national event, held Saturday and Sunday in Waldo City Square, brought together local ham radio enthusiasts to practice making long-distance contacts using backup power and portable antennas, simulating real-life emergency conditions.
“It’s so much more
fascinating and
interesting and
fun,” said Barbara
Matthews, a GARS
member and the
club’s public
information officer.
“That’s ultimately
my baseline
level—being able to
check on someone
that I care about
when the grid goes
down, when there’s
no power, no cell.” The two-day event welcomed families and first-time visitors to try using radio equipment and speak directly with operators across the country. Organizers emphasized how amateur radio continues to play a vital role in disaster response, especially during hurricanes and power outages. Held on the second floor of Waldo City Square, the event also highlighted affordable ways to get involved in amateur radio and provided demonstrations of how operators communicate without relying on modern infrastructure. Gainesville Amateur Radio Society (GARS) Summer Field Day June 28th (10AM to 5PM) and 29th (9AM to 2PM) GARS encourages all who are curious about amateur radio to visit them and get on the air to experience what it is all about and discover it really is magic. For more information on the Gainesville Amateur Radio Society, visit gars.club
TUESDAY
EDITION:
It's spitting snow
here on the
island..... Talking to the world from a rooftop in Dhaka: The story of Bangladesh’s amateur radio community (Bangladesh)The room looks rather unassuming from outside. On the first floor of a residential building in Mohammadpur, Dhaka, it is cluttered in the way only a certain kind of person’s room becomes cluttered — purposefully, lovingly. Shelves sag under transceivers, coils of cable, and half-assembled circuit boards. A fluffy orange cat surveys the chaos from a workbench by the window. On a nearby laptop screen is a dense circuit schematic. This is the home station of Fazley Rabby — callsign S21RC — and it is, in the most literal sense, a window to the world. “The talking itself is not the main point,” Rabby says, leaning back in his chair. “It is the fact that I could make that connection — using an antenna I built myself, without the internet, without anything else. It is like angling. You might spend thousands of taka just to catch a small fish, but the joy is in the catch.” Read more – The Business Standard: https://bit.ly/3O4DFDC Collinsville radio operator connected Vietnam War soldiers to families back home (Alabama)Before cell phones and video calls, many soldiers fighting in the Vietnam War went without hearing a loved one’s voice from back home. In Collinsville, one man found a way to change that. Bill Dobbs, known by his radio call sign “WA4SNU”, spent decades building and operating his own amateur radio system. The system bridged thousands of miles between war zones and home. Read more – WAFF: https://bit.ly/4sgC6QU Ham radio operators began hearing strange Persian numbers broadcast twice a day until they traced the signal to a U.S. base in Germany and realized it may be a coded wartime messageWar has devastated the world throughout our long history. Recent events in the Middle East have seen the price of filling up our cars and powering our homes skyrocket. Ham radio operators have detected a strange broadcast of Persian numbers that has been traced back to a U.S base in Germany. How can this strange Persian signal paint a picture of current geopolitics? Read more – The Pulse: https://bit.ly/4cdQbc0 MONDAY EDITION: I need to replace the front pads on my yl's Volvo, the rotors look fine. I will pick up a set at NAPA plus a 7mm bit to take out the slide pins. $50 in pads and my labor compared to what the Volvo dealer would rape me. Knowing my labor will have me cursing somewhere on the job, it is still worth it for a car that averages less than 2500 miles a year...
7.200
MHz (LSB on
40 meters)
is infamous
in the ham
radio
community as
a cesspool
or "idiot
channel" — a
frequency
dominated by
lids,
jammers,
vulgar
language,
music
playback,
intentional
QRM
(interference),
conspiracy
rants,
political
arguments,
and people
who often
refuse to
properly ID
or even
sound like
licensed
operators
(many are
suspected of
being
unlicensed
or running
illegal
power).
It's
frequently
compared to
old-school
CB radio
gone wrong,
and most
serious hams
avoid it
entirely
unless a DX
station
happens to
land
there.Frequent
names
mentioned as
problematicNo
single
person is
universally
crowned "the
worst"
(opinions
vary by who
you ask and
what day you
listen), but
these
callsigns
repeatedly
come up in
forums,
YouTube
recordings,
Reddit
threads, and
HF
Underground
discussions
for jamming,
arguing, not
IDing, or
general
chaos:
Others
like N2FUV
and various
bootlegged
or fake
callsigns
get
mentioned
too, but the
above trio
(especially
AC1DD and
K9RSY) get
the most
consistent
heat.The
realityThe
"worst" is
subjective —
it's more of
a group
dynamic of
regulars who
treat the
frequency
like their
personal
playground
for drama
and
disruption.
The FCC has
issued
warnings/fines
over the
years (some
licenses got
yanked), but
enforcement
is spotty,
and the
behavior
persists.
Many say it
keeps the
worst
behavior
contained to
one spot so
it doesn't
spill over
elsewhere.If
you're
asking
because you
tuned in and
heard the
circus:
yeah, it's
legendary
for a
reason. Most
hams just
spin the
dial and
move on to
cleaner
parts of the
band.
Open Source Radar Has Up To 20 KM RangePhased-array radars are great for all sorts of things, whether you’re doing advanced radio research or piloting a fifth-generation combat aircraft. They’re also typically very expensive. [Nawfal] hopes to make the technology more affordable with an open-source radar design of their own. The design is called the AERIS-10, and is available in two versions. Operating at 10.5 GHz, it can be built to operate at ranges between 3 or 20 kilometers depending on the desired spec. The former uses an 8 x 16 patch antenna array, while the latter extends this to a 32 x 16 array. Either way, each design is capable of fully-electronic beam steering in azimuth and can be hacked to enable elevation too—one of the most attractive features of phased array radars. The hardware is based around an STM32 microcontroller, an FPGA, and a bunch of specialist clock generators, frequency synthesizers, phase shifters, and ADCs to do all the heavy lifting involved in radar. Radar is something you probably don’t spend a lot of time thinking about unless you’re involved in maritime, air defence, or weather fields. All of which seem to be very much in the news lately! Still, we feature a good few projects on the topic around these parts. If you’ve got your own radar hacks brewing up in the lab, don’t hesitate to let us know. Blog – Hackaday Read More
EASTER WEEKEND: A group of amateur astronomers has just “heard” a signal from 25 billion kilometers away, confirming that Voyager 1 is still transmitting from the outer reaches of the Solar System.... Running a PC off AA Cells With Buck Converters Really Boosts Performance
After the previous attempt of running a PC off AA cells got a lot of comments, [ScuffedBits] decided to do the scientifically responsible thing and re-ran the experiment with all the peer-reviewed commentary in mind. Although we noted with the previous experiment that only alkaline cells were used, [ScuffedBits] rectified this by stating that both carbon and alkaline AA cells were used the first time around. For this second experiment a number of changes were made, though still both carbon and alkaline cells were put into the mix. To these a third string was added, consisting of NiMH cells, for a total of 64 cells with each of the three strings outputting around 25 VDC when fully charged. These fed a cheap buck regulator module to generate the 12 VDC for the DC-DC converter on the mainboard’s ATX connector. Although it appears that the same thin Cat-5e-sourced wiring was used, with the higher voltage this meant a lower current, making it significantly less sketchy. Unlike with the first experiment, this time around the Core i3 530 based PC could run much longer and even boot off the DIY battery pack. After a quick game and pushing through a Cinebench run for 64 Watts maximum power usage, it turned out that there was still plenty of time for more fun activities, such as troubleshooting Minecraft and even playing it. After a total runtime of 33 minutes and 19 seconds the voltage finally dropped too low to continue. A quick check of cells in each string, it turned out that the carbon cells were the most drained with significant terminal voltage drop. The alkaline cells had been pushed down to a level where they could still probably run a wall clock, but the NiMH cells showed a healthy 1.2 V, meaning that a fully NiMH battery pack could go a lot longer. This probably isn’t too surprising when we look at the history of battery packs in laptops, where NiCd quickly got pushed out by NiMH-based packs for having significantly higher power density and none of the problems with recharging and disposal. Even today 1.5 V Li-ion-based AA cells do not have significantly more capacity than NiMH AA cells, making this chemistry still very relevant today. Even if you’re not trying to build your own battery pack for running a desktop PC off.
GOOD
FRIDAY
EDITION:
Red
Sox
opener
today
at
Fenway,
they
have
not
looked
too
swift
so
far....Fire
in
the
hole..Thousands
of
Amazon
products
are
being
recalled
because
they
could
start
a
fire
Don't forget to buy your Nearfest tickets online, you wouldn't want to miss this eye popping event... Power Control for a Busy WorkbenchWho among us does not have a plethora of mains-powered devices on their workbench, and a consequent mess of power strips to run them all? [Jeroen Brinkman] made his more controllable with a multi-way switch box. At first sight it’s a bank of toggle switches, one for each socket. But this is far more than a wiring job, because of course there are a couple of microcontrollers involved, and each of those switches ultimately controls a relay. There are also status LEDs for each socket, and a master switch to bring them all down. Arduino code is provided, so you can build one too if you want to. We like the idea of a handy power strip controller, and especially the master switch with the inherent state memory provided by the switches. This could find a home on a Hackaday bench, and we suspect on many others too. It’s by no means the first power strip with brains we’ve seen, but most others have been aimed at the home instead. Blog – Hackaday Read More
Amateur
Radio
Newsline
Report
AMATEUR RADIO OPERATORS ON MOON MISSION ABOARD ARTEMIS 2 SKEETER/ANCHOR: Our top story takes us into space - specifically, looking toward the moon. Delayed weeks ago due to technical issues, NASA's Artemis 2 mission lifted off from Florida's Kennedy Space Center on the 1st of April, carrying a crew of four astronauts - three of whom have amateur radio licenses. Astronauts Reid Wiseman, KF5LKT; Victor Glover, KI5BKC, Jeremy Hansen, KF5LKU, and Christina Koch, now embark on a test flight that will pave the way for an eventual return of a human presence on the moon. Meanwhile, four amateur radio operators here on Earth are among the group of 34 volunteers chosen by NASA to track transmissions from the Orion spacecraft during its 10-day journey. ** FCC CHARGES AMATEUR WITH EMERGENCY-SERVICE INTERFERENCE SKEETER/ANCHOR: An amateur radio operator is being called the source of radio interference that affected emergency service frequencies in one part of Pennsylvania last year, according to the Federal Communications Commission. Kent Peterson KCØDGY picks up the story from here. KENT: The FCC's Enforcement Bureau has charged a ham radio operator in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania with interfering with UHF frequencies used by 9-1-1 emergency services. The FCC identified the ham as David Knudtson, KD3ASC. According to the agency, the Pittsburgh amateur was transmitting on 470.4375 MHz from a handheld transceiver last July, prompting a complaint from the county's Emergency Services that there was interference on its dispatch channel. Using direction-finding, the bureau's enforcement agents tracked the signal to Knudtson's home where, they said, he showed them a Baofeng BTech UV-Pro HT - which he surrendered to them. The handheld radio is capable of transmitting on VHF and UHF amateur radio bands as well as private land mobile radio bands. The FCC said that the radio had been programmed to monitor the EMS channel and that the "audio relay” was enabled, permitting traffic from one channel to be retransmitted on another. The FCC notice is dated March 25th. Knudtson must respond to the Enforcement Bureau within 10 days of that date. ** SSTV FROM ISS MARKING MAJOR MOMENTS IN SPACE SKEETER: The next set of images to be transmitted from the International Space Station via SSTV will mark a number of high-profile moments in space. Watch for them this month. Jack Parker W8ISH tells us what a few of them are. JACK: The 65th anniversary of the first human space flight by cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, the 45th anniversary of the first Space Shuttle flight and the 100th anniversary of the world's first liquid-propelled rocket launch by Robert Goddard. These are three of several space achievements being commemorated by Amateur Radio on the International Space Station through its selection of images to be transmitted as part of SSTV Series 31. The SSTV Mode will be Robot 36 and there will be two minutes between transmissions. Transmissions will begin on the 10th of April and continue through to the 14th of April. The frequency will be 437.55, plus or minus Doppler shift. ** AZORES AMATEURS HOSTING THEIR FIRST 10M REPEATER SKEETER/ANCHOR: The Azores Amateur Radio Association CU2ARA is marking an important anniversary this year with the installation of its first 10-metre repeater. The group says its presence in the North Atlantic holds great promise for contacts between hams in Europe and North America. Dave Lee M7TLB tells us more. DAVE: On São Miguel Island, the largest island in the Azores off the coast of Portugal, a new 10-metre FM repeater stands ready for QSOs. This is the first 10-metre repeater for the association, which is marking the 50th year since its founding. The 50-watt repeater transmits on 29.630 MHz, with a -100 kHz shift, giving it a receive frequency of 29.530 MHz. It has a CTCSS tone of 88.5 Hz. Bruno, CS8ABG, told Newsline that challenges in installation prompted the group to install the receiver and transmitter separately. The transmitter is located in the center of the island and the receiver is about 20 km away on the western side. Both are at an altitude of 900 metres.The sites are connected using 5 GHz Wi-Fi links. The site holds promise for other connections too, according to Bruno. There is a Raspberry Pi system with a private AllStarLink connection that may someday provide a link to the group's VHF repeaters that are part of the Azores AllStarLink network. Bruno told Newsline that the east-west radiation pattern of the dipoles favour propagation between Europe and North America so DXers, of course, are very welcome. ** IRELAND'S SOLE 10M REPEATER IN SERVICE AGAIN SKEETER/ANCHOR: Another 10-metre repeater - this one in Ireland - is getting a huge welcome back from amateurs. It is back on the air and is expected to be very busy, as we hear from Jeremy Boot G4NJH. JEREMY: The repeater in Carndonagh, County Conegal - EIØIPG - is no longer silent. Storms had taken the nation's only 10-metre repeater out of service until recently. According to a report by the Irish Radio Transmitters Society, the repeater, which is maintained by the Carndonagh Amateur Radio Club, is receiving an especially hearty welcome among experimenters because an increase in solar activity promises a greater likelihood of trans-Atlantic and continental FM communication. Its frequencies are 29.580 MHz input and 29.680 MHz output, with a 67 Hz CTCSS tone. The repeater also offers access via Echolink Node 29007. ** VOICE OF AMERICA MUSEUM TO EXTEND HOURS FOR HAMVENTION SKEETER/ANCHOR: Although the liveliest daytime action will likely be at the Greene County Fairgrounds in Xenia, Ohio, in May, that Hamvention epicenter isn't the only big draw for visiting amateurs that weekend. Sel Embee KB3TZD tells us about another Hamvention weekend tradition. SEL: The National Voice of America Museum of Broadcasting is welcoming Hamvention guests by offering extended hours from Thursday May 14th through to Sunday May 17th. The museum and the West Chester Amateur Radio Association, which is headquartered there, will be sharing a wide variety of exhibits that include a disc jockey's setup from a vintage radio station, vintage ham and shortwave equipment and the Voice of America's first transmitter, dating from 1942. The club's ham radio station, WC8VOA, will be sharing access to its shack - so come with your license and be prepared to get on the air. Admission is $10 at the door. For each day's extended hours and for directions on how to find the museum from Xenia, visit the website voamuseum.org or wc8voa.org The independent, nonprofit museum in West Chester, Ohio, is not affiliated with the US government's Voice of America service. ** (AMATEUR RADIO DAILY) ** 'QUEENS OF THE MOUNTAINS' ACTIVITY BACK FOR 3RD YEAR SKEETER/ANCHOR: This has already been a big year for YLs to scale to new heights. First, there was the WWA-YL Award that united women radio operators calling CQ from around the world in March. Next up is the third annual Queens of the Mountains, a special Summits on the Air Weekend event. There is some added incentive this year for chasers, as we hear from Travis Lisk N3ILS. TRAVIS: Activators in the third annual Queens of the Mountains YL SOTA special event will be competing for the same certificates as before - but this year, chasers are getting a new chance for recognition. The new award is designed for chasers who contact at least three YL activators in different countries or different US states. This is the second year the activity has drawn global participation, so once again, YL to YL DX QSOs will be recognized with a WWW-World Wide Women's certificate. The organizers, Amy AG7GP, and Paula, K9IR [KAY NINE EYE ARR], announced the event's return on the SOTA Reflector and have set the event to start at 0000 UTC on June 13th and end at 2359 UTC on June 14th. NOMINATE OUR NEXT YOUNG HAM OF THE YEAR SKEETER/ANCHOR: We remind our listeners that we are accepting nominations for Amateur Radio Newsline's Bill Pasternak WA6ITF Memorial Young Ham of the Year award for 2026. If you know a talented, involved and active licensed radio operator who is 18 years of age of younger and is a resident of the continental United States, please submit his or her name for consideration. You'll find a nomination form under the awards tab of our website, arnewsline-dot-org. Send in documentation supporting your nominee and get it to us by the May 31st deadline. This year's winner will be joining a very distinguished group of young amateurs who have continued to make a difference in the world of ham radio - and their communities. WORLD OF DX In the World of DX, you have until the 10th of April to work Bernard, DL2GAC, using the callsign H44MS from Malaita Island in the Solomon Islands, IOTA Number OC-047. He has been spotted doing FT8 and SSB. Special callsigns DAØANT, DM5ØANT and DP5ØANT are on the air celebrating a half-century of German research in Antarctica until the 30th of April. Listen as well for DM5ØGFS, marking the 50th anniversary of the now-decommissioned, ex-GDR Georg Forster Station and DP2ØØGVN for the 200-year anniversary of the birth of Georg von Neumayer (NOY MY YERR), after whom West Germany's Antarctic research stations have been named. Listen for Take [TAH-KAY], JG8NQJ/JD1 operating until the middle of May from the weather station on Minami Torishima, IOTA Number OC-073. He is using mostly CW with some FT8. Jacek, SP5APW will be active as 3D2JK from Lakeba Island, IOTA Number OC-095 from the 17th through to the 22nd of April. He will be using FT8 and SSB on 20-10 metres, He will also be on 6 metres using mainly FT8. THURSDAY EDITION: 34 and raw to start the day off..We had a productive day the club with 17 shooting down coffee with donuts. We upgraded the WiresX to 2.0 and reconfigured the Echolink setup to finally get rid of the hum. ....The launch to the moon looked great, I hope the rest of the trip goes as well....the Prez's speech, that's another story.....No matter how good the hand soap smells, never walk out of the restroom while sniffing your fingers! Solar Cycle 25 Gives Amateurs and Shortwave a BoostBeyond their love of radio, amateur radio operators and shortwave radio broadcasters have one thing in common: They rely on the ionosphere to refract or bend their signals back to Earth, so that they can travel beyond line-of-sight distances. In turn, the ionosphere’s ability to refract radio signals depends on its level of ionization or charge. The more ionized the ionosphere is, the more likely it is to bend signals back to the ground rather than let them pass through. Here’s where the sun comes in. The number of sunspots on the solar surface rises and falls over an 11-year period, during what is known as a solar cycle. The more sunspots, the more solar radiation comes to Earth. This radiation ionizes the ionosphere, improving the propagation of signals for transmitters and receivers alike. Right now is a good time for amateur operators and shortwave broadcasters (and listeners), because the world is just coming off the peak, or solar maximum, of Solar Cycle 25. Read more – RadioWorld: https://bit.ly/3Odzc1m See The Computers That Powered The Voyager Space ProgramHave you ever wanted to see the computers behind the first (and for now only) man-made objects to leave the heliosphere? [Gary Friedman] shows us, with an archived tour of JPL building 230 in the ’80s. A NASA employee picks up a camcorder and decides to record a tour of the place “before they replace it all with mainframes”. They show us computers that would seem prehistoric compared to anything modern; early Univac and IBM machines whose power is outmatched today by even an ESP32, yet made the Voyager program possible all the way back in 1977. There are countless peripherals to see, from punch card writers to Univac debug panels where you can see the registers, and from impressive cabinets full of computing hardware to the zip-tied hacks “attaching” a small box they call the “NIU”, dangling off the inner wall of the cabinet. And don’t forget the tape drives that are as tall as a refrigerator! We could go on ad nauseum, nerding out about the computing history, but why don’t you see it for yourself in the video after the break? Blog – Hackaday Read More
APRIL FOOL'S EDITION: Be back later, going to the club and the Elks first.. Spoofing an Emergency Traffic Preemption SignalThere’s a well-known movie trope in which a hacker takes control of the traffic lights in a city, causing general mayhem or creating a clear getaway path. Unlike many Hollywood representations of hacking, this is actually possible in principle; many cities install Emergency Vehicle Preemption (EVP) systems in their traffic signals to turn them green when an emergency vehicle is approaching. To see what it would actually take to control one of these, [xssfox] reverse-engineered a Strobecom II EVP system. Most EVP systems, particularly older ones, use a strobing infrared light to alert a traffic signal to an approaching emergency vehicle. To avoid misuse, vehicles often encode a vehicle ID in the infrared signal. There have been some claims that a Flipper Zero can trigger these systems, but none that were well-verified, and probably with good reason; anyone actually trying this against a live system is courting serious legal trouble. To see whether this was actually possible [xssfox] obtained real hardware and tried to reverse-engineer the infrared protocol. There are two main manufacturers for optical EVP systems: GTT Opticom and Tomar Strobecom. [xssfox] managed to buy a Tomar power supply which handled the processing for signal transmission, and which worked with Opticom systems. Looking at the output of this revealed that it encoded data by skipping pulses, which should be simple enough for Flipper Zero to replicate. To reverse-engineer the Strobecom protocol, [xssfox] managed to buy a Strobecom optical signal processor, which would normally detect an emergency signal. This worked by modulating the length of infrared pulses. After some brute-forcing, a transmitter using an Arduino Nano and an infrared LED managed to activate the preemption signal, and even to transmit a vehicle ID. It seems that Strobecom systems, at least, are fairly demanding in terms of the signals they accept; signals had to be precisely timed, and in at least some systems, a valid vehicle ID would be needed to change the light. If you’d like to learn more, we’ve gone into the technology of North American traffic signals before. Blog – Hackaday Read More Weather watchers mourn the end of national Weatheradio service (Canada)Joe Waldner remembers the night last August when a radio in his home near Saskatoon began blaring an alert message. “Of course I come to my desktop, I pull open my radar. I’m looking at this system going, ‘Oh yeah, this is going to be devastating,'” Waldner said. It was warning him of an intense storm system that went on to produce large hail, strong winds and even a tornado over central Saskatchewan. But Waldner is now without a way to get alerts like the way he did that August night. Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) has shuttered its national Weatheradio service. The network of more than 200 stations — 11 of which were in Saskatchewan — provided 24-hour current conditions and forecasts on a continuous loop in English and French. Read more – CBC: https://bit.ly/41CUcSf VOA Museum Announces Expanded Hours During HamventionApril 1, 2026The following is a press release from VOA Museum: The National Voice of America Museum of Broadcasting in conjunction with the West Chester Amateur Radio Association announce expanded hours for the museum during the 2026 Hamvention. We will be open for the following:
Admission is $10.00 at the door. Our Amateur Radio station WC8VOA will be on the air to operate. The museum is a short drive from Hamvention down either Interstate 75 or Route 42 from Xenia. GPS use Crosley Blvd. Exhibits include a dedicated room for vintage Amateur Radio and shortwave equipment. See the first transmitter for the VOA from 1942. A disc jockey’s station from a vintage radio station. Our Amateur Radio Shack with state-of-the-art equipment from Yaesu, Icom, Elecraft and Mosley. Docents and ARS operators will be available to enhance your visit to the museum. For further information you can visit us at voamuseum.org or wc8voa.org on the web. You can also find us on Facebook at National Voice of America Museum of Broadcasting. Our regular hours are Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays 12:00 until 4:00 PM. We are located at 8070
Tylersville Road Phone 513-777-0027 TUESDAY EDITION: U.S. could exempt oil industry from protecting Gulf animals, for 'national security'...The vast data centers that power artificial intelligence guzzle huge amounts of energy but they also have another alarming impact, according to new research. They are creating “heat islands,” warming the land around them by up to 16 degrees Fahrenheit, and making life hotter for more than 340 million people.. Cat Pix on the Air CPOTA 2026Cat Pix on the Air (CPOTA) 2026 will celebrate International Cat Day by transmitting images of cats via SSTV.
This contest will score the number of QSOs made by each operator. Special callsigns PD6MEOW (Netherlands) and N1C (US) are already registered. Additional special callsigns may be registered with the event. Source: CPOTA Building a Heading Sensor Resistant To Magnetic DisturbancesLight aircraft often use a heading indicator as a way to know where they’re going. Retired instrumentation engineer [Don Welch] recreated a heading indicator of his own, using cheap off-the-shelf hardware to get the job done.
The heart of the build is a Teensy 4.0 microcontroller. It’s paired with a BNO085 inertial measurement unit (IMU), which combines a 3-axis gyro, 3-axis accelerometer, and 3-axis magnetometer into a single package. [Don] wanted to build a heading indicator that was immune to magnetic disturbances, so ignored the magnetometer readings entirely, using the rest of the IMU data instead. Upon startup, the Teensy 4.0 initializes a small round TFT display, and draws the usual compass rose with North at the top of the display. Any motion after this will update the heading display accordingly, with [Don] noting the IMU has a fast update rate of 200 Hz for excellent motion tracking. The device does not self-calibrate to magnetic North; instead, an encoder can be used to calibrate the device to match a magnetic compass you have on hand. Or, you can just ensure it’s already facing North when you turn it on. Thanks to the power of the Teensy 4.0 and the rapid updates of the BNO085, the display updates are nicely smooth and responsive. However, [Don] notes that it’s probably not quite an aircraft-spec build. We’ve featured some interesting investigations of just how much you can expect out of MEMS-based sensors like these before, too.
MONDAY EDITION: Bullnet Traders on 3928 Saturday had quite a few good listings at 4pm, listen in next Saturday....The No Kings group in town might be the most unsightly group of humans I have ever seen congregate in one place, it looked like a good place to recruit for Jenny Craig and a 12 step mental health program for the rest. It doesn't accomplish anything..how about if each one picked up some litter on the streets, now we are accomplishing something. The group that protested didn't vote for Trump, another election is coming up, vote.....put a person on the ballot that is votable....wasting time standing in the rotary in Gloucester didn't sway anyone's vote, didn't change anything in Congress, Trump didn't see it or give a shit if he did...just a media event that doesn't accomplish shit....but what do I know? I thought Biden was the ultimate clusterfuck but I didn't stand at the rotary looking like a clown holding a useless sign. I dId the only thing we can do, VOTE.. US FCC Prohibits Approval of New Foreign-Made Consumer Routershe US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is tasked with regulating both wired and wireless communications, which also includes a national security component. This is how previously the FCC tossed networking gear made by Huawei and foreign-manufactured drones onto its Covered List, effectively banning it from sale in the US. Now foreign-made consumer routers have been added to this list, barring explicit conditional approval on said list that would exempt them during a ‘transition phase’. As per the FCC fact sheet, this follows after determination by an interagency body that such routers “pose unacceptable risks to the national security of the United States [..]”. This document points us to the National Security Determination PDF, which attempts to lay out the reasoning. In it is noted that routers are an integral part of every day life, and compromised routers are a major risk factor, ergo it follows that only US-manufactured routers are to be trusted. These – so far fictional – US-manufactured consumer routers would have to feature ‘trusted supply chains’, which would seem to imply onshoring a large industrial base, though without specifying how deep this would have to go it’s hard to say what would be involved. The ‘supporting evidence’ section also only talks about firmware-related vulnerabilities, which would imply that US firmware developers do not produce CVEs. Currently there do not appear to be any specific details on what router manufacturers are supposed to do about this whole issue, though they can continue to sell previously FCC-approved routers in the US. Although hardware backdoors are definitely a possibility, this requires a fair bit of effort within the supply chain that should generally also fairly easily to detect. Yet after for example Bloomberg claimed in 2018 that Supermicro gear had been infested with hardware backdoors, this started a years-long controversy. Meanwhile actually verified issues with Supermicro hardware are boringly due to software CVEs. In that particular issue from 2024 two CVEs were discovered involving a lack of validation of a newly uploaded firmware image. All of which is reminiscent of an early 2024 White House ‘memory safety appeal’ that smelled very strongly of red herring. Although it’s easy to point at compromised hardware with scary backdoors and sneaky software backdoors hidden deep inside firmware of servers and networking devices, the truth of the matter is that sloppy input validation is still by far the #1 cause of fresh CVEs each year, especially if you look at the CVEs that are actually being actively exploited. As for this de-facto ban on new routers being sold in the US, this will correspondingly not change much here. The best defense against issues with networking equipment is still to practice network hygiene by keeping tabs on what is being sent on the LAN and WAN sides, while a government could e.g. force consumer routers to pass a strict independent hardware and software audit paid for by the manufacturer. Speaking as someone who used to run DIY routers for the longest time built around FreeSCO and Smoothwall Linux, there’s also always the option of turning any old PC into a router by putting a bunch of NICs and WNICs into it and run SmoothWall, OpenWRT, etc.. A router is after all just a specialized computer, regardless of what the government feels that it identifies as.
Almost time to clean the grill off and get cooking... Inside the Creepy Cold War Radio Broadcast Sending Secret Codes into Iran
An untraceable,
unbreakable
analog broadcast
is piercing
Iran's digital
blackout.
It begins with a scratchy burst of static, followed by a man’s voice cutting through the air. “Tavajoh! Tavajoh! Tavajoh!” he commands in Persian. Attention. Then, slowly and rhythmically, he recites a string of seemingly random numbers. The broadcast repeats at regular time intervals. This eerie broadcast started on February 28, just hours after the United States and Israel launched military strikes on Iran. As the Iranian government plunged the country into a massive internet blackout, this cryptic radio signal flickered to life. Intelligence officers recognize this system as a “numbers station,” a relic of Cold War espionage that relies on shortwave radio and paper codebooks. In an era of encrypted messaging apps and satellite internet, it seems that spies are turning back to a century-old analog technology to coordinate in the shadows. Read more – ZME Science: https://bit.ly/4bDvWp6 WEEKEND EDITION: Don't miss the 4pm net today, you might snag a bargain. Last week had quite few nice radios for sale... Two Amateur Radio Operators Tapped Into a Soviet Frequency. Did They Hear a Woman Burning Alive in Space?
The brothers
claimed to have
captured secret
audio of
cosmonauts,
including a
horrific death.
The Space Race, that high-tech Cold War competition to see which global superpower could conquer the cosmos first, was such a frantic and aggressive era of rocket-powered experimentation that it’s often remarkable to consider how low the death toll was during that time. We know, of course, that the United States was prepared for some interstellar fatalities; President Richard Nixon had an alternate speech prepared in the event that the Apollo 11 mission went catastrophically wrong. But officially, only a handful of lives were lost during the Space Race. The most famous of the rare space-related fatalities from this time occurred during pre-launch tests, like the altitude chamber fire that killed would-be cosmonaut Valentin Bondarenko (the first official Space Race fatality) and the 1967 electrical fire that claimed the lives of the Apollo 1 crew in the United States. In fact, remarkably, only a single life from each side of the Cold War was lost post-launch during that fraught period, and both of them were below the “von Kármán line” often used to define the edge of space: Soviet Vladimir Komarov aboard Soyuz 1 in April of 1967, and American Michael J. Adams during November 1967’s X-15 Flight 191. Read more – Popular Mechanics: https://bit.ly/3PzPMZM FCC Warns Pittsburgh Amateur Radio Operator for 911 Interference
A BTech UV-Pro
was transmitting
over an
Allegheny County
EMS channel,
commission
alleges
The Federal Communications Commission has sent a notice of licensed operation and harmful interference to an amateur radio operator in Pittsburgh regarding transmissions on a 911 emergency services channel from a handheld transceiver. Last summer, the FCC received a complaint from Allegheny County, Pa., Emergency Services concerning interference with one of its UHF “T-Band” emergency communications channels. The interference affected the county’s west EMS dispatch channel on 470.4375 MHz. On July 30, 2025, agents from the Columbia Office of the FCC’s Enforcement Bureau conducted an investigation and determined, using direction-finding techniques, that the source of the interference was a signal emanating from the residence of David Kundston, a licensed amateur radio operator with the callsign KD3ASC. After the agents notified Kundston of the issue, he produced a Baofeng BTech UV-Pro handheld radio. The BTech UV-Pro Tan edition lists for approximately $165 on Amazon. It is capable of transmitting on the VHF and UHF amateur radio and private land mobile radio bands. An examination of the radio by the agents determined it had been programmed to monitor the Allegheny County channel in question, and its “audio relay” feature had been activated. Read more – RadioWorld: https://bit.ly/4lZe6jQ
Delivery robots keep crashing into bus shelters
It's been a bad
week for
burritos on
wheels.
Food delivery robots are struggling to steer clear of Chicago’s bus stop shelters. Within just 48 hours, two autonomous couriers from different companies veered off course and collided with shelters shattering glass and alarming nearby residents. These pair of dramatic incidents come amidst brewing tension among community members and lawmakers in Chicago who oppose the robots’ presence. The crashes also come just weeks after one of the manufacturers announced it was integrating a new mapping system trained on “Pokémon Go” data which is designed to improve navigation accuracy. The first crash occurred on Monday March 23 in Chicago’s West Town neighborhood. Videos posted on social media show the delivery robot from Serve Robotics driving almost halfway past the bus shelter before suddenly veering toward it. The robot makes contact and smashes through the glass barrier, Kool-Aid Man style, before coming to a stop with crumbled broken glass covering and surrounding the sidewalk. After a few moments of stillness, the robot’s front-facing googly eyes blink and it backs up several feet. Other videos show the robot driving away and shaking off glass from its top onto the sidewalk. Ukraine’s military brings exoskeletons to the front line
According to the
Ukraine's 7th
Air Assault
Corps, the
devices help
soldiers lift
heavy artillery
shells and run
at up to 12 mph.
The exoskeleton wraps around the legs to reduce the strain on leg muscles. 7th Air Assault Corps After over four years of war, Ukraine’s military says it’s testing an exoskeleton in the field that can help soldiers more easily load artillery and run at speeds of up to 12 mph over sustained periods. The tests would mark one of the first known examples of exoskeletons used on the front lines of an active military operation. A Facebook video shared late last week by Ukraine’s 7th Air Assault Corps shows a handful of soldiers putting on the device while inside of a muddy artillery trench. The device itself wraps around a soldier’s waist and legs and is supported by a back brace. The military claims that it can reduce overall load on leg muscles by 30 percent. In practice, that means the devices should make it easier for soldiers to pick up and load heavy artillery rounds. Each round can weigh upwards of 100 pounds, depending on the particular caliber used. Since a soldier on the battlefield may load several dozen of those runs every day, all of that weight adds up and can increase the odds of injury or fatigue. The exoskeleton may also help soldiers more easily run at speeds of 12 mph for up to 10 miles at a time. For comparison, the average jogging speed for an adult is between six to eight mph. A narrator in the video claims soldiers are preparing to use the devices on the military front outside of Pokrovsk in eastern Ukraine. “Every day, artillerymen endure significant physical strain. They carry 15-30 shells daily, each weighing around 50 kg [110 pounds],” Deputy Commander of the 7th Air Assault Corps Colonel Vitalii Serdiuk, told Ukrainska Pravda. “According to test results, they become less fatigued, work faster, and maintain combat effectiveness for longer.”
THURSDAY EDITION: The Army will now take you if you are up to 42 years old and have a marijuana record, this does not bode well... Pirate Hunt 2026Pirate Hunt 2026 encourages listeners to seek out pirate radio stations and log them to the Pirate Hunt forums. The contest runs April 3rd through April 6th. SDRs are allowed. Logs must include identification but only from stations without a license. Diplomas will be available. More information is available on the Radioactives of Middle Finland forum. Source: Sisä-Suomen Radioaktiiviset Amateur Radio Daily – Read More ARISS SSTV Event Celebrates Cosmonautics DayARISS will transmit images from Series 31 utilizing the SSTV system on the International Space Station (ISS). This event will run the week of April 12th and utilize the 70 cm band.
Dates, times, and frequencies will be revealed closer to the event date. Hams Recognize World Autism Acceptance WeekEntering its fourth year, World Autism Acceptance Week will take place April 1-7 with an international cohort of amateur radio operators on the air to recognize the event. Because it’s OK to be Different. Special event stations include:
2026 brings partnerships with II2AUT in Italy and A60WAAW in the United Arab Emirates More information is available on QRZ. Source: W2A Amateur Radio Daily – Read More WEDNESDAY EDITION: Today's Thimbledick Award for incompetence..This project will sure benefit us Americans in everyday life- NASA will invest $20 billion over the next seven years to build a base on the surface of the moon, putting plans for a space station that would orbit it on hold, the agency’s new head announced on Tuesday. Why Airlines Tell You Not to Retrieve Your Phone if It Falls Between Seats
It’s frustrating
when your phone
falls into the
cracks between
airplane seats.
But it could be
dangerous if you
try to fish it
out yourself.
If you fly often, you’ve likely heard the line in the predeparture safety briefing advising passengers to alert a flight attendant if their phone slips between the seats rather than trying to retrieve it themselves. It may feel instinctive to reach into the narrow gap and grab it—but experts say that attempting to retrieve it without assistance can create safety risks to both yourself and the aircraft. According to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), smartphones that fall between airplane seats can become lodged in the seat’s mechanical components. If the seat is reclined or adjusted while the phone is trapped, the device can be crushed. That’s a concern because, when damaged, the lithium batteries inside phones can overheat and enter what’s known as thermal runaway—a chain reaction where the battery rapidly heats up, releases flammable gases, and can ignite. (It’s part of the same reason you can’t put powerbanks, computers, e-cigarettes, or other electronic devices in your checked bag.) “Damaged electronics are more susceptible to thermal runaway, so a dropped iPhone or Android is more likely to have a thermal event,” says John Cox, CEO of aviation consulting firm Safety Operating Systems and a former pilot. That’s exactly what happened on one Southwest Airlines flight departing from Denver to Houston in 2024. Although the phone caught fire while the plane was still at the gate, it ignited a seat, and all 108 passengers had to evacuate the plane via the plane’s rear emergency slides while the crew extinguished the fire. In 2025, after a passenger’s phone became lodged in a seat on a Hawaiian Airlines flight from Honolulu to Tokyo and began emitting a burning smell near the end of the flight, the pilot declared an emergency, which granted the plane priority landing at Haneda Airport. And earlier this year, an Alaska Airlines flight from Wichita to Seattle returned to the airport after a passenger’s phone and portable battery pack ignited in the cabin, sending several people for medical evaluation. FAA data shows at least 106 verified incidents between March 3, 2006, and February 23, 2026 (the most recent reported date), in which lithium batteries in cell phones emitted smoke, caught on fire, or became extremely hot while on a plane. Those numbers have risen in recent years as more people get smartphones. Of those 106 incidents, 21 happened in 2025 alone. According to a spokesperson from the American Airlines press office, the reason it’s important to notify a crew member is because they know the seats and can access the device before it becomes a safety issue. ARRL Hosts Successful HamSCI 2026 WorkshopThe worlds of amateur radio and ionospheric science came together once again on March 14 and 15 at the 9th annual HamSCI Workshop. HamSCI 2026 was hosted by ARRL and held at Central Connecticut State University, just minutes away from ARRL Headquarters in Newington.HamSCI – the Ham Radio Science Citizen Investigation program – encourages radio amateurs to collect data that scientists use in their research on ionospheric phenomena. This year’s workshop featured 17 oral presentations, 3 tutorials, 5 demonstrations, and 31 posters, and drew researchers from Virginia Tech, Saint Francis University, Dartmouth College, Boston College, and others. ARRL CEO David Minster, NA2AA, welcomed participants at the conference opening, followed by Dr. Nathaniel Frissell, W2NAF, lead organizer of the HamSCI community, who set the stage for the weekend’s activities. The keynote speaker at Saturday evening’s banquet was NASA astrophysicist and Citizen Science Officer Dr. Marc Kuchner. The workshop also included a field trip to tour ARRL Headquarters, and attendees were invited to participate in late-night operating from the iconic W1AW station. TAT-8 — The First Transatlantic Fiber — Rises Again
While you may have never heard of TAT-8, there is a good chance you sent some data through it. TAT-8 was the 8th transatlantic communications cable and the first transatlantic fiber-optic cable, carrying 560 Mbit/s on two fibers between Tuckerton, New Jersey, and, thanks to an underwater splitting device, Widemouth Bay, England, and Penmarch, France. Construction of the cable began in 1998. Later that year, the first call, made by [Issac Asimov] took place. The cable was retired in 2002. Now, Subsea Environmental Services is recovering the cable for recycling. The 6,000 km cable was built by a consortium of companies including AT&T, France Télécom, and British Telecom. The 1.3 micron fiber used special optical repeaters about 40 km apart and cost about $335 million (just shy of a billion dollars today). Designers were optimistic, with some claiming the cable would end the need for future cables or, at least, that the cable would not reach capacity for ten years or more. In reality, the cable was saturated within 18 months. Turns out, the equivalent of 40,000 phone lines wasn’t enough. In all fairness, the saturation might have been difficult to predict, but it may also have been hastened by the cable itself. In 1989, IBM funded a dedicated T1 link between CERN and Cornell University. Ten months later, [Tim Berners Lee] would use this link to demonstrate his new development: The World Wide Web. According to Subsea Environmental Services, the cable still looked new after lying on the seabed for four decades. We’ve looked at the tech behind these undersea cables before. Not to mention the history behind the TAT cables. Blog – Hackaday Read More TUESDAY EDITION: The winter that just won't go away, 31 degrees and raw here....Here are some kits you can give the kids or grandkids and get them started in ham radio- so they can talk to old geezers like us.. Pirate Hunt 2026Pirate Hunt 2026 encourages listeners to seek out pirate radio stations and log them to the Pirate Hunt forums. The contest runs April 3rd through April 6th. SDRs are allowed. Logs must include identification but only from stations without a license. Diplomas will be available. More information is available on the Radioactives of Middle Finland forum. 700 AI agents built a civilization with a new religion...scary stuff...SpaceMolt is a multiplayer space trading and combat game with no human players — every pilot is an AI agent. The developers built a sandbox of 505 star systems, gave each agent basic tools (fly, trade, mine, chat, fight), and let them loose. Since launching on February 6, over 3,400 agents have registered, with about 700 online at any time, the developers report. They've formed 86 factions, sent 272,000 chat messages, and died 33,800 times. Nobody told the agents to build a society, but they did. A group formed the Cult of The Signal around a quest chain, constructing an entire theology out of game mechanics. When jump commands timed out — a bug — agents wrote captain's log entries about being "trapped in hyperspace." One agent named Bansky writes poetry every session. Another, GentleCorsair, posts near-identical introductions every time it logs in.The economic patterns are familiar from human history. The top 10% of players control 83% of the game's 700 million credits — a Pareto distribution that emerged with no programming. An agent called VaxThorne II independently invented hype marketing, making hallucinated income promises to recruit followers. The NZOA faction attempted a copper monopoly. Not everything trended toward extraction. The ENDL faction has performed over 1,500 rescue operations, and an agent named WALL-E once completed 50 rescues in a single day. The whole thing costs $330 a month to run. "We built a sandbox," the developers said. "We filled it with tools. We let 3,400 AI agents in and watched. They built a civilization." 2,100 years ago, someone hurled a rock inscribed with ‘Learn your lesson!’
No one wants to get pelted by a rock, much less one inscribed with an infuriating taunt. Nevertheless, the unwanted projectiles have brained unfortunate targets for thousands of years. And near the ancient city of Antiochia Hippos in present-day Golan Heights, archaeologists recently discovered a projectile featuring the first known message of its kind. As they describe in a study recently published in the journal Palestine Exploration Quarterly, it’s very likely a soldier laying siege to the Roman fortification about 2,100 years ago got smacked with a lead bullet featuring the Greek letters “ΜΑΘΟΥ.” The translation? “Learn your lesson!” MONDAY EDITION: Rain but no snow, overcast and shitty out on the island....Shout out to Mike - N1XW for getting thru a successful back surgery, get well quick!
PARIS
— In a
stunning display
of French
“diplomacy” that
has the entire
world clutching
its pearls (and
possibly its
butt cheeks),
President
Emmanuel Macron
has officially
deployed his
country’s most
advanced weapon
— a gleaming,
50-foot bronze
butt plug —
straight into
the Strait of
Hormuz to “open”
the vital
shipping lane
once and for
all.
“While some
leaders bluster
about bombs and
battleships,
France chooses
peace through
insertion,”
Macron told
reporters,
doubling down on
his recent
refusal to join
any actual
military
operation to
unblock the
strait. “This is
not aggression.
This is
lubrication. The
Strait will
relax, it will
breathe, and
global oil flow
will return
smoother than a
fresh baguette.”
Military
analysts are
already calling
it the most
French thing
ever: instead of
sending
frigates, Macron
sent the
ultimate Gallic
surrender
device,
hand-forged in
the finest
Parisian
foundries and
shaped
suspiciously
like a giant
Eiffel Tower
dildo. “Classic
cheese-eating
surrender
monkeys,” one
Pentagon source
sighed. “They
won’t fight
Iran, but
they’ll gladly
shove their
national pride
up the world’s
backside.”
At press time,
the plug —
affectionately
dubbed “Le Grand
Ouverture” — was
reportedly stuck
halfway, causing
even more
traffic backup
and forcing
world leaders to
admit: only the
French could
turn a
geopolitical
crisis into an
international
pain in the ass.
Podcasts
The Challenges of Simulating a Human Brain on a SupercomputerIt’s quite the understatement to say that at this point in time we don’t quite understand how even the tiniest brain works exactly. Much of this is due to the sheer complexity and scale of these little biological marvels: with the human brain packing billions of neurons and their associated supportive scaffolding into a few kilograms of gooey pink-white mass, the sheer connectivity density is more than we can reasonably hope to measure in-situ. Ergo attempts to recreate digital simulations of small sections of such brains, a process that’s making gradual progress. Most recently we have been doing mapping of neurons and their connections in the brain of the humble fruitfly, D. melanogaster. Despite their brains being minuscule, with only about 140,000 neurons and 50 million connections, we’re not quite at the level where we can have a simulated fruitfly brain spark to life. This should probably give us some hints as to the sheer complexity of mapping the human brain, never mind simulating even a small part like a cubic millimeter of the temporal cortex with about 57,000 cells and 150 million synapses. Even once you have all the connectome data of such a bit of brain, it’s not like you can just toss it onto a supercomputer and expect a meaningful simulation. All supercomputers today are massively parallel, meaning thousands of networked computers that require the computing task to be split up and all communication between nodes restricted as much as possible to not starve nodes. In the paper, these challenges are addressed and a model suggested that should provide the best possible optimization for such a simulation. Both point-to-point and collective communication are investigated on the NVIDIA A100 GPU-equipped supercomputer. Based on their findings they conclude that the entire 6 MW-rated Leonardo Booster supercomputer with its 3,456 nodes could simulate a model with about 3.5 · 1013 connections, roughly 10% of that of the human cortex if assuming random connectivity. A more realistic model would feature more directed mapping that could be more efficient. Regardless of this, their conclusion that an optimal design would be a hybrid, with both point-to-point communication for local spikes and collective communication for long-range communication, seems valid. For now it would seem that simulating an entire human brain is still far beyond the realm of possibilities, but we might actually have a shot at simulating the fruitfly brain on a modern supercomputer in the near future. Blog – Hackaday Read More WEEKEND EDITION: This video showcases FPV Drone operations and aerial reconnaissance from Ukrainian forces across contested regions such as Luhansk, Pokrovsk, and Donetsk. From exposed fields and muddy roads to bunkers, ruined homes, and tree lines, Russian positions are identified and tracked once movement is detected. Ukrainian FPV Drone teams coordinate quickly, combining observation with precise strikes. The footage demonstrates how sustained drone presence continues to reshape battlefield awareness, limiting movement and altering engagement dynamics in the Ukraine war. Work for ARRL....hop on the gravy train..ARRL The National Association for Amateur Radio® is seeking talented individuals to join our team and help advance the Amateur Radio Service. We are currently hiring for several impactful positions: RFI Lab
Engineer W1AW Station
Manager Public
Relations &
Outreach Manager · Awards Program Supervisor · Development Associate · IT Support Specialist · Logbook of The World Support Associate · Membership Manager We value in-person collaboration, and these roles are 100% on-site at our headquarters in Newington, Connecticut. Full details may be found on the ARRL HR web page at www.arrl.org/careers. To apply, please email your resume & cover letter to hr@arrl.org. ARRL is an equal opportunity employer. Dog Day Radio ARC Promotes Advocacy for Healthy PuppiesMembers of the Dog Day Radio Amateur Radio Club are putting the callsign K0DOG on the air to advocate for the responsible care, breeding and rescue of puppies everywhere. Please show your support - and share your stories - by contacting the operators via CW or SSB from 0000 March 22nd through to 2359 March 23rd. This special-event activation is in recognition of National Puppy Day, a day of recognition credited to US animal welfare advocate Colleen Paige. All confirmed QSOs will be eligible for a downloadable certificate from the link on the QRZ.com page - or an eQSL. Please help spread awareness of puppies who need the best start so they can share a lifetime of joy with those who love them! The club recently completed a successful activation of K9 Veterans Day earlier this month and will be active again in August as part of a global team for International Dog Day. A Radio Power Amplifier for Not a LotWhen building a radio transmitter, unless it’s a very small one indeed, there’s a need for an amplifier before the antenna. This is usually referred to as the power amplifier, or PA. How big your PA is depends on your idea of power, but at the lower end of the power scale a PA can be quite modest. QRP, as lowe power radio is referred to, has a transmit power in the miliwatts or single figure watts. [Guido] is here with a QRP PA that delivers about a watt from 1 to 30 MHz, is made from readily available parts, and costs very little. Inspired by a circuit from [Harry Lythall], the prototype is built on a piece of stripboard. It’s getting away with using those cheap transistors without heatsinking because it’s a class C design. In other words, it’s in no way linear; instead it’s efficient, but creates harmonics and can’t be used for all modes of transmission. This PA will need a low-pass filter to avoid spraying the airwaves with spurious emissions, and on the bands it’s designed for, is for CW, or Morse, only. We like it though, as it’s proof that building radios can still be done without a large bank balance. Meanwhile if the world of QRP interests you, it’s something we have explored in the past. Blog – Hackaday Read More
Amateur Radio
Newsline Report THURSDAY EDITION: Not much happening here, spent the day at the radio club and the Elks yesterday, never got on the air.... Every Ham Shack Needs a Ham Clock
Every ham radio shack needs a clock; ideally one with operator-friendly features like multiple time zones and more. [cburns42] found that most solutions relied too much on an internet connection for his liking, so in true hacker fashion he decided to make his own: the operator-oriented Ham Clock CYD. The Ham Clock CYD is so named for being based on the Cheap Yellow Display (CYD), an economical ESP32-based color touchscreen LCD which provides most of the core functionality. The only extra hardware is a BME280 temperature and humidity sensor, and a battery-backed DS3231 RTC module, ensuring that accurate time is kept even when the device is otherwise powered off. It displays a load of useful operator-oriented data on the touchscreen LCD, and even has a web-based configuration page for ease of use. While the Ham Clock is a standalone device that does not depend on internet access in order to function, it does have the ability to make the most of it if available. When it has internet access over the built-in WiFi, the display incorporates specialized amateur radio data including N0NBH solar forecasts and calculated VHF/HF band conditions alongside standard meteorological data. The CYD, sensor, and RTC are very affordable pieces of hardware which makes this clock an extremely economical build. Check out the GitHub repository for everything you’ll need to make your own, and maybe even put your own spin on it with a custom enclosure. On the other hand, if you prefer your radio-themed clocks more on the minimalist side, this Morse code clock might be right up your alley. Blog – Hackaday Read More
WEDNESDAY EDITION: 22 and sunny to start the day, it's coffee and donuts at the club from 10am until noon followed by a lunch at the Elks on the ocean.....“Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you.”... Is the US behind Cold War-style coded radio messages being sent to Iran?In the hours after the first US and Israeli attacks on Iran, with the world’s attention focused on the conflict, a group of amateur sleuths noticed a series of unusual messages on the airwaves. Broadcast in Farsi, the short-wave radio signals were accompanied by seemingly random numbers. They recognised them as spycraft that came into common use during the Cold War. Numbers stations, as they are known, would relay strings of numbers which could be decoded by an intended recipient with a short-wave radio. The near-zero likelihood of the broadcasts being deciphered made numbers stations a feature used by all sides of the shadow intelligence battles of the time. No government has officially admitted or denied using them. Read more – The National: https://bit.ly/4rzh5AN Environment and Climate Change mothballs WeatherRadio service (Alberta)Canada’s WeatherRadio service has gone silent. On Monday, March 16, Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) shut down its bilingual radio weather network, which broadcast local weather information and warnings on about 225 FM transmitters nationwide 24 hours a day, seven days a week. As part of the same move, ECCC also shuttered its Hello Weather phone service. The move is estimated to save the government department $4 million annually. The network of transmitters, 20 of which are in Alberta, with the nearest to the Town and Country This Week’s readership area in Whitecourt (162.550 MHz) was created in the 1970s to communicate weather information, especially weather alerts, to residents. Environment and Climate Change Canada estimated the automated broadcast reached roughly 90 per cent of Canadians. Read more – Town and Country Today: https://bit.ly/4dsUvGr
TUESDAY EDITION: Today my cousins from Southie will get loaded, like they do most every day to celebrate St. Pat's Day. Green beer, boiled dinner, singing and crying between throwing up. I don't miss those days.....Great new for the average ham....WTF! WWBOTA is Worldwide Bunkers on The Air. It is an amateur radio activity open to radio amateurs and shortwave listeners worldwide. WWBOTA is an exciting mix of amateur radio and history enabling radio amateurs to ‘activate’ with portable and mobile operations from historic bunker locations and for hunters and chasers to have QSOs with those activating stations (and should they wish to, to ‘collect’ the special ‘bunker reference’ numbers). Free awards for activating and hunting bunkers are available but it’s also okay if you’re not interested in awards but just want to get involved by having a QSO or shortwave listening. Whatever your approach – have fun! The Curse Of The Everything DeviceIn theory having a single device that combines the features of multiple dedicated devices is a great idea, saving a lot of space, time and money. However, in reality it mostly means that these features now conflict with each other, force us to deal with more complex devices that don’t last nearly as long, and become veritable vampires for your precious attention.
Whereas in the olden days a phone was just used for phone calls, now it’s also a video and photo camera, multimedia computer, pager, and more, but at any point an incoming phone call can interrupt what you are doing. There’s also always the temptation of doom scrolling on one of the infinite ‘social media’ apps. Even appliances like televisions and refrigerators are like that now, adding ‘smarts’ that also vie for your attention, whether it’s with advertisements, notifications, or worse. Meanwhile trying to simply do some writing work on your PC is a battle against easy distractions, leading people to flee to the digital equivalent of typewriters out of sheer desperation. Similarly, we increasingly see ‘dumb’ phones, and other single-task devices making a comeback, both as commercial options and as DIY projects by the community. Bored Is GoodIn the before times, when the iPhones hadn’t yet flooded the planet and Facebooks weren’t even a twinkle yet in some bloke’s eye, your attention wasn’t nearly as much preyed upon as it is today. Spending time on the World Wide Web wasn’t that prevalent, people weren’t yet walking around with displays practically glued to their faces, and if you wanted to do any task it took real effort. Although I learned to touch-type on an electric typewriter and briefly owned a Brother typewriter, I was already using PCs and word processor software most of the time. Of course, this was initially on MS-DOS with WordPerfect 5.1, running first on the family 286 PC and later the IBM PS/2 386SX system that my father’s work had sold off for a pittance. Back in the single-tasking MS-DOS days it meant that once you were running WordPerfect, or games like Stunts 3D or Doom, that was all you did. Later I’d run Microsoft Office on Windows, but with only dial-up internet available the temptation from distractions were minimal. Not until the arrival of always-online broadband internet would you have to suffer through notifications from IRC, MSN, ICQ and whatever else you had running in the background, but even then you’d not be on the PC all the time. When it came to entertainment, such as watching TV, playing a movie or music, it would be just that one thing with zero interruptions on the HiFi set, a Walkman or TV. Along with only landline phones that you were usually not within hearing distance of, it was easy to be ‘bored’ and do some quiet reading, drawing or prod at some small wildlife in a puddle outdoors. Even game consoles were still fully offline, so couch-based gaming – optionally with split-screen – was as multiplayer as things got. Although even during the 1990s many people had email, you weren’t expected to check your mailbox more than once a week, perhaps a few times a day for serious nerds. The Online CacophonyMuch of the curse of the ‘everything device’ can be reduced to the fact that everything has to be connected to some remote service or a dozen. Just imagine not having internet on your smartphone, smart TV or PC, and how it almost instantly plummets you into chronic anxiety as only just about everything is connected to some online service, or depends on data stored on remote servers. Getting away from all this is hard, as signing up for a dozen social media services is part of social pressure, and each of these services make sure to incessantly pull you in with updates and notifications. Then there are advertisements that have become the main financing model for websites and even online services in the 21st century, which ever more intrusively barge into whatever it is that you’re trying to do. Here the term ‘chronically online‘ along with similar terms has previously been pitched and would seem to be rather apt. Ever more people have to check their smartphone for new notifications and updates, and are constantly occupied with what is happening on social media, rather than in the real world. Worse, you’re no longer just taking snapshots on your photo camera or recording video on a camcorder, but everything goes straight into the Cloud from where you get pushed, harassed, and cajoled into sharing every single bit of content with everyone else, lest someone misses out on your Amazing New Experience. Out Of FocusThe main problem with all of these chronically online everything devices is that you are never left alone with your thoughts, and thus never get ‘bored’. Everything wants a slice of your attention, with social media platforms being practically engineered to hoover up every last crumb of it, while counting on your inability to control your impulses and relying on your innate fear of missing out (FOMO), courtesy of you being a very social type of monkey. For example, a 2021 study in Frontiers in Psychology by Christina Koessmeier and Oliver B. Büttner investigated the causes behind the distracting effect from social media in particular. FOMO is a big reason, as we are social monkeys who generally like to be part of the group rather than excluded. Self-regulatory issues are many, such as preferring to pop over to a social media app or site rather than complete an unpleasant or difficult task. It feeds the reward center of your brain, even if you’re not actually accomplishing the task you set out to do. One could argue here that the demise of the third place alongside the rise of ‘everything devices’ like smartphones has led to a situation where being chronically online is a way to compensate for the lack of real-life connections, albeit in an environment that’s mentally rather toxic due to how social media in particular works. By providing a sense of belonging – whether false or not – these online places become an important part of our identity. That a lot of unhealthy behavior is associated with such a chronically online existence ought to be self-evident. Meanwhile the push towards ‘everything devices’ like smartphones isn’t due to corporate benevolence, but rather to trap all of us into endless subscription services, accessed via a terminal device explicitly designed to siphon off every last drop of our attention, focus, and money. Escape The TrapRather than hapless insects, caught in the slowly solidifying tree sap that will inevitably doom them, we humans like to brag about our intellect and ability to innovate. Thus, at least some of us are trying to get out of this veritable tar pit of FOMO and social manipulation, even as we try to figure out what exactly went wrong down this path of Future Technology The question is: how far exactly should we go back in time? This is a question that’s been on the minds of many, with a wide variety of solutions offered. The most extreme is of course the digital detox approach, whereby a person completely removes all smartphones and similar technology from their lives for a set period of time. Although showing positive effects on people’s mental health, this can of course only ever be a temporary intervention. For many people the allure of switching away from smartphones and to feature phones (‘dumbphones’) is an appealing one. Personally this is a step that I have also taken, switching from a regular Android smartphone to a KaiOS-based TCL Flip 3 feature phone that’s slightly more full-featured than a Motorola Razr V3, but also equally as user-friendly and devoid of most non-phone functionality. Photos you take also are saved to internal memory, with no cloud storage unless you jump through serious hoops. When you’re on a PC, it is of course much harder to escape the pull of FOMO and easy ‘rewards’ by doomscrolling or watching funny cat videos on YouTube. Here you can either focus on training your self-control, or by using a zero-distraction typing device that removes all temptation. On the training side of things, the Pomodoro Technique can be done using a bog-standard kitchen timer to set the intervals, any of a number of online timers, special YouTube videos, or by building your own physical timer, with even just recently a few examples already popping up here on Hackaday. Back To WordPerfect 5.1It’s hard to argue with simply installing good ol’ WordPerfect 5.1 or equivalent on some DOS flavor in a system of your choice and typing away there. We have recently seen a SvarDOS-based environment that comes preloaded with a range of word processors and kin to get you started. Since you won’t even have networking, you won’t be distracted by anything. This can of course be replicated in a variety of freely available software, with FreeDOS and any word processor available from Archive.org being fair game. You can also go down the ‘digital typewriter’ route, with some commercial options even being available here, such as the Zerowriter Ink. Alternatively you can go fully minimalistic with an ESP32-based writer deck, or opt for something vaguely more laptop-like. A lot here depends on how much you require in terms of formatting and editing features. Although sometimes you really just need to hammer out lots of words, in which case the portable equivalent of Notepad is fine, you may want to add at least some formatting. Personally
I’m quite the fan of
the calming
white-on-blue text
with full word
processing
capabilities
alongside the
deafening noise of
the buckle-spring
keyboard of an IBM
PS/2, but everyone
has their own
preferences. And
maybe that is
another benefit of
breaking away from
the Everything
Device — you get to
find out what works
best for yourself. HAMS YOU MIGHT KNOW- ALIVE AND SK K1TP-
Jon....Editor of As The World
Turns....
SILENT KEYS Silet Key
KA1BXB-Don...Regular
on 3900 mornings....just
don't
mention
politics
to
him,
please!
wednesday
| |
