[clue-tech] Linux HAMs?

Fri Aug 22 11:48:47 MDT 2008

What an appropriate callsign for you Ed. :)

Mine was WB0GMY.  I got my novice ticket in 1972, then my advanced class ticket a few months later.  Mostly I worked 15 and 20 meters with a little 40 meters.  About 1/2 CW and 1/2 SSB.

My first transmitter was a home brewed 6L6 keyed oscillator.  No, it didn't chirp. ;)  Receiver was an ARC-5.  Ah, the bad old days!  All fed into a tribander at 30' plus a dipole running along the ridge line of the roof.

The first OSCAR satellites were going up about then.  I was intrigued but never made any real effort to connect through them.  I pretty much quit in about 1975 when I went to college, and never picked it up again.  For communications experimentation I used the phone system in various ways.  ;)  Then computers came along and grabbed my interest.

The only real collision for me between computers and ham radio was programming a Commodore VIC-20 to train myself to read 5 letter random code groups at 18 WPM for a civil service job interview in the early 1980s.  Amazingly I passed the test.  What's amazing is that I could never have copied CW at that rate when I was an active ham!

Now it's coming full circle.  I'm starting to dive into DSP in order to find rogue cable modems via RF signature.  Back into the RF world!  

I have done something similar, analyzing current draw in smart cards to discover internal secrets.  Measure the current, apply the waveform to a DSP transform, and you can figure out which branch the processor took.  With enough data points you can reconstruct the code that's executing just by DPA (Differential Power Analysis).

I was just reading yesterday about using multipath as a secondary data channel, now that DSP can sort out the 2 incoming waveforms.  Amazing!

--------------------------------------

Peter Kuykendall

Date: Fri, 22 Aug 2008 11:11:15 -0600
From: ejy at SummitBid.com
To: clue-tech at cluedenver.org
Subject: Re: [clue-tech] Linux HAMs?

Nate (and the group), 

Yes, my callsign is popular with some of my old HF contester buddies. The ones who were into CW contesting especially liked to use my call because when working pileups it's common to just send "QRZ FU" or "FU"  for "who is calling NL7FU" and work the next station. They got a kick because as you know "FU" is also a pretty in your face way to tell someone off, so they loved the idea using the "FU" call. Crazy bunch of guys those old school contesters. 

Sadly, it seems HF and Ham Radio in general is under pressure by commercial interests who covet the bandwidth. 

I often think about how Ham Radio was really the first internet. There are many many similarities.

I've been a ham since I was about 12 years old, and had some really cool experiences talking to people all over the world from Alaska.

I also worked King Hussein of Jordan who was a ham, listened to traffic during the Bosnian war, and worked tons of guys on little islands in the Pacific who always had cool stories to tell. Before the wall came down the eastern Europeans were an interesting bunch to work too. Maybe the coolest QSO I had was with the guy who is a direct descendant of the first mate who led the
mutineers of the Bounty, and who still lives on Pitcairn island. I
didn't know the story, and he related it to me over a long 80 meter QSO. So I first heard the story of the Mutiny on the Bounty from the direct descendant of Fletcher Christian on an 80 meter ham radio conversation. Got to like that. 

All that stuff you mentioned below is completely unfamiliar to me, but it doesn't take much to get me intrigued. I'll have to follow the links and have a look. Maybe one day we'll have an "eyball QSO" and you can demo some of it. 

73 de NL7FU (Ed)

On Wed, Aug 6, 2008 at 4:52 PM, Nate Duehr <nate at natetech.com> wrote:

Ed wrote:

Me too. A crazy TCP/IP over Ax.25 guy, that is. I discovered Linux around '93, and then when I found out that there was going to be a "Linux for Hams" distro based on Debian, started down the road to fanaticism. Back in the day, I had a tnc a dual band ht, and my 486 Linux box serving web pages over Ax.25 at something like 2400 baud I think. When I bought a dedicated data radio I got it up to 9600 baud. Whoo hoo!

I learned all about the TCP 3-way handshake watching it over a 1200 bps (AMPR) half-duplex link (because it was soooooo slow, you could read the traces "live" on the screen) back in those days.  Back when Ethernet packet sniffers were $15,000... but every AX.25/AMPR/IP setup was running one of the "NOS" varieties of software with built in IP sniffing.  Was cool back then.

My latest time-sink is D-STAR...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-STAR

http://www.dstarusers.org - Shows activity, world-wide

http://www.coloradodstar.org  - The locals

Some stuff written for it is in Java and cross-platform.  Other stuff is Windows only.  No Mac-only yet, that I've seen from both open and closed-source developers.  One nice python app using GTK for the windowing, I think.

The manufacturer (Icom) specifies CentOS for the "Gateway" computer, and doesn't even mention that it's derived from RHEL or that you could support RH by buying it... all the way down to CentOS 5.1 screenshots in the (horrible) installation document from Japan.

The Icom-sponsored radio programming software from a company called RT Systems, is Windows-only.

Some serious kernel and hardware hacking.

Hardware here, no kernel...

I sold all my ham gear a couple years ago, except for the Heathkit stuff I built way back before there was such a thing as Linux. I always tell myself I'll get back into it again when the kids are a bit older and I have a bit more time.

That's a bummer.  I've contemplated that "option" a lot lately, but I think I'll keep at least one rig at home and in the vehicle.

Maybe I'll build up another huge HF station up on a mountain top in Alaska and control it remotely via some ridiculous satellite link setup down here in America.

I keep hearing that Ham Radio Deluxe and Skype mixed together with some interfacing of the sound card in the PC to the mic/speaker outputs of the rig, makes for a "just fine" way to remotely control just about any station, as long as the rig is supported by HRD.

Could also use something like Windows Remote Desktop (it passes audio from the remote machine while you're controlling it, a very neat trick) and avoid the Skype part, I suppose.

73 de NL7FU

I bet you used to get some (unwanted?) attention on CW with that callsign ending in "FU"!

:-)

Nate WY0X

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-- 
Ed

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