Onno (VK6FLAB)

Anything and everything Amateur Radio and beyond. Heavily into Open Source and SDR, working on a multi band monitor and transmitter.

#geek #nerd #hamradio VK6FLAB #podcaster #australia #ITProfessional #voiceover #opentowork

  • 233 Posts
  • 671 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: March 4th, 2024

help-circle
  • This is what I wrote about this on 2018-01-07:

    What is amateur radio? What’s not part of the hobby and what is?

    The more you dig into this, the deeper the rabbit hole goes. I’ll start with an analogy to set the scene.

    In aviation, Sir George Cayley was the first person to investigate heavier-than-air flying vehicles. He invented the aeroplane in 1799. The first full-sized glider, built in 1849 carried the first person in history to fly, the ten-year-old son of one of his servants. Since then the Wright brothers made their flight at Kitty Hawk. We saw the invention of commercial aviation, the turbo prop, the jet engine, the space-shuttle, helicopters, drones, rockets, hot-air balloons, the Hindenburg, the Goodyear blimps, hang-gliders, gyro-copters and many, many other contraptions.

    Each of those are considered aviation and the person controlling the device is considered a pilot.

    In amateur radio we talk on the radio.

    We also create repeaters and talk on them. We link them together using what ever technology is available. We make it possible to connect to such networks using software such as Echolink, AllStar Link, IRLP and other internet based systems. We create digital networks with DMR, use WSPR to exchange information, make contacts using CODEC2, have contests using CW and Morse code.

    We build software defined radios where we use computers to decode and encode radio signals, test back scatter using all manner of signal processing, use packet radio, RTTY, Hellschreiber and bounce signals off the moon and nearby meteors or an overflying aircraft.

    We make auto-tuners with a Raspberry-Pi or an SWR meter with an Ardiuno. We build valve based amplifiers and program mp3 voice-keyers, GPS lock radios, map propagation using the internet and have a rag chew on the local 2m repeater.

    We investigate 13cm propagation, do experiments with amateur television and we set up radio stations on top of mountains, in light houses and on remote islands.

    All of this is amateur radio, and frankly I’ve only just scratched the surface.

    There are heated discussions about if a linked repeater using the internet to create the link is real amateur radio or not, whether using your mobile phone as a node on the Echolink network is real amateur radio or not, if using a computer to create contacts on a digital mode such as JT65 is real radio or not.

    Each of these questions highlights a misconception about our hobby.

    There are no boundaries in amateur radio. We’re a bunch of inventors, mavericks, people who attempt the unthinkable, try the impossible and make progress.

    There are people who are passengers on planes, and there are people who fly them. There are people using technology and there are people who invent it. We have a unique perspective as a community. We have the ability to imagine something that doesn’t yet exist. Why would you spend any energy on whether that thing is real amateur radio or not?

    Amateur radio is a myriad of things, some of them related to antennas and radio spectrum, some not. This hobby is what you make of it, so go forth and invent something, try something, get on air and make some noise!

    I’m Onno VK6FLAB

    Source: https://podcasts.itmaze.com.au/foundations/20180107.foundations-of-amateur-radio.txt






  • Since radio spectrum is shared globally because radio waves don’t follow political boundaries, it’s coordinated by a UN body called the ITU, the International Telecommunications Union.

    There are a few frequency ranges set aside for so-called ISM (Industrial Science and Medical) use.

    The 2.4 GHz band was set aside for such use and together with Wifi, Bluetooth and baby monitors, it’s used for all manner of other things.

    Since the range at low power is quite short, many devices can share the same frequency and not interfere with each other.

    Here’s some background.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISM_radio_band









  • I moved from VMware Fusion after a hardware failure and migrated to Proxmox. I use VMs to isolate client information and to test and use different OS versions and distros.

    I have a VM that runs Docker and connect to it via SSH for running applications I don’t want to install on my main workstation.

    My main workstation is also a VM.

    I came from bare metal Linux for years and found that I spent too much time recompiling kernels to make it work with my hardware.

    Now that everything is a VM, changing underlying hardware, and even hypervisor is trivial.

    If VMware hadn’t been bought by Broadcom and allowed me to virtualise x86 on Apple Silicon, I’d still be running VMware Fusion. UTM by the way is completely unreliable … I really tried.

    As it is, I’m running Proxmox on AMD.

    in summary, Proxmox allows me to build what I need when I need it virtually and it’s running on a standard Debian host.

    Edit: #$#__# autocorrect (unreadable -> unreliable)























  • Onno (VK6FLAB)@lemmy.radiotoSelfhosted@lemmy.world•*Permanently Deleted*
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    11
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    4 months ago

    I think that unless you have some way to enforce accuracy, it’s meaningless and AFAIK automatic detection tools are no better than chance and to my knowledge, getting worse.

    An AI bot operator isn’t going to tag their material as [AI], more likely than not they’d attempt to use [NOT AI].

    I’d also point out that while lemmy doesn’t (yet) support hashtags, any “tagging” would probably benefit from using the existing method using a #tag.

    Ultimately, you need to ask yourself, is undeclared AI that goes undetected by the community a problem, or the new “normal”?

    I’ll note that I’m not a proponent of Assumed Intelligence and think that when the bubble bursts we’re going to be in a world of hurt, but with a little luck the billionaires will have lost their shirts in the process.


  • When you watch a movie in public with native audio and subtitles and you speak or understand the audio language, you’ll often hear scattered laughter before the main audience laughs because often the subtitles have a delay for the punchline of a joke, which means that those who already heard the joke laughed at the moment it happened, not a second or more later when the subtitles arrive.

    Most of the time the subtitles match the audio, sometimes they change a cultural reference, or infrequently completely get the translation wrong for no apparent reason which can become a new accedental joke all on its own. Then there’s weird ones where numbers like someone’s age or the time are wrong.

    Source: I speak multiple human languages to various degree … and way too many technology ones. I’m also going deaf, so I have closed captioning on most of the time.