K0SWE Blog

The COVID-19 pandemic has of course kept us mostly at home and away from people for over a year now. But with wide-spread vaccinations, the grip of the pandemic is starting to loosen. Case in point: last night, Colorado ARES R1D6 was able to meet in-person for the first time since February 2020! We worked on initiating ARRL ARES Task Books. Most members of the unit have the training to complete Level 1 of the task book without effort, so we worked on some Level 2 skills like front-panel programming a radio, and taking a field report on an ICS-213 with sufficient detail. It was a lot of fun to see folks in-person again!

I've been switching my focus more to the software engineering side of the hobby. I've been getting more and more involved in  Pat  and have been particularly interested in the form templates features, which has been available as a beta feature for about a year now. I can't take credit for most of the form templates code, most of that was written by Rainer Grosskopf KI7RMJ, but I was able to nudge Pat's founder, Martin Pedersen LA5NTA, into creating a new release. So far, most of the feedback is very positive! There are a couple of bugs to fix and necessary UX improvements to make, but at least it's out there in the world!

I was able to get out for a little while today. I worked a little FT-8, and had planned to do some voice. I started to get a little rain, which I was prepared for. But then the rain picked up an I had to disassemble.

After all that work on Mountaineer , I recently found someone who was working on a similar project:  Digirig Mobile  by Denis Grisak K0TX. It's pretty much identical in feature set, a quarter of the size, is similarly open source  and was designed by an actual electrical engineer who knows what he is doing. After building cables to interface with the TX-500, it's working perfectly! I spoke with Denis over email and he gave me some ideas to improve Mountaineer. I'm grateful, but for now, I think I'm just going to stop development on Mountaineer and guide people towards Digirig. In a way, I'm a little relieved. It was a lot of fun developing Mountaineer and building my hardware skills, but the thought of productionizing it, mass-producing, having to deal with logistics and payments and customer service... It's all more than I really wanted to pursue. I'll leave that to someone with a more entrepreneurial spirit!

With the pandemic seemingly waning, the Golden Gate Dirty 30 was actually able to happen this year! Supporting this event two years ago was the first event I supported as a ham operator, and I was thrilled to get to participate again. This year I was officially part of the RMHAM Tech Team responsible for setting up and operating the IP-over-microwave network. I volunteered to be stationed up on City Lights Ridge. It's not a place that the team had stationed somebody before since it mostly runs itself. However, that site is the lynchpin of our operations, and there had been problems there in the past requiring team members to sprint up the steep trail, sometimes with heavy additional lead-acid batteries. I opted to sleep up on top of City Lights Ridge rather than attempt the difficult hike at 04:30 in the morning. It was a beautiful 36 hours to be up there, and mostly uneventful. Even so, at the end of the event, one of the organizers told me it was a great mental relief having some...

 I got my latest batch of Mountaineer boards yesterday and built one of them. It actually works! Woohoo!