Also, the buzz surrounding the launch of OpenAI's ChatGPT5 did it live up to the hype?
Peter Marks, software developer and technology commentator from Access Informatics, joined Philip Clark on Nightlife to discuss the latest news in technology.
https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/nightlife/nightlife-tech-talk-with-peter-marks/105700240
Jack VK5KVA kindly tested analog single sideband against FreeDV RADEV1 at a series of reducing power levels. We are 560km apart and this was recorded in the middle of the day on 40m. You'll hear how much easier digital voice can be to listen to compared with analog radio.
I think we could go to even lower power levels and still have a good conversation on FreeDV RADEV1.
An entertaining FreeDV net here in south eastern Australia this morning. I had, unfortunately, changed my microphone from a desktop with a preamp to a cheap headset and got universal feedback that I sounded much worse. In the end I unplugged the headset and just used the microphone in the monitor and it was reported to be vastly superior!
Amazingly there were two stations running QMX QRP radios. They seem to work amazingly well transmitting (and presumably receiving) FreeDV.
Stations seen on air (not all transmitted) were VK5KVA Jack, VK3YV Tony, VK3BRT Barry, VK3KR David, VK3KEZ Bryan, VK3GTP, VK3AWA Daryl, VK5LN Michael, VK4APF Robert, VK6KR, VK2XOR Max, and VK5VC.
Note that I'll be away next Sunday so Jack VK5KVA has kindly offered to be net controller.
Later today, lots of activity in Australia:
Last week I had a chat with Ben, VK3TBS, from the popular Amateur Radio Channel YouTube channel. He's put what I said together with some illustrations of the use of the FreeDV app.
My thanks to Ben for all his work in putting this together.
VK3PCC, VK5KVA, VK5RM, VK2DWG, VK2HJW, VK2DWG, ZL2TJM (rx only), VK5LN, VK3BRT, VK2JXB, VK3KR, VK3RV, VK3YY, VK5QI (the famous Mark Jessop!).
Really great to talk with everyone.
The net begins each Sunday morning at 10:30 eastern time and Jack, VK3KVA hosts an evening net from 20:30.
Some people have used FreeDV in the past and are experiencing the sonic goodness of the new RADEV1 mode for the first time.
Just brought an unused old Intel iMac up from Melbourne. These feel very slow compared to the current M series CPU Macs but they do have a beautiful screen and it seems a pity to sell for just a few hundred dollars.
Anyhow, plugged it in, installed FreeDV and immediately heard a New Zealand station, ZL2TJM making his very first FreeDV transmission. I asked Rob what prompted him to try FreeDV and here is his reply:
Sounding pretty good on 40m from across the ditch from New Zealand. "You won't believe how good eighty meters is on FreeDV".
The iMac is 11 years old and was stuck on macOS Big Sur 11.7.10. While everything worked OK some software for the old OS is no longer being updated including the Chrome browser and, of course, tools like Xcode.
It's not for the faint of heart but after a few hours I got through the process and now have the configuration you see in the About this mac window shown on the right.
One, pretty major, problem I encountered is that it recommended Sequoia 15.7 but when it booted the software couldn't find the drivers and not much was working. It didn't draw the desktop properly and there was no dock.
A bit of searching and I found that one should go back a version to 15.6. I tried downgrading over the working system but that failed so I ended up doing a clean install of 15.6 which is now working very well.
A few small things don't work - I think. One is Watch unlock but that's a bit flakey in normal use. Overall I feel like this machine is getting a second life. It's a wonderful 5K screen and as you can hear from the FreeDV audio above, the speakers are very good.
An 11 year old computer being this good strikes me as excellent value. Congratulations to the good folks behind OpenCore. Make sure you back up your data before attempting this (I did).
We had a good Sunday morning 40m net here in Australia with VK3BRT, VK5KVA, VK2DWG, VK2ATW, VK2BQL, VK5LN and VK7MB.
Two of the stations were first time users of FreeDV. A few problems with audio devices and mic levels but sorted in the end.
There is also a Sunday evening Australia net too starting at 8:30pm eastern time run by VK5KVA.
Just bought a zBitx radio from HFSignals. The attraction is for portable use on digital modes without needing a computer as it has a Raspberry Pi built right in.
Mine arrived, unfortunately, without the microUSB OTG adapter. I've ordered one but thought I'd try to get it connected to Wifi without needing an external screen, keyboard, and mouse.
Following the disassembly instructions (which are excellent) I removed the battery compartment.
The micro SD card is visible and you'll need tweezers or pliers to pull it out (it's not a push to eject style holder).
I plugged the card into a mac and opened the boot directory. The trick is to create a text file called wpa_supplicant.conf in the following format:
ctrl_interface=DIR=/var/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=netdev
update_config=1
country=<YOUR_TWO_LETTER_COUNTRY_CODE>
network={
ssid="<YOUR_NETWORK_NAME>"
psk="<YOUR_NETWORK_PASSWORD>"
key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
}
We've just had the FreeDV Sunday morning net (starts at 10:30am eastern time) and 10 stations were at least seen.
Some stations were receive only and I think some are still getting audio issues sorted out.
It was great to welcome David VK3KR who was using FreeDV for the first time running 5W on a QMX.
Richard, 3LRJ, and I were running an early build of 2.0.2 which includes a handy mic gain slider in the main window.
Recently I've been investigating how to migrate from Google Blogger to Wordpress. The best solution for me so far is by using Google's takeout to get a feed.atom file and use a python script to copy over posts, comments and images.
Along the way, I needed to run Wordpress and my normal approach to this was to install Ubuntu Linux and manually set up mysql, nginx, php, and wordpress. This gets tedious. I've played with docker in the past but was very pleased to find that there is an official wordpress compose.yaml and this makes it very quick to get up and running. (Ubuntu 24.04.2 LTS)
curl -fsSL https://get.docker.com -o get-docker.sh
sudo sh get-docker.sh
sudo usermod -aG docker $USER
# log out and back in then test
docker run hello-world
docker info
mkdir wp-docker
cd wp-docker
# save the compose.yaml file
# from https://hub.docker.com/_/wordpress
docker compose up
Then visit the machine's web port 8080 like http://latitude.local:8080/
The first time you get this:
The two docker containers, one for mysql, the other for the apache web server, already know how to talk to each other. After just a little config we have Wordpress:
The terminal that you did the 'docker compose up' in can be gracefully shut down with Control-C.
To wipe it all, so you can start fresh or get some space back:
docker compose down --volumes
Note that docker is extremely efficient and takes much fewer resources than running a full vitual machine.
Just returned from a few days in Australia's far north. In contrast to the cold and wet here in Victoria, it was around 26C and very pleasant in the pool.
Each morning I walked along the beach and watched the sun come up.
Our unit had a small outdoor area and naturally I took enough gear to set up a WSPR station. Seen here with a long G&T for scale.
My antenna was far from ideal but I did hear some stations.
The QMX is excellent for this task and I can also recommend the Z-match tuner which can match almost any old bit of wire.
Bill on the Soldersmoke blog posted recently with some concern that one day Google might lose interest in their free blogging platform Blogger. I share his concern and wanted to assure myself that there's a way to move all of my posts, images and comments to something else, most likely Wordpress, if suddenly required to.
After much searching around there don't seem to be many options. One is a promising looking Wordpress plugin btw-importer by mnasikin. It's not in the plugin directory but you can download the zip and install it.
This is probably the way to go in the end but currently it doesn't migrate comments. I've reported a few bugs and mnasikin has been very responsive. He even accepted a tiny pull request from me to at least skip comments for now, rather than turning them in to posts.
Wordpress has a very nice REST API and I can see some python code around that makes a nice wrapper for it. I asked Anthropic Claude to write me python to read the Google takeout feed.atom file and migrate posts, images and comments over to Wordpress and it did a pretty good job. I fixed a few bugs but it's working well enough to be a good start.
I've stuck my (our?) code up as a Github gist: blogger2wordpress.py and I hope it helps someone (maybe future me).
Here's a migrated post:
Here's the comments:
Looks pretty good although, undoubtedly there are bugs.
Update: Blocked by Mod_Security
I tried all this on an Ubuntu virtual machine at home and it worked fine. When I tried on a hosted Wordpress site I got this error:
Processing entry 9/20: Why the 30 Meter Pipeline to Norway?
Error creating post: 406
Response: <head><title>Not Acceptable!</title></head><body><h1>Not Acceptable!</h1><p>An appropriate representation of the requested resource could not be found on this server. This error was generated by Mod_Security.</p></body></html>
✗ Failed to create post: Why the 30 Meter Pipeline to Norway?
It seems that Mod_Security doesn't like the Wordpress API being used.
Several days went by trying to get the support people to turn off Mod_Security. Next I ran the script and it transferred 206 posts, categories, comments and images before the host stopped responding. I'm not sure what happened - perhaps some sort of rate limit, or a maximum traffic issue. The host had DDoS protection so it's possible that was triggered.
The script had a one second pause between posts but this wasn't enough and I raised it to five seconds. I still saw a few errors with posts, comments and images. Some were complaints about illegal characters, some images were not liked by Wordpress - I don't know why.
In any case it looks like this script works well enough. Here's the end of the run which went for about 36 hours:
Migration complete!
Posts - Successful: 3757, Failed: 2, Total: 3759
Comments - Successful: 8561, Failed: 324, Total: 8885
Images processed: 3861
Cleanup completed
Peter Marks, software developer and technology commentator from Access Informatics, joined Chris Taylor on Nightlife to discuss the latest news in technology.
https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/nightlife/nightlife-tech-talk-with-peter-marks/105535882
I've had two good contacts VK3-VK5 using FreeDV RADE1 today. Quite a lot of stations on air.
It would be good to have a regular net for Australian stations (and anyone else who can hear us). To start with I suggest Sunday mornings from 10:30am Eastern time.
Speaking of FreeDV RADEV1, there's a great intro and reception demo from popular YouTube channel Tech Minds:
At one point he says "...the new RAIDV1 mode .. in my opinion has to be the best sounding digital mode I've heard to date." Nice.
We've just had the first Australian net (with me as controller anyway). A big success! VK5KVA Jack, VK3PCC Peter, VK5MA Ian, VK5LN Michael, VK2BLQ Stephen, VK2GTS Gary. I could see VK2ABO was hearing us and I had reports from VK3RV.
Talk to you next Sunday from 10:30am eastern time.
Interestingly it also picked up some signals while in flight either during taking off and when coming in to land. I don't think it saw any at cruising altitude.
There was never a good enough connection for a direct message but I did see some traffic on the default channel.
Meshtastic is built on top of LoRa and is capable of amazing range, mostly line of sight. I have much to learn about this technology but the idea of having a way to communicate, either direct or via a mesh network without internet or cell phone coverage is interesting. A lot of nodes are named after the callsign of the ham that owns them.
Artificial Intelligence is the biggest story in tech at the moment. But there are down-sides and unexpected consequences.
One of them has a new name “AI Slop”. In other news, incredible remuneration packages are being offered to attract AI researchers to change jobs.
Peter Marks, a software developer and technology commentator from Access Informatics, joined Dom Knight on Nightlife to discuss the latest news in technology.
https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/nightlife/nightlife-tech-talk-with-peter-marks/105483494
Graeme, VK3CDO, is a friend from the Macedon Ranges Amateur Radio Club. He often shares his knowledge of bushcraft and this weekend we headed off to the Leanganook Campground in the Mount Alexander Regional Park. I took some wire, a squid pole and an UNUN to use with a KX3.
I had a few contacts and registered with POTA.app but really didn't spend much time at it. Enough to confirm that my unun allowed the radio to easily tune up the end fed wire. It was fairly cold and we spent some time, aside from chatting, cooking various delights. (Fried Spam in this case).
My tent worked out well but I'm glad I put a space blanket underneath as the ground was cold.
Graeme has some interesting skills, in particular, he appears to be able to make fire from almost nothing. First he used magnesium to get the fire going.
To top that, he used just a flint and a little piece of scorched cloth to quickly make fire.
It's a nice campsite with lots of space. Being a Friday night I didn't expect many other people but a few did turn up.
I talked about the FreeDV project and demonstrated one of the best performing modes, 700D with its hand crafted (by David, VK5DGR) codec and modulation and then compared it with the new Radio Autoencoder (RADE) which uses machine learning to transmit amazing sounding voice over an RF bandwidth of about 1.5kHz.
There are many applications of machine learning in the amateur radio world that come to mind including:
Today I caught a train from Southern Cross bound for Bendigo. At Footscray a man got on. He looked confused and clearly had almost no English. He was asking if this train went somewhere but we couldn't work out where he meant.
Several passengers tried to figure out what he wanted and when we finally figured out that he wanted to go to Melbourne it was too late, the doors had locked and we were under way north.
Unfortunately for him, this was an express and the next stop was Sunbury, about 40km away.
He slumped into the seat next to me and I showed him on the map where we were headed. He said he had just arrived from Iran and was going to meet his boss. I said I was sorry to hear what is happening over there. Talking to the boss on speakerphone, he explained he'd caught the wrong train. The guy on the other side offered to pick him up! I explained that that might not be the best approach, better to catch the train back at Sunbury.
He asked if I was a technician? I said yes and he told me he was working for someone who worked for someone who was a technician.
The conductor came through checking MyKi cards and my new friend pulled out an infringement notice he'd been given earlier for not having a ticket. (He seemed to think that was a ticket). I spoke with the conductor on his behalf and explained the situation. He kindly let it pass.
When we got to Sunbury a bunch of fellow passengers got up and pointed to where he should go and explained what colour train he should catch to get back to Southern Cross. It was heartwarming to see.
Our train system is confusing, even for me, I can't imagine how hard it would be for a visitor with little or no English. Signs are poor, trains leave Southern Cross on different platforms and you can't find out from within the ticketed area.
I was proud of my fellow Australians today and their open and helpful attitude to a new Australian.
I vividly remember seeing a Macintosh computer for the first time.
At the time I was heavily into CP/M and WordStar. At work we produced a newsletter by printing text columns on a daisy wheel printer. Headings were made by rubbing letters from Letraset. Photos were turned to dots with a high contrast process camera with a transparent dot screen. The pieces were cut up and pasted together.
When I saw a Macintosh with a graphical screen that showed the fonts and graphics as they would appear I was stunned.
Later I learned that it was a programmer called Bill Atkinson who was one of the very clever people who managed to make all this work in the constrained environment of those early machines. Bill wrote low level graphics code that was incredibly efficient. "QuickDraw" doesn't fully capture the achievement. He wrote MacPaint, with its box of tools including the pencil and "FatBits" which influenced all the bit map editors that followed including Photoshop and friends.
Even later, Bill created HyperCard, a user friendly development environment that could be used by almost any computer user. I loved it.
I went to a MacWorld expo in the early 90s. (This is before Apple withdrew to have their own events). To get a seat in the front row for Bill's talk I attended the session before and claimed my seat. He walked in clutching a bunch of gear strung together with SCSI cables.
He told stories about his work including the ImageWriter printer but also talked about the work he'd done to improve the dot pattern that could turn a greyscale image into a pattern of dots that smoothly simulated it. "Atkinson Dithering" it came to be known. He said that one day, when he was working on it, a colleague came to the door of his office and, seeing a nice greyscale image on his Mac's screen - commented that it was great that Apple was going to release a greyscale screen Mac! (Of course, they weren't but the dithering looked very real from a short distance away).
Bill was a visual person. I have a beautiful book of photographs of textures from nature that he published.
Thank you Bill.
New analysis from Mary Meeker finds that we are in the AI boom.
Also a look at the merger between OpenAI and ex-Apple head of design Jony Ive's io.
GUEST: Peter Marks, a software developer and technology commentator from Access Informatics. Listen here.
Like many people I was very excited by QRP-Labs work to bring sideband to the excellent, compact, high performance, digital rig, the QMX. I ordered a built version and have been using it in the field.
My setup, in a small waterproof box is quite compact but I plan to put together a portable radio with a QMX, rechargeable battery and some sort of antenna tuner. For this project I ordered the kit version and have now completed construction. It's a dense six layer board. The surface mount components are all pre-soldered so most of the work is toroids and connectors.
The QMX has built-in diagnostics, including RF bandpass and low pass filters. After my build I could see some problems all of which were due to me not managing to solder to enamelled wire. At times, inspection under high magnification revealed a solder joint where the solder seems strongly repelled by the wire. After a bit of debugging the radio is working well.
On the bench I run it from 12.0V via a linear regulator (I built the 12 not 9V version). (My bench supply of 13.8V is too high. I get 5W out on 80m and about 4W on 40 and 20m. Performance as a WSPR transceiver is really excellent.
If you run in to trouble there's some great resources including Hans' troubleshooting guide which includes a faultfinding log of fixes he's needed.
Also there is an active QRPlabs discussion group where people help each other. I've enjoyed this kit very much and it's a really wonderful radio.
I've been running it receiving and transmitting WSPR almost continuously for about a week. Rock solid. Sometimes reception of my signal is amazing (when there aren't solar flares that kill the bands). Here's a single transmission on 40m reported by 94 stations:
It also receives exceptionally well.
"Season Two of On the Media’s Peabody-winning series The Divided Dial is the untold story of shortwave radio: the way-less-listened to but way-farther-reaching cousin of AM and FM radio. The medium was once heralded as a utopian, international, and instantaneous mass communication tool — a sort of internet-before-the-internet. But like the internet, it also took a turn for the chaotic. And like AM and FM talk radio, it also went hard to the right, with extremists and cults still finding a home on the shortwaves".
THE DIVIDED DIAL EPISODE 1: Fishing In The Night
THE DIVIDED DIAL EPISODE 2: You Must Form Your Militia Units
THE DIVIDED DIAL EPISODE 3: World's Last Chance Radio
THE DIVIDED DIAL EPISODE 4: Wall St. Wants Your Airwaves
First I've heard of The Shortwave Modernisation Coalition which proposes to use shortwave for high speed trading.
I think there is a role for shortwave broadcasting but today I think it should broadcast a hard to jam, easy to receive digital data format.
Thanks to Thomas at The SWLing Post for drawing this to my attention. ABC Radio National, of which I'm a past contributor, has a documentary program called Rear Vision and this week they have a program about the demise of VOA which most of us will be familiar with from our lifetime of shortwave listening.
It's a really well done program with archival material that triggered great nostalgia as a long term listener.
"The US funded international news network Voice of America started broadcasting into Germany in 1942.
It now broadcasts in nearly 50 languages to more than 350 million people around the world.
But in March this year, US President Donald Trump signed an executive order dismantling the US Agency for Global Media - the independent government body that oversees Voice of America.
Now, Voice of America has been silenced for the first time in 83 years.
Guests:
Patsy Widakuswara is Voice of America's White House Bureau Chief and lead plaintiff in VOA's legal case against the Trump Administration.
Dr Nick Cull is Professor of Public Diplomacy at the University of Southern California, Annenberg, and he specialises in the historic role of communication in foreign policy.
Dr Kate Wright is Associate Professor of Media and Communications at the University of Edinburgh and co-author of Capturing News, Capturing Democracy: Trump and the Voice of America by Kate Wright, Martin Scott & Mel Bunce
Produced and presented by Kirsti Melville".
Great work!
The VFO is an Arduino nano and Si5351. IF is at 9Mhz and uses a crystal filter board sourced from AliExpress. Interestingly there is RF preselection using electronically switched capacitors and a varactor diode.
Audio output is an LM386. There's AGC and the radio even has squelch.
What is, perhaps, missing is AM reception.
It is wonderful to see such a project in Silicon Chip.
Peter Marks, a software developer and technology commentator from Access Informatics, joined Chris Taylor on Nightlife to discuss the latest news in technology.
https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/nightlife/nightlife-tech-talk-with-peter-marks/105315754
It was good to meet Chris Taylor who's filling in while Philip Clark is on leave. Chris was one of the Chaser gang and I fondly remember watching VHS cassettes of CNNNN when I worked at CNN 25 years ago.
I've been staying in Tasmania this week, on the north coast, near Devonport and naturally I wanted to bring some sort of radio gear along. The QRP-Labs QMX recently added the ability to transmit sideband. I've had a few contacts with this and reports are good. The QMX (and QDX) are particularly good at FSK modes like WSPR I think due to the direct synthesis rather than audio mixing.
My travel case is quite small and fits everything I need including a pill bottle microphone.
The station was set up overlooking the ocean with a 29' wire pretty much just resting on some bushes.
Operation was on 40m at first but 20m was the standout. I was heard as far away as Europe in the first transmission.
I'm embaressed to admit that the very compact tuner was purchased from China and is clearly a copy of the QRP Guys' Ununtenna Plus. I have ordered the real thing which they say has much better quality toroids in it. The design is good and it's the most compact antenna tuner I can carry with me.
The QMX has a built in tuning mode with SWR display but I find nulling the LED on the tuner is easier.
At first I tried operating inside the house with the wire running out through a metal sliding glass door but I couldn't get it to tune. I think the close coupling to large metal earth threw things off. Operating outside was pleasant and signals were very good.
The Moorabbin & District Radio Club Hamfest must be one of the biggest in Victoria and it's always a good excuse to pick up some parts and catch up with friends.
My feeling was that it was a bit smaller than last year but still worth a visit. I purchased a Bird power meter with a fault (but it came with the needed part). A few pushbuttons and a vintage morse key being sold from an SK estate by Drew. A few impressions of the show:
The in-line power/SWR meter I bought was said to be faulty due to a burnt out diode. The Seller supplied me with a replacement and said he hadn't got around to fixing it.
When I got it home, I opened it up and tested both diodes and they seem to be OK. Attaching a transmitter and it seems to work. I'm not too concerned about calibration so I'm happy with the purchase. It came with 2x N to BNC adapters which are probably worth what I paid for the whole thing.
I headed off early to visit VK3ZZC who's unwell at the moment. We wish him all the best for a speedy recovery. Great to catch up with Drew VK3XU, Peter VK3YPG, Nigel VK3DZ, Dave VK3ASE, Peter VK3YE, Chris VK3AML, Jim VK3ZKK, and others.
