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.
