Amateur Radio

Well .. the time has come for me to spread my wings and explore other platforms.

I moved to Mastodon after eXtwitter became a hotbed of hate. Mastodon is a lovely community, but it doesn't allow for anything longer than 500 characters and if you know me at all, 500 characters is just enough for my general opening paragraph (ha!), so I've been on the lookout for a new home for my activities. I've been playing on YouTube and LinkedIn, but neither really suits the purpose of engaging people in conversation.

I've been using Reddit for about seven years, but the writing for Reddit was on the wall after the great black-out. The final nail is their IPO. I was active on Reddit, so much so that .. apparently .. I'm one of the anointed ones who can buy shares at their upcoming IPO.

Except .. I cannot.

Why not?

Money aside, I'm not a US citizen, and clearly Reddit has no interest in even pretending to be a global community.

If there was any confusion in your mind why Reddit has become an absolute shitshow, that has got to be the cherry on top.

It's not as if they don't know, I still get unsolicited Australian moderator newsletters.

So .. here I am, on lemmy.radio. I've been lurking for a year,and noticed that activity levels here are not high. I'm guessing that this will change over time and perhaps I can make my small contribution to the discussion here.

So .. if you know me, you know why I'm here. However, my head still fits through the door and I fully understand that you might not know me from the bar of soap in your bathroom. Let me assist.

I'm a licensed radio amateur - duh - from Australia. My callsign, VK6FLAB, is real, though the regulator's new system doesn't yet quite know what to do with the callsign I've held since December 2010 .. I'm working on it.

I'm a fan of QRP and I love to experiment. I've been documenting my exploits in a weekly podcast, now called "Foundations of Amateur Radio" .. it's a play on my Foundation license, which permits any mode on a restricted set of bands (80, 40, 15, 10, 2, 70cm) with 10 Watts.

I am a massive fan of WSPR and my (currently) 10 dBm beacon has been heard 13,945 km away in Holland (in Zuidwolder just outside Groningen). I'm looking to attenuate it further :-)

Meanwhile I'm exploring PlutoSDR. My current adventures revolve around running a compiled GNUradio flowgraph on the Pluto itself. This would mean that you could build a flowgraph, export it to C++, cross-compile it and run it on the Pluto.

Said differently, this would mean that you could create any GNUradio transmitter, make it into an executable and upload it to the Pluto where it could run at the full 6144000 bps. (See: https://wiki.gnuradio.org/index.php/PlutoSDR_Source)

If I do this right, I could listen to all WSPR transmitters on all bands simultaneously. Similarly, transmit a WSPR beacon on all bands that my license permits.

So. While all that's going on, I like being on air and making noise. I host a weekly 'net called "F-troop", for new and returning amateurs. Every Saturday at 0:00 UTC for an hour. Available via RF, IRLP, Echolink, AllstarLink, Brandmeister and 10m HF.

I'm still looking for a new home online for F-troop, but that's a story for another day.

73 de Onno VK6FLAB

Edit: Zuidwolder has an "L" in it and my grammar brain needs help proof-reading (x2).