OK. The outdoors weren’t that great this year. There was high humidity, temps in the 80s, and no breeze at all. Inside the camper was like a weird sauna. Not at all typical fare for OSPOTA in my short career. So while I was sweating away in the camper, my wife and the Radio Rottie were out hiking in a stifling forest beset with mosquitoes. Not fantastic. But better than it could be!

The Great Outdoors

We’ve been camping light lately since it’s been the two of us (plus dog) for a couple of trips. We’re getting a lot better at that and that’s probably a good sign. If this had been a regular camping trip and not OSPOTA, my radio gear would have been entirely different. That wasn’t the case. This was OSPOTA. So everything that needed to come along came along.

As with previous years, I brought the IC-705 along as the rig of choice. Why? Because it’s awesome and it’s my little buddy in the field. I don’t have anything else that can touch it. Paired with the Hardrock-50, it’s a really amazing setup. Given that we had shore power, the powersupply and the Hardrock came along for the ride. This is the rare occasion where I go above 5 watts. I even saw the meter on the Hardrock indicate 49 watts PEP! That is CRAZY power! Definitely don’t recommend licking the antenna while I’m sending with that. Speaking of the antenna, I put up the Chameleon with the extension. It just works really well when I’m hopping from band to band and I built the Hardrock with an ATU module so everything matches nicely. It performed pretty darned well, in my opinion.

This picture was taken while I was giving the station a shakedown. I grabbed 18 or so contacts on FT8 before things got started just to make sure I was being heard and that the station was in good order. Data QSOs are not permitted for OSPOTA so those contacts went into the log for my POTA activation which occurred at the same time.

The Rules

I like OSPOTA because it respects my time. It’s 8 hours (1400 to 2200 UTC). SSB and CW only. 80m, 40m, 20m, 15m, and 10m. There are multipliers if you get other Ohio State Parks. Otherwise, it’s all about grabbing some QSOs. Spotting is allowed and encouraged to get the word out. After all, this is a contest that’s about promoting Ohio’s state parks and has been since 2008. That pre-dates a lot of park stuff and makes it a point of pride for my local club, PCARS, who sponsors the event. The rules are simple. The contest is the right length for guys like me who don’t do a lot of contesting, and you can double dip on a POTA activation if you want. Sounds like a perfect Saturday in the park.

New Things?

If you were looking carefully in the station picture above, you’d see a little blue puck. What is that?

I’ve been running a set of Putikeeg paddles as my goto for POTA for a while now. I find that they are really rugged and take my abuse without complaint. Something that has bothered me about the set I have is the fact that everything about them is exposed. Not great for an environment where wind, rain, dust, dirt, sand, and snow might be flying around. I follow K4SWL’s blog qrper.com pretty closely as Thomas puts out great videos that I find very, very relaxing and informative. He put out a question for what people use for their field keys/paddles in the weather. I didn’t find a link to what I bought, but it put me on the trail and I picked up a set. The price is right and they work really well!

Now. Seriously? I have a Begali Traveller. It is probably the most amazing mechanical object in my home. I adore it. But I took it to the park with me for a long time and had an episode where I thought I’d lost it. Never again. I will take it with me on special occasions, but for regular use in POTA? No thanks. It’ll stay on the desk in the shack.

All of that to say that the Putikeeg paddles are NOT a Begali. These are very different paddles with very different use cases and risk profiles. If I lost the Putikeeg? I’d replace it for sure. I’d be frustrated, but I wouldn’t lose my mind like I would if I lost the Begali. And these paddles? They’re good! They perform! They take my slapping around, have great magnets in the base, and this set encloses all of the bits you don’t want wet or dirty. Total win!

Was it a great idea to use that instead of something I knew would work on a contest? No. But it was fun!

Speaking Of Fun…

The other thing I did this time around was pull together a piece of software to do my logging.

Buckle up. This is going to get weird.

I wrote KC8JCLogger because I wanted to play with a Python application and turn a silly utility into a piece of working software. I didn’t really want to make a logger, but that’s how it ended up. This year, I found myself thinking about adding an OSPOTA feature to it. I started to poke at it and then immediately put it into a new application. I did a lot of copy paste from KC8JCLogger and put together a VERY simple UI for capturing QSOs. Callsign, RST Sent, RST Received, and Exchange. Exchange could be NOT (OH station but not in a park), DX (anywhere else), a State for inside the US (works for POTA compatibility but could also be DX), or an OSPOTA Park Code. Really simple.

All of the QSOs get fed into a data table just like KC8JCLogger. But the cool thing I added was a neat UI to show it was connected to Rigctld for frequency and mode data and an indicator to tell me whether or not that connection was working. Sometimes things happen in the field and it’s good to know if something went sideways.

The software also shows the current station data. Where I am, the class I’m working, and grid square. Looks more official with that stuff in the UI.

The neat part? The really neat part? I had it track the multipliers. Any time I had a QSO with another park, it added the park code to the Multipliers area. It also tracked the contact count per band. At the bottom, total QSOs, Multipliers, Score, and Parks worked all show up. It even tracks the minimums.

Maybe the best feature is that it exports to ADIF and Cabrillo at the same time. So I get my log for submission to the contest and something that I can either dump into KC8JCLogger or POTA.app. I also had the robot check the output against the rules and samples and it seems to be clean.

To say I was without a net on this software is an understatement. I started working on it the day before the contest. I did ask the robot to check a couple of edge cases for me and it found a MAJOR bug that would have blown up on my third QSO with a park. So yay, I guess? But this was the epitome of Alpha software. More of a sketch than a program. I will roll this into KC8JCLogger in some form so that I can make field logging faster.

Might also put out the OSPOTA only thing next time around. Share it for funsies for other people who don’t really like any other logging software.

Other Station Notes

I mentioned that the logger pulls rig data from rigctld. I run wfview as my interface to the IC-705. The laptop and the 705 attach to a TP-Link portable router that can run from a USB battery pack. That router in turn connects to my phone for network. Why? So it can get the time for when I’m doing FT8 mostly. With some changes I’ve made to how KC8JCLogger works, it might come in handy. But it’s about the time. Without the phone in play, the 705 and the laptop talk to each other effectively and wfview provides its own rigctld instance that allows the logger to grab rig details on the fly and keep my QSOs accurate!

How Did It Go?

Well, I didn’t get as many contacts as I would have liked. My SSB contacts on 40m seemed sketchy. Part of this was the fact that I was running a vertical whip. That’s not great, even with the boost of the Hardrock. It got the job done, but when the bands got noisy and I got down in the mud, there was no pulling me out. That did bum me out a little. CW was great! I got plenty of contacts and even picked up one of the parks on CW. Love it when that happens. But 40m got loud earlier than I would have expected and 20m didn’t seem to be wonderful. Again, could be me. It could also be that I was at a State Park Campground with RVs around sporting LED strings that create more noise than light. I should have been handing out chokes like a house at Halloween. Alas, it was not to be. There would be some adversity.

That’s fine. Even though it was hot in the camper and there was noise, I still got to sit and tap out code and make contacts with other park enthusiasts. I got some friends in the log like Joe KC1SRI and plenty of hunters who have been there for me in the past.

What I do love most about OSPOTA is that I don’t feel rushed. Usually, if I’m doing an activation with family around, I feel like I need to hurry up and get it over with so I can get back to being with them. There is some truth to that, but also? We’re all there to relax and unwind. If I do that with headphones and paddles? No harm, no foul. OSPOTA just feels different because we’re there for that and it seems to me that making contacts is the thing.

The QSO Map

Take a look at that map. There’s a weird one in there that I need to dig into since I didn’t notice it until I ran it through qsomap.com and that’s the line going down to The South Pole. Something is wacky in there and I bet it’s on the FT8 side of things. Looks cool though! As one might expect, CW looks great, SSB is really close (mostly 40m), and the FT8 is kinda in there all over. I’m pleased with that to be sure.

Lessons Learned

I like to keep notes on what went well and what didn’t. With OSPOTA and the Hardrock, I always bring along my little USB fan. It is the difference between 130F and 98F on the surface of the Hardrock. I just don’t want to have that heat if I don’t have to and the fan doesn’t create any RF interference or too much noise.

One of the PowerPole connectors from the power supply popped off. I fixed it easily enough but it made me nervous. Need to re-crimp that bad unit and maybe bring the PowerPole tools with me for the next contest. Or work out another way to get it into the power disribution box. Yeah, I can hear the PowerPole critics laughing from here. I’m still not changing. It wasn’t that bad.

I need a bigger pad of scratch paper for grabbing callsigns out of the noise. Sometimes you get characters 1-3 and then 5. Logging software isn’t great for jumping around and I don’t want to waste Rite In The Rain log books when scrap paper would do. Something to consider.

I am going to seriously consider a different kind of antenna for next year. The truth is, a vertical whip is great for footprint and I can’t honestly do much else at a campground, but I’m going to think about it. I’d love to put up a hex beam, but that seems like begging people to stop by and ask if I’m a spy or trying to contact aliens. Still, it’d be sweet!

Final

All in all, it was a great trip and a fantastic OSPOTA for me. It’s a great reminder that while not every contest is for me, this one is.

As a reward for reading this far, I present Bella The Radio Rottie!

Thanks for reading and 73!

The Duality of KC8JC is simple: I love state parks. I hate camping in them.

Why is that? Most of the time, state parks drop the sites on top of one another. In the post-COVID times, people have been markedly less courteous in the park campgrounds and it makes me edgy. That’s not why I go camping. I go to get away. That’s why we got the camper we got. It can go anywhere our tow vehicle can and we’ve proven that. I much prefer the remote national forests of Michigan’s upper peninsula. But that’s not less than an hour away.

My preferences and prejudices aside, this was a great weekend and the campground was stellar. The sites were secluded enough and everyone we ran into was great. Given that we decided on rather short notice to get out and have a weekend to relax, this was perfect. Just my wife, the dog, and me.

Yes, this was Bella The Radio Rottie’s first camping trip without our dearly beloved and departed Nacho. She seemed a bit on edge, but also glad to be out and about in the camper where she gets to sleep next to us at night. I did miss my beagle curled up in a ball next to me, so I get it.

Punderson has a lot going for it. I know we’ll go back there when the snow flies as they open the trails to fat bikes in the winter. I’m excited to see how that goes! But there’s no snow in August (in Ohio in 2026) so that’ll wait.

We didn’t get there in time for me to get an activation in before the 00:00z turned, so instead I got things set up at a leisurely place and we cooked up some dinner.

The Gear

This time out, I only took along the TR-45L (with the TR-35 in reserve Just In Case™). I didn’t really feel like messing around with digital modes and when I take the IC-705 I instinctively toss my computer in as well. I also didn’t want to work voice as I don’t like to be That Guy chattering away at the campground and I didn’t know what the scenario would be for operating elsewhere. The TR-45L makes a lot of decisions for me. It says that I’m going to be 5 watts (or less) and I’m going to run CW on 80m, 40m, 30m, 20m, or 17m. We all need that kind of simplicity sometimes.

I generally use the Chameleon whip with extension and ground spike when we camp. It’s much more reliable and less of a pain than putting a wire in a tree. There’s also a lot less to trip over and I don’t feel the need to hang a bunch of little flappy pieces of tape or anything to keep myself from walking into stuff. I can put up the whip, run a feedline into the camper, and toss out some radials. Done.

As for logging? Paper. Paper all day long.

Slowing Down

Operating with the TR-45L changes my entire demeanor. The knobs and switches and that delightful meter puts things in a different time. There are no magical filter settings. There’s just a notch filter and RF gain. No ATU, just a Z-match on the back. Match the line and start tapping. Sure, it does have two memories that make calling CQ for hours easier, but that’s really the end of the list for “Modern Features”. This is a no-nonsense radio and it demands a different approach. At least it feels like it does.

A radio without a waterfall invites me to stare out the window as I call CQ. I also feel like I listen more carefully when there isn’t a screen. Not that I’m giving up the IC-705 anytime soon, but the tempo is different. Maybe this is one of those things that is personal rather than universal. It really is nice to sit and pound out CQ and then wait for the contacts to come in.

And there was a lot of waiting.

The bands during the day were, as I like to say, Hot Garbage®. Noisy. Lots of crashing. It was also a really nice day and late August so I have to think that there were fewer hunters than normal. A quick peek at POTA.app showed that there was certainly not a huge number of activators out and about. There was no hurry. No place to be. More Morse. More tapping. Less stress.

The Activation

I pulled in 10 contacts and called it even. It was a long time tapping to get those 10. I did a fair bit of hunting too. I figured I’d try again after the UTC day rolled over - and I did. That round, when it was darker and 40m wasn’t as noisy, moved a lot faster. But even that was 11 and out. Sometimes, that’s just how it is. And that’s fine by me. I’m sure if I’d had a digital rig, I could have pulled in FT8 all night. But that didn’t fit the mood of the trip. In fact, it doesn’t fit my general POTA mood these days. Ya know what? That’s fine. It’s a hobby.

Speaking of hobby, I still get tickled when I see my silly web widget show me as On The Air.

QSO Map

The maps are just about what I would have expected. I did fairly well on my sub-5-watt setup.

Final

It was a nice, quick trip down the road to play radio and enjoy the camper. I’ll definitely head back to that park and I still can’t believe that I’ve never been. Ah well, it pays to play like a tourist in your hometown.

Thanks for reading and 73!

Where Did This Come From?

I’m not sure when this project fired up, but it’s the kind of thing that I feell like I should have picked up on sooner. Oh well! At least I got to the party. And it is a party.

I’ve gone on at length about Winlink and the many and varied ways to send email over RF. My current GoTo system has been pat with a side helping of VARAHF most days running under a CrossOver (WINE) setup with rigctld as the backbone. Running this on my Mac Just Works™ and it makes me happy. pat on the command line is a dream. Easy to use, quick to configure, and available on any platform in my shack (mobile or otherwise).

For me, a person who is comfortable with the command line and rigctld and all of the other little bits and pieces that go into this process of getting an email sent, this isn’t a significant hill to climb. In fact, pat with its web UI is really, really easy to use. I recommend it all the time. I also spend some time putting together scripts for people that help them get this stuff running with a single command rather than remembering the other stuff. Top that off with a healthy converstation around modems and, well, yeah. In 2026 Winlink still isn’t a slam dunk. That’s a problem.

Enter MacWinlink!

The Promise

Explaining rigctld and rigctl isn’t easy. I do know that when I go to search the web for how to use it, my blog comes up pretty quickly. Yay me! But that also tells me that this isn’t a utility most people live in - at least I certainly don’t! We get it working and then forget what we did to make that one thing work that one time when we were using that other rig on the laptop at the club site and… It’s 2026. We should be able to do better. It feels like this is where MacWinlink is going.

Between the application itself and MacWinlink Helper the user gets everything they need to configure the system and run it within the very comfortable user interface guidelines that Apple has created. That’s huge. Please do not discount that. Ease of use shouldn’t be something that is laughed at or derided. It should be celebrated. I get the sense that’s where this application is heading even if it isn’t quite there yet.

The General Flow

The Helper application can be configured to manage all of the modems. That includes VARA, ARDOP, and even Direwolf. This is The Big Deal. It also can set up its own rigctld session, connect to an existing rigctld process, or go directly to the radio. This lowers the barrier to entry significantly, in my opinion.

Me? I always have my own rigctld running, so I just pointed the config at that and it worked. I had it launch VARA HF and I put in all of the settings (audio devices, license code, etc.) and it handled the rest without me having to invoke CrossOver at all. For my setup, that’s simplifying things and I like that.

With the Helper running, the user can dive into MacWinlink and do exactly what they should expect: draft an email and send it. There are templates and forms already populated. I sent an IC-213 to Winlink Wednesday just today, in fact. The experience feels like using Apple Mail. The forms templates still feel like the clunky HTML constructs that they are, but they’re housed in an interface that makes them easier to use. The template interface is very much like what pat does.

The rest of it? It’s Just Email.

Sending / Receiving

For today’s Winlink Wednesday, I clicked the little send icon after composing the email with template attachment and the application pulled up a VARA HF window. It asked me to select a gateway.

After selecting one that I knew was going to be good, it started the session. It connected, sent my mail, saw that I didn’t have any waiting, and ended.

That’s about it. And that’s all it should be. When it was done, it pounded out my callsign in CW as instructed and I closed the window.

Getting It On Your Mac

There are two repositories and one of them seems to be private. There is a repo that has binaries for beta testers. That’s everyone right now, so this is where you find those:

https://github.com/jjones9527/macwinlink-releases/releases

Pull them down, install them, fight with MacOS because it didn’t come from the app store or a “Known Developer” and get on with it. Yeah, in the latest OS you have to go into the Privacy settings, scroll all the way to the bottom and say, “Yes, I did in fact mean to do the thing I did.” You’ll have to do that for MacWinlink and for the helper application. Not the end of the world, but c’mon Apple. I know what I’m doing until proven otherwise.

Simplicity

I’m going to indulge here a little bit because I did have some back and forth on Mastodon where there is always great conversation and a lot of good thoughts on the hobby and what we do with it. A lot of hay is made over Winlink and how critical it is in a disaster. I’m not going to engage with that on the surface. I’m going to peel that onion one layer.

Something that is critical needs to be simple. A fire extinguisher does one thing. It does it very well in the hands of someone who has been shown how to use it. The fundamentals of a fire extinguisher aren’t complicated though using one correctly does require a bit of practice. Not years of honing technique, but doing it once to see how it really works.

Winlink isn’t a fire extinguisher. It’s fragile. And I don’t mean the server infrastructure, I mean the local stations that send traffic.

I wrote and deleted a bunch of stuff about operating systems here. I realized it’s not germane. I’m on a Mac and this is a Mac application. We’ll stay on topic for a minute (you’re welcome).

Winlink on the Mac is not simple. I’ve mentioned rigctld which takes a minute to learn. I’ve also mentioned CrossOver as a way to run VARA. That’s non-zero investment of time and money. ARDOP requires a lot of mojo to get running on the Mac. What MacWinlink does well is package all of these things so that it can manage it for the user. Find your way through the config once and everything should work every time. I know that as a person who writes code and messes around with other people’s code I’m always screwing up something on my system that makes a script fail. MacWinlink gets me out of my own way and let’s me let things work. That’s not nothing. That’s progress.

Now, I’m not going to say it’s polished enough that I can talk a person through configuration over the phone. Not yet. But it’s headed that way. And it really does feel like they are moving toward a model where the helper app disappears into the application itself. If/when that arrives? We’ll be living the good life!

I’ll also toss in that an app like this, built in a modern framework with modern sensibilities, should be ready for accessibility features used by the OS and implemented in the framework. I have no way to evaluate that myself, but I hope someone out there is paying attention to that facet.

Ignore The Following Criticism (Please)

Also? I’m not one to criticize the naming of projects, but this one is something. All of the ham software that has “Win” in the name is generally irritating and having been a person who had O’Reilly books and plenty of “Learn C++ in 24 Hours!” books as well, I know exactly where that originates. But… I mean… Mac Win Link? What are we doing?

Onward!

Final

If you’re a Mac user and participate any Winlink activities, you should just go download it and play with it. It’s ready for a user like me who holds everything together with duct tape and bash scripts so it’s probably ready for you too.

It’s also imperative to track this project simply to see that there is progress being made in software for this hobby. We don’t have to be stranded in a Win32 mindset. There are people moving things forward and this is a good example of that.

Thanks for reading along and 73!

APRS Scope-Creep

With my iGate up and running and actually doing things with stuff, I was just idly looking at my Kenwood TH-D74A and thinking about how I could use it to send Winlink messages. I have done very little thinking about that other than when I’ve seen others check in to nets using APRS. The TH-D74 has a built-in TNC and I’ve been happily sending test messages. Why not send a quick email?

How I Did It

A large part of this blog is me writing stuff down so that I can remember how to do it later. This is that part of the post.

1. The recipient of the messages is WLNK-1.
2. The first message is: SP email@domain.tld Subect Text Goes Here
3. Get an ack from WLNK-1 that has three numbers in it like: 287.
4. 287 means “Send the second, eighth, and seventh characters of your Winlink email password jumbled with 3 other characters.”
5. Get another ack that says you’ve got about 2 hours before you have to authenticate again.
6. Send your message: Here is my msg. I can go on and on for a bit.
7. End your message: /EX
8. ~Fin~

Resources

I didn’t invent this. I distilled it from other sites:

https://ki4hdu.com/amateur-radio/misc/winlink-aprslink/

https://winlink.org/APRSLink

There are others. I also used the TH-D74 manual (YES! YES I DID!)

Notes For Me

Select an ack from the Winlink server. Hit the MSG key (4) to start a new message to the server.

Don’t authenticate your phone with the APRS.FI app while you’re trying to do stuff over RF. Duh. But…I proved it was a bad idea.

Wait for an ack. Getting things out of order will be a total pain.

Final

Now that I know there’s APRS traffic around me, I’m having a great time messing with it. When I’ve carried my TH-D74 around beaconing and listening long enough, I’ll report back. So far? Lots of fun!

NOTE

Thanks to Joe KB8AP for pointing out that my RSS feed was kinda screwed up. I think I was running a jekyll server session in one window while deploying in another and the directory got clobbered with a bunch of localhost nonsense. I’m not trying to H@XX0R your Gibson. I can’t undo it once it hits a reader, so we’ll just have to be cool and let it age out. I’m pretty sure that’s what’ll happen. Sorry ‘bout that!

73 and thanks for reading!

It Starts As Something Simple

I was cleaning up my office and came across my Digirig Mobile. I’ve used it a bit with my truSDX and another rig just to see what I could do with it. There were occasions to plug it in a few times while camping just for grins and it seemed like a useful piece of gear to have around. But there it was, sitting on a shelf being boring when it could be entertaining!

With the Digirig in hand, I turned around and saw my BTECH UV-25x2 UHF/VHF rig. This little guy was my first shack radio back when I was initially licensed. It’s not a feature rich radio, but when I upgraded (in a big way) to an IC-7100, I didn’t feel bad about putting the UV-25 in the Jeep. That’s where it lived for a long time. Then I swapped it out for the IC-7100 which then fell into a state of not really working and now the IC-7100 is waiting to be boxed up and repaired while the UV-25 is sitting on my desk. Circle of Life? Not exactly.

What would it take to get the Digirig working with the UV-25 and why would it involve buying yet another cable? Because ham radio, that’s why. That might also have been the easiest question to answer in this endeavor.

After some reading online, it seemed way easier to chuck a few bucks at the Digirig crew and get an Official Cable than to wire one up in the spare time that I was planning to burn on getting all of this stuff working. A few days of waiting and the cable was in hand. Let’s plug in and get on the air!

Let The Long Journey Begin!

I plugged the Digirig into the Mac and through the magic of Pure Data I was able to hear the NOAA station through the rig and confirm that the audio chain to the Mac was working. Step Zero was ready! But boy was that signal hot. Really hot. Red hot. Disturbingly hot. This probably wouldn’t be a big deal. Maybe. Shouldn’t be. And yet.

With the rig dialed almost to nothing and the Mac’s input attenuated to almost nothing, the signal was clear. That seemed like Good Enough™.

Direwolf

I’ve run Direwolf on the Mac for some time. I use it when I want to do a little packet radio on Net105 or anywhere else. I’ve got a solid config file and everything works the way I need it to. Running it with two rigs on the same machine meant making a second config. The combined config worked just fine and I’m posting the Digirig/UV-25 portion here so I can find it later:

#===== CHANNEL  — APRS IGate (DigiRig, UV-25) =====
ADEVICE plughw:CARD=digirig,DEV=0
ACHANNELS 1
CHANNEL 0
MYCALL KC8JC-10
MODEM 1200
PTT /dev/serial/by-id/usb-Silicon_Labs_CP2102N_USB_to_UART_Bridge_Controller_b44497deb1c3ec11808ca6f2d297222e-if00-port0 RTS
TXDELAY 50
FULLDUP OFF

#===== IGate (applies globally, not per-channel) =====
IGSERVER noam.aprs2.net
IGLOGIN KC8JC-10 PASSCODEGOESHERE
IGTXVIA 0 WIDE1-1

#===== Control Ports (unchanged) =====
AGWPORT 8000
KISSPORT 8001

#===== TEST Beacon =====
#PBEACON delay=0:30 every=30 symbol="I&" overlay=G lat=XX^XX.XXN long=XXX^XX.XXW comment="APRS IGate test - KC8JC" via=WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1
#PBEACON sendto=IG delay=0:30 every=60 symbol="I&" overlay=T lat=XX^XX.XXN long=XXX^XX.XXW comment="APRS IGate test - KC8JC" via=WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1

You may notice RIGHT AWAY (if you’re paying close attention) that the ADEVICE line is defining the device using ALSA terminology. That’s because where we start is almost never where we end. So just consider yourself extra clever and we’ll come back to this.

APRS Passcode

Oh! To be on the APRS network with something like Direwolf and expect anything to come or go across the network, you need a passcode. That’s the IGLOGIN in the config. Go to this site: https://apps.magicbug.co.uk/passcode/ and you can generate one with your callsign.

Digirig Issues

Receiving worked really well. I sent a message from my TH-D74 and Direwolf decoded it on the command line. That felt great! Huge success! But that’s only halfway there. I needed to find a way to get the transceiver to do the transmitting part.

There is a simple utility CM108 that will flip the PTT on and off in 1 second intervals for testing. I fired it up and waited for my UV-25 to do…anything. It didn’t. Fine. Maybe there was something else at play. As it turns out, there was something (a lot of somethings, really) that I didn’t know.

A funny thing about the Digirig MOBILE is that it doesn’t handle PTT the way that the other Digirigs do. So when you run the CM108 test program you’ll find that the pins it tries to activate just don’t work. I will admit freely that I tinkered with this for a good hour and spent about 90 minutes digging through forum posts and being frustrated by search engines that no long work before I gave in and asked the robot. The robot found a relevant piece of documentation and showed clearly that PTT had to be done via the /dev/serial device.

Hoo boy.

I’m sure there was an easier way to find this, but the rig itself is kinda niche for this application and this is already pretty niche stuff. Used to be that would make it easier to find, but no more. With that addition to the config, I was getting the UV-25 to transmit! Yay!

By the way, the best way to test everything is to make sure your KISSPORT is set and then use kissutil like this:

KC8JC-10>APDW18,WIDE1-1,WIDE2-1::KC8JC-9  :Hello from server{01

That will send a message from the server, out the transceiver, and to the APRS enabled HT on the desk. It’s pretty thrilling to hear the TH-D74 come to life and read off the call of the sending station after a solid decode!

A Few Modifications Myself

But boy was Direwolf upset about the audio levels. Like, really upset. Every message that came in over RF was talking about how maxed out it was even though the decode was fine. Well, as it turns out, the Digirig is known to have some heat for certain rigs. There’s even -20dB attenuator built into the board! It just requires a little physical modification to activate it.

This video shows how it’s done:

https://digirig.net/digirig-mobile-rev-1-9/

Yeah, you open it up, slide out the little board, get a really sharp blade and cut the trace between the two big solder pads.

Yikes.

For a guy like me who uses tools specifically so I don’t break stuff, this was intimidating. It took a long time and very gentle strokes with the blade before I finally got down deep enough to cut the trace. With the two pads measuring an overload of ohms (no continuity) the little guy went back together and WOW did it make a difference. What was once very hot was totally manageable. You really have to resepect engineering things like this into something. Kudos to Digirig (Denis K0TX)!

So Here’s The Thing

Running an APRS Gateway on my daily driver Mac Mini seemed like A Really Bad Idea®. I have a server that I do little experiments on that is pretty stable. That seemed like a better solution. Of course, in my house, if it runs Linux, it’s running Debian Unstable (except for my field tablet that is still running Ubuntu because it works and I’m not made of time). It took almost nothing to get Direwolf up and running. The config was already good and everything I needed was in Unstable. This was probably the step that required the least thought and effort.

Some ALSA Notes

Checking to see that your device is there can be accomplished with a simple:

arecord -l

That will give you:

card 1: Device [USB PnP Sound Device], device 0: USB Audio [USB Audio]

You can do the same thing with aplay to get output devices.

Now, to survive a reboot or upgrade and keep from having to screw around with audio device renumbering, this is a good approach. Start by running lsusb. You’ll get something like this in the mix if you have the Digirig Mobile installed:

Bus 001 Device 012: ID 0d8c:013c C-Media Electronics, Inc. CM108 Audio Controller

The ID is the important part. Creating a udev rule will make it all boot-proof:

sudo nano /etc/udev/rules.d/85-digirig.rules

SUBSYSTEM=="sound", ATTRS{idVendor}=="xxxx", ATTRS{idProduct}=="yyyy", ATTR{id}="digirig"

In the ID listed above, 0d8c:013c would be xxxx and yyyy in the SUBSYSTEM rule.

Then…

sudo udevadm control --reload-rules
sudo udevadm trigger

And run arecord -l to make sure you see the “digirig” or whatever you used in the list. This will make sure that reboots and upgrades won’t go messing with devices in your configs. Works over here anyway!

The Local Scene

One might wonder why one would even think of putting up a gateway around these parts. Well, a couple of years back when I was getting started on Winlink, I found that the online resources would have me believe that I live in a packet radio desert. This seems highly unlikely given my proximity to DX Engineering, the number of ham clubs around, and the ham radio plates I see on cars around these parts. But, the web resources wouldn’t mislead me, would they?

Much like with the Meshtastic experiments I’ve been doing, the only way to know what’s out there is to listen. My Meshtastic node that sits here listening all day and night has pulled together a serious list of nodes. With Direwolf running, I left the radio on all night and found that there was a lot of traffic. Plenty of mobile stations and a few repeaters that were hitting me from multiple directions. One of them being VERY CLOSE.

So close, in fact, that when sending a message directed at my server from my TH-D74 that is two stories below the antenna to the rig, it was grabbed by the other repeater and sent to me over the network before my own station could grab it. In fact, the most maddening part of testing was trying to figure out if the other station was going to snag the message first. Or so it seems. I need to learn a lot more before I can be certain of that, but I can say that it was like flipping a coin to see who would receive the message and deliver it.

I’ll probably look the owner up and send over a friendly email. I like to know my local hams! And I have a thought as to where the antenna might be…

Practice

I had forgotten so much about how to use my TH-D74 for APRS that it’s embarassing. I’d not sent a message in a long time and I’d totally forgotten how to navigate the interface. The TH-D74 is the kind of radio that has more features than a ham deserves and an amazing way to navigate to them - once you know all of your most frequently used menu numbers! But to maintain any level of expertise, one must practice and I had not. There were more than a few frustrating moments that could have been avoided if only the muscle memory were maintained. With a new gateway and all that, there’s little excuse not to send a couple of messages a week to stay in practice.

The same goes for the Mobilnkd TNC4 + IC-705 + aprs.fi app combo. The 705 did eventually end up sending packets and I did remember that there were little things to do like go into the Mobilnkd app before getting started with anything else and setting the PTT to Multiplex on the Audio Output Settings. Forgetting that cost about 15 minutes of staring at the screen and wondering.

This is why Winlink Wednesday is so important. If you want any credibility for being useful in an emergency, everything must be well practiced. I’m not claiming to be useful here, but it’d be nice to have some fluency, ya know?

Final

There’s more to do. I have Direwolf running as a service so it should be good to go on that front. It will survive the inevitable reboots and that much is tested.

I’m going to start carrying my TH-D74 with me and monitoring APRS traffic. That and sending stuff to my station at home as often as I can remember. I’ll also invite any and all hams to send stuff my way and see if it works. I know the internet connection is good and that it will transmit to radios that it has heard since starting. A few weeks of pushing traffic around will have me almost convinced it’s working.

If there’s anything you see here that looks WRONG go ahead and drop me an email. My callsign at this domain will get it to me. Or you can find me on Mastodon @KC8JC@Mastodon.radio.

Thanks for reading and 73!

Back To My Roots

I am a big fan of West Branch State Park - US-1999 in Ohio. It’s a place I spent a lot of time as a kid. We didn’t do a lot of vacations, but we did go to West Branch to swim and have picnics on the beach most weeks in the summer before I hit Junior High School. Going out to the point where I usually operate is peaceful and full of fond memories.

A few years back, they demolished the pavilions in the area where I usually operate. I was confused and reached out to the park. They had a really good reason for everything that they did and I’m 100% behind it. I detailed it here: https://www.kc8jc.com/2023/10/12/west-branch-state-park-update/

All this is to say that I understand that things change. But there are planned changes made by people who care about the place in question and then there are more “organic” changes that might come from the people who spend time there. I think that’s what I ran into on this adventure.

I pulled into the area that has largely been reclaimed by grasses and native plants. It looks fantastic! Lots and lots of pollinators as planned. But what there wasn’t was the picnic table I sit at to do my activations. It was at a point, under a tree that was great for putting up an end-fed wire antenna. That had been the plan for the day. As I walked up, I figured I’d just sit on the ground. I’ve done that before. No problem! But as I got closer, I saw what had happened.

Picnic Panic

Someone(s) decided to relocate the picnic table closer to the water.

Look, it’s a great spot! I love everything about it! But the only way to get there is to jump, skedaddle, or take your chances with a natural “step” made from a couple of loose rocks.

As I age, I become increasingly aware of the fact that every one of us is only able-bodied for a limited time. This isn’t a great setup for a lot of folks and honestly if my son had been with me, I would have insisted that we move it back up to where it belongs because I’m an Eagle Scout and a parody of the paladin who can’t break the rules. My family makes fun of me for it pretty mercilessly.

All of that said, it’s a pretty awesome spot to sit and play radio!

That’s an amazing view.

Set Up and Gear

I really, really, really love the Penntek TR-45L. If I hadn’t picked that up when they were still being made, I don’t think that I’d ever forgive myself. It’s just such a cool rig. It has quirks - like all rigs! - but it also has style. All those knobs and switches and the analog meter…makes an operator happy to be on the air. Today was a day where I felt like taking it into the field for some good clean fun while the weather is nice and I don’t have to rush.

The original plan, as mentioned above, was to put a wire in a tree. That wasn’t going to work if I wanted to sit at the table. And I very much wanted to sit at the table. So I dug into my bag and pulled out my Elecraft AX1. I still swear that this antenna is better than it has any right to be. I’ve heard it derided in several forums and that just tells me that the person running their mouth hasn’t used it. It works. Every time. And I’m surprised by it. Every time. That’s why I carry it with me on every activation. If I can’t get something in a tree or the whip isn’t going to work, the AX1 has me covered. Compact, inconspicuous, and efficient.

Side note: I’ve been watching Thomas K4SWL with that AX4 over on the other side of the pond and I’m paying close attention. Putting one of those into the kit seems like a great idea.

On The Air

I got on the air and it was slow. It was Monday. It was roughly 1300 UTC. I was running 40-meters. It was going to take a minute. The bands were in pretty good shape. The sound of the water nearby was so relaxing. There was a light breeze and it wasn’t even 70dF. Everything was perfect. I could have sat there for quite some time even if I wasn’t making any contacts. I did knock out my 10 fairly quickly. Then I took a nice walk around the area to see what was growing and to just enjoy the scenery. It’s a beautiful park especially when it’s quiet.

QSO Map

I was getting out pretty well for under 5 watts into the AX1. Here’s what it looked like on the map.

Final

It was the perfect morning for an activation at one of my favorite parks. I’ll be out there more as summer gives way to fall. It’s also my favorite park for winter activations. But we’re not going to rush it. We’ll take our time and enjoy the long, warm days.

Thanks for reading along! 73!

What’s Going On Here?

I looked up this morning after walking the dog and realized that I’d not done any POTA activating since vacation at Sleeping Bear Dunes. That’s unusual. For me, POTA Activations are a lot like meditation or regular exercise. I can tell if I’ve gone too long without really engaging because I don’t bounce back the way I should. In short, POTA is a good mental exercise and not doing it is something that I can feel. The flip side of that is that when I do get into the field, I feel great afterward! Even if it’s a quick 10 and out like this activation. I wasn’t even there an hour and I felt completely recharged.

Midnight (Morning) At The Oasis

Now I’ve been hanging on 19 activations of Coopenrider-Kent Bog Nature Preserve (US-9401) for quite a while now. Looking back on how the summer has gone so far, it’s not a surprise. We’ve had weird weather, bad AQI, and a lot of stuff that needed doing around the house. You know, the things that take away from hobby time. Today was the perfect day to drop by, grab 10, and finally cross the 20 activations line with this park. I’ve finally pulled in an Oasis Activator Award for a park that is something like 3 miles from my house maybe? Probably less? I don’t know. It feels dumb that I haven’t gotten a kilo there yet, but it’s a Parking Lot On The Air kind of site and that’s not usually what gets me motivated to get into the field. In any case, it’s done!

Gear

The IC-705 with the Chameleon whip on the Jeep were the order of the day. Easy to zip in and zip out with that setup and it’s really the only viable antenna for the park. I took along the Putikeeg paddes and clamped everything onto the grab bar in the Jeep as is my custom. Everything worked great on a whopping 5 watts of CW fury!

QSO Map

It was 40-meters all morning. The QSOs were coming quickly enough that switching bands seemed silly. It was a pretty good spread for 40-meters. I got RBN reports that had pretty good signals. I’m always excted to be 16dB at 5 watts or less.

Here’s what it looked like on the map:

Final

I’m glad I got out to the park today. I’m of a mind to do a Warthog Rove in the next week or so just because I can (if the weather holds). I might even have some Ham On A Bike activations coming up.

Thanks for reading and 72!

Many of us struggle with that, I think. It’s probably what draws us to Amateur Radio. It’s that desire to dig in and learn new things while at the same time just screwing around. Poking at things to see what they do. Doing things for their own sake. After all, at this point in history, Amateur Radio is really for people who want to have a serving of fun with a side of technology.

The community that comes from Amateur Radio is wonderful. Mostly helpful people who like to go deep and really understand things. People who like to explore. If you spend enough time talking with folks like that, you will - if you’re lucky - find yourself tugging at strings and falling down rabbit holes. It’s a great way to spend some time and stretch the mind. Don’t want yourself getting stiff and achy in a mental way, right?

The Gemini Protocol

Something that has come across my radar more than a few times is Gemini. I’m no stranger to Gopher and I do remember using lynx and pine as my daily drivers (that’s all we had, really) but I’d not really poked at Gemini. I kind of filed it away as being Gopher Part Two which isn’t fair. More and more it bubbles up in my Mastodon feed as a part of the “smolweb”. That is to say, hand made, artisanal web content served up without algorithms and ads and things that are not fun. Well, I like to think I’m fun, so I started to poke at Gemini for a minute. I pulled on that thread and ended up exactly where one might expect.

What Did You Do, Ray?

Man I need to rewatch Ghost Busters.

Anywho, I downloaded Lagrange.

brew install --cask lagrange

With that on Ye Olde MacIntosh, I started to browse around. I found some things that were fun. Stuff that was out there just to be out there. No real interactivity. Just cool stuff. I remember when the web was like that. It was great! Then we started doing dynamic stuff with Perl and it all fell apart. Oh well.

The attraction to that kind of weird fun was just too much. I stumbled across Awesome Gemini which was a road to Agate (it’s Gemini’s birthstone…get it?!). The next thing I knew, I was running a capsule on my internal Nextcloud server. But that was too easy! I looked across the room and saw a Raspberry Pi 3B blinking away. I’d set that up 2 or more years ago as an Allstar node so I could run Echolink. Well, when we got a new internet provider and a new pile of networking hardware I never bothered to fix the routing so that box was talking to nothing. Oops. That made the upgrade from Debian Stretch (WHAT?!) to something more modern less painful.

And side note? Why is svxlink stranded on Stretch anyway? I know my dad has fussed with that for the club’s Echolink server and it just feels like a nightmare. I know things get abandoned all the time, but this feels weird. I did a lot of looking to see if I could keep it running and I just couldn’t. So now it’s a Gemini server and maybe something else soon. Who can say?

Potential

The thing about Gemini is that it’s brutally simple. The syntax is limited. There’s no concept of interactivity. The page is served and that’s it. That’s not to say that you couldn’t write a page or update it with something fun. I dunno, maybe I could use it as a way to spot myself for the 5 or 6 people who are both Ham Radio operators AND have Gemini clients. I mean, let’s be clear: those are My People.

For the moment, I’m going to mess around with it and see where it lands in my technology space. It feels so much closer to something that I want to do than something big and heavy like Wordpress or, well, anything that could call itself a Platform.

Check It Out

Go to that Awesome Gemini repository and get a client. Then head over to gemini://kc8jc.online and see what’s going on over there. I promise you won’t regret it!

Have some fun and thanks for reading!

I picked this little guy up because I saw a bunch of operators on Mastodon were using it. At about $60US it wasn’t that much of a gamble. And frankly, after the scare I had of thinking I’d lost my Begali in the field, I was looking for something that was solid enough, but wouldn’t make me lose my mind if I lost it. This fits into that niche very nicely.

I’ve got other keys that I use in the field. I have some from CW Morse and they’re good too. Lightweight, plastic, easy to work on in the field. But even the metal key I got from them feels a bit lighter than what I’d like. I asked a couple of questions on Mastodon and then hit the buy button. I didn’t quite know what to expect, but this little guy is pretty great.

I have a metal base that I carry around with me and the magnetic legs on the Putikeeg attach in a serious fashion. That thing really isn’t going anywhere. I like that a lot.

The keys take a slap well, but don’t require it. It’s very adjustable and I haven’t found myself fiddling with it too much. I have it Set and am clearly into the Forget portion of Set It And Forget It.

For my activations from the Jeep, I’ve used a crab clamp to hold the metal base and then attach the key to that. It works really well. It also works well on table top with the base or even held in the non-keying hand. I’ve dropped it a few times, tossed it into a bag loose, and probably given it more abuse than it deserves but it hasn’t seemed to mind. That said, I gave it a better home after reading a Field Report on QRPer.com and seeing a picture of the foam from the case’s box that it ships in dropped into a Pelican case.

When I think about some of the things I use for field operations, I tend to go for High Value. Sometimes I pay a little more for something that is just a touch nicer than a lower cost item, but I turn that on its side. Does it really cost more if it delivers on reducing friction or improved performance in some domain? In the case of this set of paddles, I think it is more than worth it at the current price. I’m quite pleased.

This isn’t much of a review and No, I wasn’t compensated for it. I’ve just seen people ask recently about this little dude and I want to say that Yes, You should.

73 and thanks for reading along!

We loaded up our weird Australian camper and pulled it north to Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore in late June. It was a beautiful place to be. The campsite in the D H Day Campground was exquisite. The weather was in the 50s dF at night and up to 67df or so during the day. Perfect for hiking and cycling. If you’re my daughter, it’s even prime weather for swimming in a Great Lake that doesn’t get all that warm.

Gear Talk!

Of course, since we were camping in a property run by the National Park Service (US-0767 for those who care) I brought along some radio gear. Unlike my normal camping operation, I did things a little differently. We were totally off the grid for this one. No shore power at all, so I left the Hardrock-50 at home. Instead, I took along my IC-705 (which surprises no one) and my Penntek TR-45L. Why the Penntek?

Have you seen this thing? Are you asking me that for real?

I’ve talked a bit about this rig in the past and the fact remains that it is absolutely wonderful to work a radio that has everything controlled with knobs and switches. Real knobs and real switches. No submenus. No nonsense. The speaker in it is solid but it really shines with headphones. The receiver is astonishingly good and the darned thing just gets out when it needs to.

The version that I have does have the Z-match option which we’ll get to in a second. It also has an internal battery that I added after I bought it. It’s great! Perfect for taking to the beach.

The Chameleon whip and spike were the setup for camp but I took the AX1 along so that I wouldn’t be encumbered or get in anyone’s way if I decided to work other places in the park - which I did (see photos above).

Modes

I really enjoy working CW. It’s my POTA mode of choice because it’s quiet and doesn’t disturb anyone in the area. In fact, if I have headphones on, you’re not likely to know I’m up to anything other than staring off into the distance or scratching something in a notebook. That’s how I like my activations.

That said, there’s a time and a place for everything. I was in a couple of situations where the bands were absolute garbage and I wanted to get my daily activation knocked out. I dusted off the Surface GO 2 tablet and fired up WSJT-X. It was definitely the right thing to do.

FT8

This was my gateway mode. Living where I lived and having no concept of things like POTA or even mobile operation when I first came to the hobby, FT8 was a great way to make contacts in a high noise environment while I learned the rules. Everyone (myself included) screams, “Just Get On The Air!!!” and that’s great advice! But for some folks, the thought of making a “mistake” or “ruining” a contact for another operator is a lot to tackle. FT8 (and other digital modes, to be fair) take the edge off. It’s a great beginner mode, perfect for less than amazing conditions, and fun. What’s not to like?

So I did a pile of it. Mostly in the late evening, which was early morning UTC, so that I could sneak in a little radioactivity while everyone else was otherwise occupied with sleeping or reading or whatever.

Learning Things

I mentioned the Z-match on the TR-45L. I built one from a kit once, used it a couple of times, and put it in my bag for emergencies. Part of taking the TR-45L along with me was to force myself to really understand how to get a match with that piece of gear. As with most things Ham Radio, I built it up to be bigger than it was. I don’t remember the video or I would link it, but the trick seems to be this: adjust one knob until you drop your SWR and then tweak the other knob watching to be sure that the SWR drops again. Repeat that process until you have a satisfactory match. In my case, that’s when the TR-45L’s angry red light goes away and the cool needle gauge reads something nice and low.

Me? I start with both knobs in the middle and fiddle with things from there. I’m sure there’s a more science-y way to do it, but that has worked really well for me and it’s easy. Not that anything about the process is very difficult, but you do need to remember to turn down the power and work in short bursts. We don’t want to burn anything out, right?

I would call myself quite accomplished with this piece of tech as I was changing bands a lot while using the whip. Not only were conditions rough, they were rough and volatile.

Getting Out

I was definitely getting out on the beach with that little unit running well under 5 watts.

But the activations were slow. Nothing wrong with that! For the most part, I didn’t have anything else to do or anywhere else to be. That’s the beauty of getting out to a place like that. If I wasn’t hiking or on my fat bike, I could be enjoying some radio fun.

QSO Map

Here’s what it looked like. All 5 activations piled up on top of one another.

Final

We ended up bugging out a day early due to heavy rain. We had easily 2.5” of standing water in the campsite after rain that started overnight and wasn’t going to stop that day. While there’s no bad weather (only insufficient gear), the fun to work ratio wasn’t aligned for us. No biggie. We got home with time to put things away and we’d had a great time. Can’t recommend that park enough!

73 and thanks for reading!