Debian Hamradio

I've been chugging away at my Debian Hamradio work! Chirp, Direwolf, svxlink, xastir and gtk-meshtastic-client have all seen upstream updates, with the latter being one I sponsor. There's others too, but those are the highlights.

debian-hamradio metapackages saw some small changes of packages under the metapackages. This came mostly from Daniele Forsi in a merge request I tried to be too perfect over, and delayed for some time but it's in testing now.

Hibbian Packages

I had a bit of a build infrastructure meltdown that's now been resolved, and that caused a pause in things going live on the repo. Since then, linbpq 6.0.25.33 has been uploaded and built for all supported platforms.

Hibbian Live

I've made good progress on the live boot system and used it in the wild at a special event station! A great way to use my own PC for something but not have to worry about people looking at my files accidentally.

I made a custom spin for the Milton Keynes ARC and another group for helping explain Linux for Radio Amateurs, Moving past Linux and getting started, which I'm really proud of. It seems that having everything there is helpful, and being able to boot from a USB stick and not replace windows straight away is a great stress relief for many.

I'm happy to make a spin for your radio club, just ask, it's only 20 minutes of work for me to personalise, or teach you how to do it.

If you want the current testing version, it's available here.

Developer information is available here

Radio at Home

It's been a little while since I did radio at home confidently - I had some work done on the heating and meters in the house in Summer that both resulted in my station being dismantled and my HF coax being severed, along with the paracord I use to keep my HF antennas on the mast has degraded in the UV.

I need to remount everything, rewire, re-drill the hole in the wall etc etc. A lot of work to do - resultantly, GB7HIB is currently dead (and the FAC revoked) - I wasn't getting enough excitement from being in the steady HF packet network mixed with problematic relations with my local packet people led me to not want to put the effort in to undo this.

In it's place, I've been running a LoRa APRS igate - My friend Fraser MM0EFI runs a solar powered digipeter in the hills, and I'm impressed at the RF link from there to me. See more here:

If you ignore the proprietary black box that is the modem/modulation scheme for LoRa, the ESP32 firmware is a fantastic open project by CA2RXU that I'm really enjoying playing with. I have multiple little trackers and the igate at home. The software isn't as slick as Meshtastic, but radio is at its best when you're playing it with your friends, and that's what's drawn me to APRS.

Future Plans

Restarting the website in Ghost with more of a blog format is hopefully indication that I plan to do more here in future.

Step 1 is rebuilding my build infrastructure and repos, as I'm not happy with how they currently run, and then other parts of the system will get reimagined. This main VPS is quite low in resource and ghost is heavy. Maybe it's overkill, but I wanted simplicity, emails and comments.

More, smaller, incremental updates of all the little things I do is the general plan, however.