Happy to report that much lunchtime work talk went pretty well! Had about 30 people watch, and some questions.

I had a weird glitch in iA Presenter (I love markdown presentation tools so was playing) where the images disappeared, but it has decent version control so I was able to recover.

Anyway, slides and speaker notes are at: https://files.hackerific.net/ham-radio-2025-03-28.pdf (54MB!)

I mainly added the notes to save me if I got stuck, so then I spoke a bit more than planned, and 30 mins was a bit short :alex_grin:

I polished up the text and posted it along with slides to my blog https://blog.hackerific.net/2025/03/29/ham-radio-not-just-for-old-men/

@jamesb@ian haha thanks, those were the stats I could find! I’m getting pretty close to 45 myself!

Tempted to see if ofcom can give me any better info.

@jamesb ahh yeah, that might help a lot, but it’ll be a while assuming they keep to the plan at https://www.ofcom.org.uk/spectrum/radio-equipment/licensing-updates/@ian

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I’m giving a #talk on #hamradio in a few weeks at work, and I’m planning to focus on networks, experimentation and digital modes.

My hope is that I can break the prevailing view that radio is just about old men chatting, by showing a bunch of things software engineers will be interested in.

Luckily there’s so much to talk about that picking what to exclude is the problem!

I think I’ll cover:

• SDRs + construction

• 44net

• meshtastic

• and then a bit on licensing in the UK.

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Hey, @M0YNG do your awesome @alex custom emojis have a license? I’m wondering if I could use a few to mark outgoing links on a radio website.

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Ooh, I see Firefox Developer Edition has native vertical tabs now.

This broke my Sidebery setup but that’s OK, I wasn’t really using the advanced features, I just wanted vertical tabs. Let’s see how well this works 👌🏻

#firefox

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📢 WSJT-X 2.7.0 was released yesterday.

Major enhancements include a new companion program QMAP, new Special Operating Activities “Q65 Pileup” and “SuperFox”, a new “Message System” feature, an option to update Hamlib at the click of a button, and various other improvements.

New features: https://wsjt.sourceforge.io/wsjtx-doc/wsjtx-main-2.7.0.html#NEW_FEATURES

Release notes: https://wsjt.sourceforge.io/Release_Notes.txt

Announcement: https://sourceforge.net/p/wsjt/mailman/message/59131262/

Downloads: https://wsjt.sourceforge.io/wsjtx.html

#hamradio #ft8

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I’m not ready to declare victory just yet but I scratch built a CATS Pi i-gate - https://cats.radio/pages/igate.html - it’s doing something when I run a tx test so 🤞

Some very small 0402 components here but not too many! I used a hot air gun this time but might try my modded toaster oven when I get time to try making the bigger tracker board - https://gitlab.scd31.com/cats/mobile-transceiver

I didn’t find build instructions but handily the kicad BOM has LCSC part numbers.

#hamradio #cats

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The Verge has an article on “timeline” apps - https://www.theverge.com/apps/605756/tapestry-reeder-surf-timeline-apps it’s an interesting read.

I’ve been using Reeder and I’ve tried Tapestry (which I help kickstart) and I can see the attraction, it’s great having a timeline of blog posts, videos, etc that I can just scroll though but I found it pretty useless for mastodon because of the lack of interaction.

Also if you’re the sort of person who wants to reliably keep on top of RSS feeds I think a traditional reader will work best.

#rss

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Just stumbled on this way of telling uv to install dependencies on running a script: https://akrabat.com/defining-python-dependencies-at-the-top-of-the-file/ very handy with https://akrabat.com/using-uv-as-your-shebang-line/

#python

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On my way from a work event at Glaziers Hall in London where I saw this amazing stained glass panel depicting Faraday and Newton. It’s the coat of arms of “The worshipful company of scientific instrument makers”.

I found some interesting information at https://wcsim.co.uk

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I added sticky-backed EVA foam to see if that helps, no issues so far but it’s early days!

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