Running ASL on Debian 13? Time to Update

Here’s the headline: New Debian 13 “Trixie” Kernel Security Update Fixes 68 Vulnerabilities. The takeaway: If you’re running AllStarLink (ASL) on Debian 13, it’s time to update.

1. QRV: Are You Ready?

Welcome to Random Wire issue 194. Sometime in the past week, subscriber numbers hit 2,300…and kept climbing. This was a surprise because a few dozen subscribers ended their subscriptions last week, too.

This week, I got my MeshCore repeater functioning. The problem was a simple on-off switch I failed to see when I put the repeater into service the first time.

I also got a T-Echo (not the newer Plus version) configured as a LoRa APRS Tracker. It is communicating with my LoRa APRS igate/digipeater in the garage.

2. New on EtherHam

• Building a MeshCore Node — Part 2: The Repeater That Should Have Been Easy — Part 1 ended with a MeshCore repeater configured in ten minutes and beaconing right on schedule — a clean win, or so it seemed. Part 2 is the two weeks that followed. I encountered a debugging tool that was quietly resetting the very device I was troubleshooting, my antenna’s blind spot, a paywalled feature with a free workaround that didn’t actually work, and a repeater that went dark for five days over something hiding in plain sight the whole time. By the end, the hardware and firmware check out clean. What doesn’t check out, it turns out, is the ten miles of Pacific Northwest terrain standing between me and my nearest MeshCore neighbor.

• LoRa APRS: Part 2 — LoRa APRS Tracker with a T-Echo — A brand-new LilyGo T-Echo goes dark after a routine firmware flash — no display update, a red LED blinking like an alarm, and every obvious fix leading nowhere. What follows is a genuine debugging rabbit hole: a Windows error that’s secretly good news, a bootloader chase that turns out to be a red herring, an independent firmware swap that finally proves the hardware was fine all along, and a BLE pairing quirk that ends up eating more time than everything else combined. If you’ve ever stared at a “bricked” board and had to figure out which symptoms were real and which were noise, this is that story, from first red flag to a live beacon on aprs.fi.

• Weekly Report: August 6, 2026 — Catch up on band conditions, digital radio news, and the Groups.io digest.

3. My Talk2Me Radio is Working Well

My little Talk2Me PoC (push-to-talk over cellular) radio is working quite nicely. Last Saturday, I had a long drive to a high school class reunion. Unfortunately, that drive coincided with Saturday’s weekly M17 net. The M17 net is always interesting and I learn a lot every time I tune in.

To the rescue: my Talk2Me radio. I already had it set to listen to America’s Kansas City Wide network using Hamlink PoC (programmed into the radio by the vendor). So while driving at 60 MPH toward Tacoma, Washington, I turned it on, turned up the volume a couple of notches, and slipped it into the chest pocket of my shirt. I listened to the complete net during the drive and even checked in from the pickup truck.

I usually pick up the M17 net at home over my hotspot, or with BlueDV on my laptop, or with my M17 radio and an M17 hotspot. Before the Talk2Me radio, I could not get KC Wide over RF while I’m driving in the Seattle-Tacoma area. Now I can listen in and participate, thanks to my Talk2Me STANDARD PLUS radio.

Honestly, I’m quite impressed. Because of this fabulous little radio, I was able to enjoy one of my favorite nets while I traveled to my reunion. The radio? It. Just. Worked. Isn’t that what we really want? For our devices to just work? This one does.

4. My MeshCore Repeater Made the Map

I finally got my MeshCore repeater working. I don’t know why I so often get a product without any instructions, but in this case, there was supposed to be a card inside the box…and there wasn’t. So I experimented for days, trying different things. Finally, I put my magnifying visor on and took a careful look at the boards inside, only to discover an on-off switch! It was a small little slider, hiding from my unmagnified view.

After sliding it to the on position and charging the 18650 battery, I put the repeater outside on top of the gutter. (By this time, I had been up and down the ladder at least a dozen times to place/retrieve the repeater on the roof. Testing on the gutter was a lot easier and safer than climbing up on the roof over and over.) And it worked. It beaconed on startup, but more importantly, it beaconed regularly after that.

About a day later, it showed up on the MeshCore map:

I’m still getting to know how this all works. I can’t reach other stations directly with my handheld device (T-Deck Plus), which is why I put up a repeater. Currently, my local MeshCore chain has three pieces: a repeater, a relay, and an app. The PeakMesh repeater is on the roof. A LilyGo T-Echo Plus at 910MHz with Bluetooth serves as a relay between the repeater and my phone. The MeshCore app is on my Android phone.

I also have a LilyGo T-Deck Plus at 910MHz with internal antenna that is a portable, handheld device. It isn’t a necessary part of my MeshCore chain.

If you happen to be using a MeshCore device, try adding the #etherham channel and pushing a message my way. That would be fun to try.

5. My LoRa APRS iGate/Digi Works

It works! The LoRa APRS igate/digipeater I installed in the garage actually works. The range? Minuscule, but more on that in a moment.

I bought a second LilyGo T-Deck Plus on 433MHz and configured it as a LoRa APRS tracker. Then I went for a drive. My igate/digi (KJ7T-2) picked up the mobile tracker (KJ7T-3) about 1/8 mile from the digi. It works.

But it only works for a short distance. The small external antenna on the T-Deck Plus is insufficient for much range when the igate/digi is located in a basin…and that is what a lake is: a topographic low filled with water. I’m surrounded by hills so that tiny antenna doesn’t stand much of a chance of getting a signal out.

You can actually see the signal strength (RSSI = Received Signal Strength Indicator) drop off as I drove away from my igate/digi (KJ7T-2) yesterday morning.

SNR (signal-to-noise ratio, in dB) is arguably the more meaningful number here. It describes how far above the noise floor the signal actually was, which is what determines whether the receiver can hear it well enough to decode it at all.

Looking at the photo, the oldest is at the bottom of the list of three exchanges. The signal went from -61 RSSI/SNR 7 (strong, near the start of the drive) down to -107/-5 and then to -117/-14 as I drove farther away, right before it dropped out entirely around 1/3 mile distant.

Here’s something worth noting: successfully decoding at -14 dB SNR is a real demonstration of LoRa’s advantage over conventional radio. FM APRS generally needs a positive SNR to decode anything — LoRa’s chirp spread-spectrum modulation (especially at SF12, which you’re running) has enough processing gain to pull a signal out well below the noise floor. That last successful frame wasn’t a fluke; it’s LoRa working as designed, right up until the combination of distance and terrain finally buried it.

I’m considering putting up the dual-band dipole antenna I have on order (note: ordered more than a month ago and my emails to the company are bouncing!) on a pole outside the garage. Maybe I can try a diplexer and run the LightAPRS Gateway on the VHF dipole and the LoRa APRS igate/digipeater on the UHF dipole. Two devices, one feedline, a diplexer, and the dual-band antenna. Just another 10-15 feet in clear air and I’ll bet I can reach at least a mile away on LoRa.

As noted in the New on EtherHam section above, I configured the T-Echo (not the Plus) as a LoRa APRS tracker. The advantage of the T-Echo is long battery life. It’s a small device so I can easily tuck it out of the way inside the pickup truck cab.

6. AI: Trying DeepSeek

I use Claude. I use ChatGPT. At the suggestion of a friend, I’ve started using Gemini a bit more. And now I’m exploring DeepSeek, which I’m finding to be very fast…but also more shallow than those other engines. Whether it will stand up to Claude when it comes to coding, I don’t yet know, but I doubt it. I’ve added DeepSeek to my Open Notebook instance running on my Proxmox server.

One thing to be aware of with DeepSeek: it stores API data on servers in China and its terms permit training on your inputs by default. I don’t plan to use it for anything important, but if you handle sensitive information, you’ll want to bear this in mind if you choose to use DeepSeek.

Me? I still lean toward Claude for the things I do.

7. Short Stack from the Interwebs

Pulled from the aggregated feeds on EtherHam (etherham.com/feeds/), items from July 30–August 5. This Short Stack turned into a Long Stack!

SDR & Signal Hacking

• Scanner Command: Mapping Incidents from Live Radio Calls and ADS-B to Airband Voice with AI — RTL-SDR Blog — A follow-on to DeepSDR: another public-safety-scanner-plus-LLM incident mapper, this time tied to airband/ADS-B traffic.

• Turning a Local ADS-B Feed Into an Easy to Read Dashboard — N3BKV’s Ham Radio Hacks — Building a clean dashboard on top of a SkyAware feed to see what’s flying overhead.

• Large-scale LoRaWAN deployments become easier through QR codes and relays — CNX Software — QR-code provisioning and relay support aimed at simplifying big LoRaWAN rollouts.

Digital Modes & Data

• bkjbbs: A Node.js Packet Radio BBS Library for Direwolf — Hamradio.my — A modern Node.js library for running a packet BBS on Direwolf, with full AX.25/KISS support and TypeScript types.

• Retevis C62 OpenRTX port and the cskburn update — M17 Project News — Progress notes on the OpenRTX port for the Retevis C62, alongside LinHT work.

Gear, Builds & Reviews

• Wanneton UV5F Ham Radio Handheld Dual Band Two-Way Radio Review — Amateur Radio Today — A hands-on look at a budget dual-band HT aimed at entry-level and emergency-prep users.

• The Best Inexpensive HF Antennas for Amateur Radio — Amateur Radio Today — Pushing back on the idea that HF requires an expensive antenna.

• Chameleon LEFS Feather Antenna QRP with the Elecraft KX3 — J-Pole Antenna — QRP field pairing of the Chameleon LEFS Feather with a KX3.

• Build Your Own DIY Compact FM Transmitter — Hackster.io — A step-by-step 88–108 MHz FM transmitter build.

• A Homebrew Workbench from Norway — Please Comment: What would you have done differently? — Solder Smoke — A reader’s shack workbench, with Bill Meara asking for critique.

• But did he really create this device? What do you think? — Solder Smoke — A skeptical look at a dubious “invention” video making the rounds.

POTA, SOTA & Field Ops

• A Wet POTA Experiment: Hunting, Calling CQ, and Changing Modes — QRPer — Mark (KB2PIZ) on how long to stick with a band/mode before switching things up during an activation.

• CE7ET: Mini POTA DXpedition to Rapa Nui (Easter Island) CL-0105 / 3G0YT — QRPer — A POTA activation report from one of the more remote parks you’ll see on the air.

• DF7CW: Field Testing the IC-705 and SOTAmāt in Märkische Schweiz (DE-0083) Before a Swedish Trail Adventure — QRPer — A newly-licensed German ham field-testing gear ahead of a bigger trip.

• The best-laid plans do work out, after you pivot a few times — QRPer — Vince (VE6LK) on activation plans that only came together after repeated pivots.

• More POTA notes, 7/30/26 — KB6NU — Dan’s real-world notes on running down the limits of a 9 Ahr BioEnno battery across activations.

• 9M LLOTA: Malaysia Joins Lakes and Lagoons On The Air — Hamradio.my — Malaysia’s entry into the Lakes and Lagoons On The Air program, with a growing reference list.

Shortwave & Listening

• A New Novel from DXer Ralph W. Perry: Pacific Dream — The SWLing Post — A longtime DXer’s new novel gets a nod from the SWLing community.

• Illustrated Radio Listening Report reaching Nepal — The SWLing Post — Cartoonist Carlos Latuff’s illustrated QSL-style reports have made it further than he expected.

• Radio Prague: “Microphones against tanks” — The SWLing Post — The latest in Radio Prague International’s history series on Czech broadcasting.

• BBC Radio 5 Live Closing More AM Transmitters — The SWLing Post — The BBC continues trimming its mediumwave footprint.

• Pirate Radio on the HF Bands: The Hidden World of Shortwave Broadcasting — Amateur Radio Today — A survey of the pirate shortwave scene for hams who make contacts but rarely just listen.

Podcasts & Community

• Ham College 142 — Amateur Radio Weekly — General exam prep covering transmitter power rules and 60-meter operation.

• LHS Episode #624: National Jamboree 2026 — Amateur Radio Weekly — Linux in the Ham Shack’s coverage of this year’s National Jamboree.

• Amateur Radio Weekly – Issue 432 — Amateur Radio Weekly — This week’s roundup, leading with a Kentucky family suing after a school resource officer seized a student’s radios without a warrant.

• Legendary DXer Bob Locher, W9KNI, Presents Tales from a Serial Sniper Part 2, “Looking South” — On All Bands — Part two of Bob Locher’s DXing memoirs.

• Talking to Silent Keys — With Varying Frequency — A reflective piece on how the community keeps engaging with the memory of hams who’ve become Silent Keys.

• One lump or two (or three)? — KB6NU — Dan’s take on the perennial argument over how many license classes ham radio should have.

Linux, Homelab & Self-Hosting

• Proxmox releases full support for the Arm64 architecture, with a few key caveats — XDA Developers — Arm64 support lands, but access is request-only for now.

• Proxmox ships with a broken repo by design, and here’s the 30-second fix every home user needs — XDA Developers — The rite-of-passage repo fix for every fresh Proxmox install.

• NightRun UEFI application boots a local LLM on Raspberry Pi 5 and x86 PCs without an OS — CNX Software — Running an LLM straight from firmware, no OS required — relevant if you’re squeezing extra life out of Pi-based nodes.

• 3 Raspberry Pi Projects I Use Every Day — Raspberry Tips — Practical, daily-driver Pi projects rather than one-off builds.

• Jellyfin vs Plex on Raspberry Pi: Which Is Best? — Raspberry Tips — A head-to-head for anyone running a Pi as a media server.

• A Mac Mini server is running headless in my closet — it manages my photo library and handles my backups — Tom’s Hardware — A refurbished Mac Mini pulling backup and photo-library duty.

• AppFlowy finally feels like real Notion, and self-hosting it fixed my biggest complaint — XDA Developers — A self-hosted Notion alternative that’s matured enough to switch to.

• Issue 522 – Minimus Releases Hardened Images For Free – What Does It Do Differently? — Awesome Self Hosted newsletter — Free hardened container images, and what sets them apart.

• My router was doing 5 things that I never asked it to, and I wish I had changed them earlier — XDA Developers — Default router settings worth turning off.

• This E-Ink Home Assistant display cut my phone notifications in half — How-To Geek — An always-on e-ink dashboard for Home Assistant that pulls attention off the phone.

• I turned an old Android phone into a Home Assistant voice satellite—no speaker needed — How-To Geek — A cheap way to repurpose old hardware, in the same spirit as hotspot/node builds.

Also Noted (Tech)

• AI enthusiast unlocks and mods BIOS with Claude Code — AI defeats RSA-2048 signature checks and unlocks 55 hidden settings — Tom’s Hardware — A Redditor used Claude Code to unlock a laptop’s hidden BIOS settings.

8. QRT: End Transmission

Radio history

I do enjoy reading radio history, and The Discovery of Radio Waves was an article I found very interesting.

Just proves to me once again that we all stand on the good work of those who came before us.

Claude and CSS debugging

As I was debugging a CSS load problem (the problem being a specific file was not loading) on a website, I started to use a tried-and-true method: turn off plugins one by one, test, re-enable, move to the next plugin. Well, this site has 67 plugins and that takes an awfully long time.

And then I thought: I wonder if Claude can help me with this? Using the Sonnet model, Claude had trouble understanding what I wanted and kept trying to hand it back to me. So I switched to the Opus 5 model and was delighted when — after I gave it permission — it proceeded to walk through all 67 plugins and test them, without me having to intervene.

Claude found one plugin that no longer parsed CSS after the plugin was recently updated. We rolled that back to a previous version, resolving the problem. That saved me hours of digging.

LoRa radio

I’m enjoying learning about this technology. New? Not…but it feels new to me, simply because while I’ve dabbled my toes in the LoRa waters, I haven’t taken a dive like in the past several weeks. It’s interesting stuff, especially how it is able to send and receive data way below the noise floor.

73, and remember to touch a radio every day!

Wow, what a week! Not much time for radio, but the coding bug dug in deep this week.

The Random Wire newsletter is the journal of what I’m doing during the week, and serves as a companion to EtherHam.com where more detailed, technical content gets published. I hope you enjoy both the newsletter and the website.

I enjoy hearing from readers and hope you’ll share what is on your workbench!

KJ7T Tom

1. QRV: Are You Ready?

Coding

Not a lot of radio play this week, as I got caught up in “the zone” while coding for my day job. Two days in a row, I started in on a project and when I looked up, the clock said ten hours had elapsed. It’s been a while since I entered a flow state like this. I kind of miss it. Time flies and the work can be very satisfying. (If you code, you know.)

What did I do? First, I rebuilt an issues-and-actions tracker for work that covers a five-year rolling time period. Then I converted a +800-person directory from a PDF document to an online database embedded in a WordPress site, to help my work team keep our member information updated. This was honestly much more complicated than it sounds.

For the online directory, I also added some protection against scrapers (bots that grab everyone’s email from a website). Emails in the directory are never displayed in the public HTML page, instead being protected by signed tokens and a rate limit with a lockout if exceeded. Clicking the email link opens a “reveal page” that shows the email address as visible text (with an app-launch attempt on top). The reveal links are rate-limited per visitor, so a bot trying to harvest hundreds of addresses in bulk gets throttled and locked out — a real visitor clicking a few links will likely never notice.

And then one of my work teammates cranked up our annual conference web pages and asked for help, resulting in another day two days of revisions and coding. Along the way, I found several plugins that were weighing down every page. Click click, poof — they are gone, and what they were doing has been replaced with some custom fields, Cascading Style Sheet magic, and a few custom-built plugins. I saved a lot of memory overhead and the pages load faster. Yes, satisfying.

Ultimately, we ended up with a group of custom plugins, all nested together under “Conference” in our Dashboard menu. This will help us manage most of the content for our annual conference and business meeting. It will also greatly reduce the repetitive entries we would normally make in the actual HTML pages. That will mean fewer errors and less time spent figuring out all the little gotchas that can be so hard to find in hundreds and hundreds of lines of content.

Radio

I was able to hang out on the M17 net last Saturday, using my Talk2Me PoC radio and, out of curiosity, simultaneously listening with BlueDV on my laptop. The M17 net is always educational, and it’s fun to hear about the continued evolution of M17 as a protocol, in hardware, and in apps like MSeven.

If you click this Talk2Me PoC radio link, you’ll discover a new feature I’m just starting to build out at EtherHam.com: a compendium of the gear I’ve used, reviewed, or recommended. I’m just getting a start on this so content is light. Translation: more to do!

I also finished up my series on push-to-talk over cellular radios and started a new series on MeshCore. Still in process are some articles on DMR.

APRS continues to be on my mind. I run it in my pickup truck on my Yaesu FTM-300D mobile radio…and on my phone with APRSdroid. But I also have the LightAPRS Gateway (a VHF 1-watt fill-in digi and igate) in the garage, and now a LoRa APRS igate/digi (UHF) running about 100 milliwatts. I’m waiting on another T-Deck Plus built around 433MHz so I can play with APRS messaging over the LoRa APRS station.

In summary, it was a week of coding with some radio and writing, too. As Julie Andrews sang:

♫ These are a few of my favorite things ♫

2. New on EtherHam

• Push-to-Talk Over Cellular: The Buyer’s Checklist — Part 4 of 4. Part 1 was the lot walk. Part 2 was my own radio purchase, start to finish. Part 3 was the radio itself, on the bench and on the road. Part 4 is the short version — everything worth checking, without the weeks it took me to learn it. Three articles, several weeks, and my own money all contributed to this list. If you only read one piece in this series, spend your time with this one.

• Building a MeshCore Node — Part 1: Why, What, and How — CascadiaMesh, the MeshCore community covering the Pacific Northwest, promises you can get on the mesh in three easy steps: pick a device, flash it, pair it to your phone. I wanted to test that claim the honest way — buy the hardware, do exactly what the guide says, and see where it actually breaks. Spoiler for Part 1: it worked fine. Flashing a LilyGo T-Echo Plus turned up one genuine hardware-vs-host-computer mystery (solved), and getting a companion radio talking to a repeater took about as long as promised. Part 2, where I will cover building and configuring a MeshCore repeater, is where things promise to get more interesting.

• Expanding Technician Privileges: The Fix Needs a Push — There’s a real, already-written fix for one of Technician licensees’ most common complaints — and it’s been sitting in an FCC docket since 2018. The petition would open modern digital modes like FT8 to Technicians on 75, 40, and 15 meters, plus some phone privileges, with almost no opposition on record. Seven years later, it’s still stuck — not from pushback, but from plain bureaucratic inertia. I dig into why it hasn’t moved, what it still wouldn’t fix (including a telling admission buried in ARRL’s own petition language), and why right now — with the FCC’s current deregulatory docket wide open — is the moment to actually push it through.

• Weekly Report: July 30, 2026 — The usual: Band Conditions, Digital Radio News, Groups.io Digest.

A New “EtherHam Gear” Page

I added a gear page on the EtherHam.com website. As my content catalog grows, I am finding it harder to come back later and find the equipment I’ve reviewed or recommended. Going forward, I’ll populate the gear page with those devices, and then link to the gear listing in my articles.

This methodology should make it easier for visitors to find the items I talk about. It will also make it easier for me to maintain links to items, because those links do change at vendor sites.

The Gear page is produced by a custom WordPress plugin, which was a lot of fun to build.

Frankly, there are already plugins that will add short, custom links to an item, but as I researched them, I found them bloated and complicated. Some require a connection to a third-party service. I also don’t like using anything that says it features “link cloaking.” Even though this is actually a common practice, it just sounds and feels wrong. My plugin is trim, does only what I want, and lives entirely on EtherHam.com. If you run a WordPress site and want the code, drop me a line. It is one PHP file, 419 lines long.

3. On The Bench

Last week, I included this item in the Short Stack:

APRSdroid 9M2PJU Mod: The Enhanced APRS Companion for Android, Built by Hams, for Hams — Hamradio.my — A ham-built mod to APRSdroid. Given the LoRa APRS iGate work on EtherHam right now, this is a natural companion piece.

Well, I installed it. If you go down this road, there are a few wrinkles to be aware of. First, you must uninstall APRSdroid if that is already on your Android device. Second, the app requires granting several permissions, but fortunately, granting permissions is as easy as pushing one button, then tapping “allow” on the ensuing popups.

Enter your call sign and your APRS passcode (just search online for “APRS passcode”) and you’re ready to go.

I’ve been using it in the pickup truck as KJ7T-5 and it is working fine.

I installed this version because it offers the ability to connect with LoRa devices if they have Bluetooth low-energy (BLE) and use a KISS TNC protocol. This means that with the right LoRa tracker, I’ll be able to connect to the other APRS network most amateurs aren’t aware of that runs on LoRa radio at 433MHz. There is a clear, step-by-step guide for this at https://aprsdroid.hamradio.my/#lora.

My 433MHz LoRa device is on its way to me from across the Pacific. I’m just very curious how this will work. One surprise for me was learning that LoRa APRS stations that are igated hit APRS-IS, so they show up on sites like aprs.fi. (Click to see my LoRa APRS station on aprs.fi.)

4. M17 Net Notes

From Saturday’s M17 net on America’s Kansas City Wide network.

• M17 is a digital voice and data protocol with hardware and software solutions.

• The LinHT handheld transceiver continues to move forward. Uses GNU Radio software.

• Other software that runs M17 includes DroidStar, the MSeven app, and QSO One.

The M17-KCW reflector carries primary KC Wide network traffic on module A (M17-KCW A). The B module on M17-KCW (also called “the B side”) is for M17 only; it is not connected to the A side. In the screenshot below, you can see some stations on module A and on B in the right-hand side of the reflector dashboard.

There is also a great service offered through KC Wide: seeing your live audio level. Find this at https://level.kansascitywide.com/. The interface looks like this:

There was very interesting commentary about FreeDV on HF and 2-meter sideband. Exploring FreeDV is on my list of things to dig into.

The net closed with some conversation in the net chat about radiograms. Some of the helpful links that were shared in the chat are:

• https://nts2.arrl.org/radiogram-portal-quick-start/

• https://nts2.arrl.org/radiogram/

• https://apps.apple.com/us/app/nts-radio/id1204567739

5. Short Stack from the Interwebs

Pulled from the aggregated feeds on EtherHam (etherham.com/feeds/), items from July 28–30.

SDR

• Testing Airspy’s New WebSpy Web SDR Interface with an RTL-SDR — RTL-SDR Blog — A look at Airspy’s new browser-based SDR interface.

• Building a $50 BOM Software Defined Radio with a HT9201 20 MHz ADC and an FX2LP USB Controller Clone — RTL-SDR Blog — Budget homebrew SDR build, bill-of-materials and all.

• Radio Silence: A Native iOS App for Listening to Public KiwiSDRs — RTL-SDR Blog — A dedicated iOS client for the public KiwiSDR network.

• TunerScope: A Browser App to Help Optimize HDTV Antenna Positioning with an RTL-SDR — RTL-SDR Blog — Clever repurposing of an RTL-SDR as an antenna-aiming tool.

• DeepSDR Updates: Live Public Safety Incident Map with an RTL-SDR, Whisper and an LLM — RTL-SDR Blog — RTL-SDR plus Whisper transcription plus an LLM, mapped live. The standout item this week.

Digital Modes & RTTY

• H-Mode: An Open HF Digital Mode That Turns Errors Into Ionospheric Measurements — Hamradio.my — A new open digital mode that uses decode errors themselves as ionospheric data.

• Someone Turned a Sony PSP Into an RTTY Encoder — Hamradio.my — Exactly what it sounds like, and a fun homebrew read.

• 5D Web Programmer: A Free, In-Browser Codeplug Editor for the Yaesu FT-5D — Hamradio.my — Open-source, browser-based codeplug editing — no vendor software required.

Shortwave & Listening

• RTI French Service Announces August 2026 Shortwave Broadcasts to Europe and North Africa — The SWLing Post — Fresh broadcast schedule for shortwave listeners.

• Japan Times: The Uncertain Future of Shiokaze’s Shortwave Broadcasts — The SWLing Post — A look at the funding and future of the Shiokaze shortwave service.

• Carlos’ Illustrated Radio Listening Report and Recording of Multiple Stations (July 21–28, 2026) — The SWLing Post — A week’s worth of DX catches with recordings.

Podcasts & Community

• HRWB 268 – Diversity Reception with Dave AB7E — Ham Radio Workbench — Podcast episode on diversity reception techniques.

• Ham Radio and the Possibility of Internet Over Ham Radio — Amateur Radio Today — A think piece on running internet traffic over ham bands.

• Two Big Store Updates: Ship with DHL or UPS, and Taking PayPal Payments — TAPR — Practical update from the Tucson Amateur Packet Radio store.

Also Noted (Tech)

• Amazon Accidentally Spent $1.8 Million Using Claude for Menial Coding Task, Went 860% Over Budget — Tom’s Hardware — A cautionary tale on agentic AI cost management.

• These 3 Raspberry Pi Projects Solve Real Problems — and One Brings Back Cassette Nostalgia — How-To Geek — Relevant to anyone running Pi-based nodes or hotspots.

• PSA: Your Watch Band May Be Messing With Your Laptop — Tom’s Hardware — Magnetic clasps triggering laptop lid sensors — a weird, easy-to-miss gotcha.

6. QRT: End Transmission

Plumbing, part 3. Get a dehumidifier, the plumber said, so I did. And I went low cost:

Dehumidifiers for Home, 1000 Sq.Ft Dehumidifier with 95oz Water Tank, Quiet Dehumidifier for Basement Bathroom Bedroom with 7-Color Ambient Light & Auto Shut Off, Sliver (this is an affiliate link)

The device has been pulling about a cup-and-a-half of water out of the air daily. It’s not silent — the fan noise is like white noise in the background, not really unpleasant at all. It remains on during my Zoom calls without disturbing me or the people on the call. The good-sized water tank and the automatic shutoff were key factors in my choice.

And the new moisture meter did arrive:

Klein Tools ET140 Pinless Moisture Meter for Non-Destructive Moisture Detection in Drywall, Wood, and Masonry; Detects up to 3/4-Inch Below Surface (this is an affiliate link)

Since I’m trying to sense moisture underneath the old linoleum flooring, I’m using the drywall setting. I don’t get exact/true measurements this way, but I do get relative measurements by comparing a known dry area against a suspected damp area. A week ago, the areas affected by the leak were about 10% higher moisture than the dry areas. As of today, measurements in the damp spots show about 6% more moisture. Meanwhile, the dehumidifier continues to pull moisture out. I’m guessing I’ll be ready to try the heat gun in about a week. I’m hoping this will let me flatten the tiles, and if I’m really lucky, the existing mastic will re-adhere to those lifted edges.

And with that, it’s time to say 73 and send my best wishes to you for a great radio-focused week ahead!

Remember to touch a radio every day!

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Notice for HamClock Users

I found a message from N0LSR in my junk mail folder yesterday, and it was important. It’s about the failing Clear Sky Institute server. If you are an Inovato or N0LSR HamClock customer, “all users must switch to the new OHB (Open HamClock Backend) to ensure continued updates and reliable operation.” Find more information on the N0LSR home page.

There’s a quick way to tell if you are on the correct server: “If you are currently on any version below 4.26 and do not get the upgrade offered to 4.27 then you are on the wrong backend server.”

Once upgraded, the version will say 4.27 and you’ll see an envelope just below the version number. Click on the envelope icon for a status message.

1. QRV: Are You Ready?

It may seem as if there is little radio content in this issue, but that’s because the bulk of my radio work landed on EtherHam.com this week. Specifically, I took several days to develop a detailed hands-on look at my new Talk2Me push-to-talk over cellular radio. The pointer for that is below in the New on EtherHam section. If you’re interested in PoC radios, you’ll find this worth your time.

After looking at how these radios and services are marketed, how the ordering and fulfillment process actually happens from the end-user point of view, and how the radio and service function, I’ve concluded: this is not a mature market. Several companies are vying for your dollars. The actual hardware and services offered are in a state of continuous change, so I think it is very difficult for a vendor to keep up with onboarding information, documentation, and even fulfillment steps. This shouldn’t dissuade you from entering this space if you are interested in PoC radio, but do be prepared for a rockier process, from start to finish, than you may be used to experiencing with mainstream amateur radio products. Why would you do this? Because PoC radios can offer an unprecedented level of connectivity and convenience.

2. New on EtherHam

• Push-to-Talk Over Cellular: Hands-On with a Modern PoC Radio — Part 3 in a series. My radio arrived with no instructions. I learned how to use it by pushing every button and chasing every menu. Thirty minutes to enter a WiFi password. An SOS mode hiding behind the flashlight button. A Bluetooth pairing that is not obvious how to undo. And when I finally found the official manual online, it described a radio with no WiFi and no Bluetooth — not the radio I bought. The device itself works, and it puts Kansas City Wide in my pocket, at home on my network and while I’m on the road. Should you buy it? Overall, I’m happy with the device and the service.

• Building a LoRa APRS iGate/Digipeater — Part 1: Why, What, and How — I already run conventional VHF APRS from the lake house, so when I heard about LoRa APRS, I wanted to see what it would take to get a station on the air. (LoRa APRS is a newer parallel network built on chirp spread-spectrum instead of classic AFSK packet.) When I checked the LoRa APRS live map, I found exactly one LoRa APRS station in the whole area, and it hadn’t heard anything over RF in over two months. Here’s how I turned a LilyGo T-Deck Plus into KJ7T-2 — a live 433.775 MHz iGate and digipeater — including recovering from installing the wrong firmware and the hidden BOOT button.

• Weekly Report: July 23, 2026 — Band Conditions, Digital Radio News, Groups.io Digest.

3. New on the Bench

MeshCore Repeater — I bought a MeshCore repeater from an Etsy seller. It is solar-powered with a single 18650 battery inside to keep it running in the dark times. I am halfway between two other MeshCore devices, each about 15 miles away. You can explore the worldwide MeshCore map at https://map.meshcore.io. In the screenshot below, I’ve placed a Random Wire sticker on my location. You can see I have stations to the southwest and to the northeast.

I’ve magnetically attached the repeater to the steel chimney cap.

Even though my device is up above the roofline, I’m on a lake, and that means I occupy a topographic low. I do have a 915MHz mag-mount antenna coming that I hope will extend the reach of this device, but I’m not optimistic. Still, it’s an interesting device and system to explore.

T-Deck Plus — This LilyGo device will probably arrive the day after this Random Wire issue publishes. This is a 915MHz device that I plan to flash with MeshCore firmware so I can talk to my repeater and perhaps get that repeater onto the MeshCore map. If MeshCore doesn’t work out, I can flash it with Meshtastic. I might also try a T-Echo Tracker on 915MHz, too.

T-Echo Tracker — This is a second T-Echo, but this one is configured for 433MHz. It should connect to my LoRa APRS igate/digipeater running as KJ7T-2. I want to use the T-Echo to see how far KJ7T-2 will reach.

APRS testing — I’ve been monitoring APRS on APRSdroid, aprs.fi, and my mobile radio, wanting to see if those were picking up my KJ7T LightAPRS Gateway device…and they are. What surprised me was that my LoRa APRS box, running as KJ7T-2, is also picked up by aprs.fi.

I also see that my internal battery voltage on the LightAPRS Gateway device has come up from the 4.5V range to nearly 4.7V. That’s because I changed the 1A wall charger to a 2A device.

4. Website: EtherHam CSS Cleanup with Claude

This may only be of interest to other webmasters. If you don’t manage a website, read this as: Claude can help you handle some mundane tasks…and feel free to skip it if the idea of cleaning up CSS code makes your eyes cross!

When I was first setting up EtherHam.com, I chose to use WordPress as the content management system. I’ve been working with WordPress for years. While it is a bit bloated for my needs, I know it inside and out. Just like using a favorite radio, there is a certain comfort in that.

I worked my way through several block themes, each requiring some Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) customization. Many fragments got orphaned along the way — leftover CSS doing nothing but cluttering the file.

I’d read that Claude could help manage a WordPress site, but hadn’t trusted it enough to try. This week, I decided to give it a try. First, I backed up the entire site, including making a copy of the CSS file I was about to change. Then I asked Claude for help.

I installed the Claude in Chrome extension when prompted, and after that, Claude had direct access to what I had open in the browser. This process worked well. We cleaned up the CSS settings, and along the way, I identified a few plugins that I had tried but never used, so those got removed.

Since I was on a roll, I asked Claude for help making formatting consistent between the home page, sub pages, and posts. In just a few minutes, we aligned formatting in these different views.

I posted the exact CSS file Claude helped me clean up on EtherHam, if you’re interested. It is nicely organized and well commented.

If you’re curious, you can download a copy as a text file.

Bottom line: EtherHam.com looks fine and the styling is cleaned up and consistent throughout the site.

5. Vehicle Super Starter: Why I Didn’t Buy It

This isn’t amateur radio, but it could intersect with licensed operators if they run a mobile radio in their rig.

What is this about? I thought about buying a super capacitor for my truck. The sales messaging I’ve been seeing seemed compelling and I find the concept quite clever, so I gave it more than a cursory look.

Ancel sells a device called the Super Starter — a permanently installed super capacitor that wires into your battery terminals and sits under the hood, taking over most of the cranking load every time you start the engine. The pitch is straightforward: your battery stops absorbing the punishing current spike of a cold start, wear and tear drops, and the battery lasts longer. No cables, no remembering to charge a separate pack, no getting out of the truck. Connect it once, forget it exists, and let it quietly do its job for years.

I’ve had dying and weak vehicle batteries, so I really like the concept. I like anything that takes a known failure mode — batteries dying at the worst possible moment — and tries to engineer it away rather than just selling you a booster with a flashlight and jumper cables.

But a few things stopped me before I clicked buy. First, the fit-to-cost problem: the base model is rated for engines up to 3.0 liters, and my Ridgeline runs a 3.5L V6. The unit that actually matches my truck runs closer to $220 than the $150 headline price on the smaller model — a detail that’s easy to miss if you’re moving fast.

Second, the marketing language has a familiar look to it. If you’ve watched the push-to-talk-over-cellular space the way I have, you’ve seen this pattern before: a genuinely interesting piece of engineering wrapped in urgency — limited-time pricing, breathless “why didn’t this exist sooner” copy, glowing coverage that reads like it was written by someone with an affiliate link. None of that makes the underlying tech bad. But it’s usually a sign the vendor wants you to make the purchase decision before you’ve had time to ask the boring questions, like whether the battery-life claims hold up after a real winter under the hood. This product launched this year. There’s no multi-year data available yet, independent or otherwise.

However, there is a review published by Car and Driver that touches on the utility of the device for cold winter vehicle starts. It sounds solid, and it is a real-world, hands-on kind of review. If you’re interested in this tech, this is worth a read: This Clever Supercapacitor Accessory Is a Smart Fix for Cold Car Starts.

Third, and this is the part that’s specific to the Random Wire audience: if you’ve got a mobile rig hardwired into your vehicle’s electrical system, this device is doing something to your crank and start-up voltage profile that nobody’s characterized yet. It’s not a fuse-blowing concern in the classic sense — the Super Starter probably doesn’t add current through your radio’s own power leads, so an overcurrent trip on that circuit isn’t the likely failure mode. The more concerning question is voltage transients on the 12V bus itself. During the crank event, the capacitor is absorbing most of the starter’s draw and then handing off to the battery and alternator; right after start, it’s pulling current back from the alternator to refill itself. Either transition could produce a brief dip or overshoot on the bus that a normally-fed rig wouldn’t otherwise see — and mobile radios are already notoriously sensitive to exactly that kind of thing, which is why so many of us add extra transient suppression to a hardwired install in the first place. I haven’t found research measuring the 12V bus with and without one of these installed, from Ancel or anyone independent. Until someone runs that test, I wouldn’t want it anywhere near several hundred dollars of mobile radio gear.

Fourth, and the part that actually killed it for me: the thing only helps the vehicle it’s bolted to. I have kids with vehicles in various states of mechanical health, and I’m the guy who often gets the call when one of them won’t start. A device clamped to my own battery terminals is no use to them. This means I’d still need to carry a portable lithium booster in the truck regardless of whether I installed the Super Starter. And if I’m already carrying a booster that covers every situation the Super Starter covers plus the ones it doesn’t, the case for spending another $220 on a single-purpose, single-vehicle install gets thin fast.

So here’s where I landed: it’s a legitimately clever idea, and I like the concept. If you’ve got a vehicle that sits for long stretches, hauls a heavy accessory load, or otherwise chews through batteries, I understand the appeal. But for a daily-driven rig with a battery in decent shape, and a household where “helpful” means being able to jump anyone’s vehicle, not just your own, a $60 portable booster under the seat does more for less money — and doesn’t ask you to trust a new product category on faith. I’ll keep an eye on this space. If the independent, multi-season reviews start showing up and the numbers hold, I may revisit it. For now, my jumper cables and a charged lithium pack are in the truck.

6. Short Stack from the Interwebs

Pulled from the aggregated feeds on EtherHam (etherham.com/feeds/), items from July 20–23.

Antennas

• The Crown Antenna: A Wire Loop That Hugs the Roof and Works the World — Hamradio.my — A roof-hugging wire loop design for HF. Worth a look if you’re antenna-restricted.

• Part 2 of… Antenna solve one problem to only create another — Amateur Radio Weekly — the classic antenna-tinkering trap: fix one issue, discover a new one. Relatable.

Propagation & Science

• HamSCI Ray Tracing Working Group — HAMSCI.org — HamSCI’s group working on ray-tracing tools for ionospheric propagation modeling.

• The ARRL Solar Update — ARRL News — Latest solar/propagation conditions rundown.

Satellites

• UmKA-1 (RS40S) Satellite to Transmit SSTV, Audio Clips — Amateur Radio Daily — New satellite planning SSTV and audio transmissions — worth tracking if you’re into satellite work.

APRS & Digital

• APRSdroid 9M2PJU Mod: The Enhanced APRS Companion for Android, Built by Hams, for Hams — Hamradio.my — A ham-built mod to APRSdroid. Given the LoRa APRS iGate work on EtherHam right now, this is a natural companion piece.

DIY / Gadgets

• Flash a $2 Pi-hole From Your Browser: The 9M2PJU ESP32-C3 AdBlocker — Hamradio.my — Browser-flashable ad-blocker on a $2 ESP32-C3. Not radio, but exactly the kind of cheap-hardware hack that fits the workbench.

History & Culture

• How Amateur Radio Built the Indonesian Internet: PaguyubanNet, Packet Radio and the Pioneers of 1986–1994 — Hamradio.my — Deep history on how ham packet radio bootstrapped Indonesia’s early internet. Genuinely excellent long-read, easily the standout item this week — from both the curated and mega feeds.

Reference

• DXing Techniques for Amateur Radio: A Complete Guide to Working the World — Amateur Radio Today — Solid DXing primer, good bookmark-and-share material.

Community / Silent Keys

• DXer and DXpeditioner Kan Mizoguchi, JA1BK, Silent Key — ARRL News —Passing of a notable DXpeditioner.

Also Noted

• San Diego Section of IEEE Invited Talk Intersects ORI’s Antenna Work — Open Research Institute

• VHF for Parks On The Air? — Amateur Radio Weekly

• The W9IMS Brickyard 400 Special Event: Third Time’s a Certificate — The SWLing Post

• Records with Soul and a WAVE — The SWLing Post

7. Ported Scripts to My Proxmox Server

This week, I moved a few scripts to my Proxmox box. The backstory? The Raspberry Pi where those scripts lived…died. And it wasn’t just any Pi — it was the one that handled my home lab tracker and processed the Digital Radio News Gatherer script every week.

I had been planning to move those scripts to my Proxmox server — someday — so the failure of the Pi changed that to right now. Fortunately, I was keeping regular backups of the scripts and data on a USB thumbdrive, in ext4 format. Proxmox can read ext4, so my backups provided the smoothest way to transfer scripts, settings, and data to Proxmox containers.

The Pi’s death wasn’t quiet. First it was a service crash-looping on the lab tracker. It turned out a routine apt autoremove had quietly pulled Flask out from under a process that had been running fine for weeks, and nobody noticed until the next reboot forced it to reload a dependency that was no longer there. In other words, it was already broken, I just didn’t know it.

Then the real trouble started: the case ran hot, SSH sessions began dropping mid-command, and one by one, services stopped responding. Cockpit, gone. Docker, gone. The web apps stayed technically alive but started throwing I/O errors the moment they tried to touch the disk. That’s the signature of a filesystem giving up, not just a CPU getting warm. A fan and a reboot bought some time, but a few hours later it came back worse — even basic commands like tail and sudo started failing. The NVMe drive, a budget no-name unit, may well be on its way out…or is possibly underpowered by the HAT. Pi 5 NVMe bases are known to be stingy on current under sustained load, which can look exactly like a failing drive without one actually being bad.

By the time I went to grab the backup drive, every way I had of reaching the Pi remotely had stopped working — the usual command-line connection, the web-based control panel, even the official remote-access tool. I pulled the thumbdrive and plugged it into my Proxmox box. After that, recovery was almost anticlimactic: I could read straight from the drive without disturbing anything, and there sat every night’s backup, the program and its database both untouched. From there, I built a new home on the Proxmox server: a small, self-contained slice of the machine, running its own private copy of the software it depends on instead of sharing whatever happens to be installed system-wide. That last part matters more than it sounds like it should — it’s the difference between a routine cleanup silently breaking your service, and your service carrying its own dependencies with it, immune to whatever else happens on the machine.

The Digital Radio News Gatherer had its own separate gremlin — a Groq API key that looked fine in its config file but wasn’t actually making it into the running process, because the cron job launching it never sourced the environment file, and even after fixing that, the file itself was missing an export in front of the key. Two small, easy-to-miss mistakes stacked on top of each other, neither one loud enough to point straight at the cause. That is sorted now, and worth remembering for anyone else running scripts out of cron with secrets tucked into a separate file.

These are lessons for anyone running similar infrastructure off a Pi — and I know plenty of you are: back up more than just your data. A solid backup process is what saved me here, not a database export. (All of my Proxmox containers are backed up weekly to an external target.) And if you can move a service that matters onto something with real redundancy, consider doing that before the hardware makes the decision for you.

8. Open Notebook on Proxmox Server

I’m starting to play with an open source project called Open Notebook. So far, it looks interesting and seems to run fine on my Proxmox server. I’m going to use it for capturing meeting agendas and notes, and then see if that kind of content proves useful.

I installed it several weeks ago and already an update was waiting. Updating it was very easy — much easier than I expected. It runs in a Docker container, so just three commands took care of the version upgrade:

docker compose down
docker compose pull
docker compose up -d

Docker Compose makes it pretty painless — three commands and your data stays untouched since it lives in the mounted volume, not in the container. I wish all updates were so easy!

9. QRT: End Transmission

Plumbing, part 2. We’re still dealing with the plumbing leak I reported last week. We now have a new faucet that works well. I had to add a plug to the unused hole in the sink top, but that was not much money and only a quick trip to Ace Hardware. The continuing issue is the water that seeped under the kitchen floor tiles. That lifted several tiles along the edges. I’ve been running a fan and a dehumidifier constantly since then to try and dry the moisture out from under the floor. A new moisture meter is arriving this week: pinless, so I can take relative measurements, comparing dry, unaffected spots with the parts that did receive some seepage. I need to make sure that wood won’t grow mold when I fix some of those tiles.

Frustrated with bad UI. I’m trying to configure an events plugin for my work website, and the user interface is full of labels that don’t mean what they say. Example: “configure calendar” is actually a shortcode generator. Or two labels that sound identical, one above the other. A “configure” link hiding under the “other data” label. An unlabeled, bright orange button in the usual “submit” position with an arrow on it…that doesn’t appear to actually do anything. If you couldn’t tell, I really, really don’t like poorly designed UIs!

And that’s enough to close Random Wire 192. I hope you had a productive, interesting radio week.

73, and remember to touch a radio every day!

1. QRV: Are You Ready?

I started a series on DMR radio this week, because my coverage of DMR has been a bit light. Why? Because I don’t really understand it. The best way to learn DMR is to use it, and I find that organizing what I’m learning and writing about it really helps to cement that knowledge in my mind.

I fixed a bug in my AllStar node running on an Arduino UNO Q board. It is reliable again. Speaking of reliability, I also implemented a backup routine for one of my primary AllStar nodes that is driven by a Dell Wyse 3040 thin client PC.

There are a few write-ups about artificial intelligence in Random Wire 191. I had an interesting experience with two different models in Claude. I also gave Hermes Agent a try and found it is too powerful and complex for what I need, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t right for you.

Following up on my deep dive into the push-to-talk over cellular space, I ordered a PoC radio. This is a leap of faith. I want to experience what a typical buyer experiences, and I’m hopeful the new radio will be fun to use. This week I touch on some purchasing friction points. Next week I should have the radio in hand.

I learned about CascadiaMesh this week…and it is interesting enough that I ordered a solar-powered mesh device to go on the roof. Fingers crossed it works well.

I signed up for QSO One and tested it for a few days. It has great promise, but right now, the UI is still a little rough around the edges, at least in my experience.

And I saw a strange glitch in my APRSdroid display. It was odd enough that I did some research on it and documented it in a bug report filed on GitHub.

I also tried a speaker-mic on the Uniwa F400 smartphone with DVSwitch and DroidStar installed. Did it work? Yes as a remote speaker, no as a microphone. I’ll be exploring button mapping as a way to try to get it working with that platform.

That’s Random Wire 191 in a nutshell. I hope you enjoy reading about these amateur radio and technology topics this week. I’m always open to learning and trying new things, so please do send your ideas and suggestions to me!

2. Thank You

I want to thank all the innovators and all the folks who form the solid backbone of our hobby. Last week, I wrote a brief piece about crossing the chasm, in the context of adopting amateur radio technology.

This week, I’m leaning in on this concept. I usually occupy the “early market” part of the curve — innovators and early adopters. Trying new things, or things new to me, is what I enjoy most. The makers, designers, builders, and coders keep the magic alive in our hobby. I doubt we’ve ever seen as much innovation and creativity in amateur radio as we’re experiencing now.

But people like me are actually a small percentage of the hobby, compared to the much larger group: the “mainstream market” folks. The early majority, late majority, and laggards (not my choice of term!) form the spine that holds up amateur radio, year in and year out. They buy the gear that keeps major players in the game, and that benefits all of us.

The “early market” folks are one side of the amateur radio coin; the “mainstream market” folks are the other. We can’t have one without the other — both are needed to keep the hobby healthy and vibrant.

Thank you to the innovators and early adopters. Thank you to the larger group that keeps the hobby together. No matter which side of the coin you prefer, you’re important to all of us.

3. New on EtherHam

Some fun radio-related topics this week.

• Introduction to DMR: The Four Wheels on the Car — This is Part 1 in a short series on DMR, written for those of us who find DMR, well, daunting. DMR asks new users to understand codeplugs, timeslots, talkgroups, and networks before they’ve even keyed the mic — and most guides bury that in jargon before you get near your first contact. This piece cuts through it with one idea: DMR is like a car, and those four concepts are its four wheels. Get all four turning and you’re on the air; skip one, and you’re not going anywhere. Part 1 of Tommy’s Guide to DMR builds that mental model — no gear list yet, no codeplug, just the four ideas you need before any of the rest makes sense.

• AllStar on Arduino UNO Q: Part 2 (The Bug That Killed My Node…Until I Fixed It) — If your UNO Q AllStar node runs for hours and then drops dead — heartbeat LED red, lsusb empty, nothing but a full power cycle bringing it back — the culprit is a documented bug that silently flips the board’s USB-C port out of host mode. The fix is a one-line command, made permanent with a small systemd service, and it’s all laid out below. The QNode is now rock solid, and yours can be too. Part 1 is at How to Run AllStar on the Arduino UNO Q.

• Backing Up Your AllStar Node: Why I Do It Even Though “eMMC Never Fails” — Every AllStarLink node builder has an opinion on whether the storage in their node will ever fail — and one popular take is that the eMMC in a Dell Wyse 3040 thin client basically never does. That might even be true. But I learned decades ago, the hard way, what it feels like to lose weeks of irreplaceable work to a single bad disk, and I’ve never wanted to relearn that lesson on a node that also connects to my ham phone. Here’s why I back up my node anyway, what eMMC actually gets right (and wrong) compared to microSD, the one AllScan file I almost forgot to include, and a free, MIT-licensed script you can use so a dead drive is a shrug instead of a crisis.

• Hardening SSH Access to Your AllStarLink Node: Moving Beyond Port 22 — Your AllStarLink node isn’t just a simple appliance — you’re running an unattended Debian server with a direct line to your radio and your home network, and automated bots are scanning for it right now. A compromised node isn’t just an inconvenience: it can mean unauthorized transmissions attributed to your callsign, or a foothold into every other device on your LAN. This walkthrough shows how to close a common gap in an afternoon — moving off the default SSH port, adding real rate-limiting, and locking down Fail2Ban correctly on Debian, including the exact reason it silently fails for a lot of people.

• Push-to-Talk Over Cellular: The Actual Buying Experience — I ordered a PoC radio from Talk2Me USA on July 11, expecting to click “buy” and wait for a box. Instead, the next four days were an inbox: a $15 billing mix-up that was later reversed, a new Terms of Service that arrived the day after I paid, and login credentials for three separate radio networks — before the hardware itself had even shipped. The ad copy sells “buy now.” The actual experience is “buy now, then wait” — and it turns out most of what a buyer needs to know happens in that gap, not at checkout.

4. Claude AI: An Hour with Sonnet, Ten Minutes with Fable

I reported last week that the default engine on Claude had changed from Opus to Sonnet. I also reported that Fable had been released, then blocked, and then made available again. I got a chance to use the high-powered Fable engine this week, and therein lies a story.

This relates to the UNO Q item directly above in this newsletter. As I tried to figure out what was going on with my Arduino UNO Q-powered AllStar node, I eventually turned to Claude for some help. Using the default Sonnet engine, we went round and round for an hour. It got to the point where I would tell Claude: no, we’ve tried that twice already, I do not want to repeat that process…and Claude would push it forward anyway.

Eventually, I asked for a written summary of that conversation, closed the thread, and opened a new one with Fable as the engine. Ten minutes. That’s what it took to do the proper research and lead me to a solution that worked.

To be fair, this comparison isn’t perfectly clean. It’s tempting to blame Sonnet for an hour of churning — but that churning is what produced the diagnostic evidence, including the exact kernel log signature of the failure, that let Fable’s first web search land directly on a known bug report. A fresh session armed with documented dead ends gave Fable a real head start.

There’s a workflow lesson here that applies no matter which AI you use: when a session starts going in circles, ask for a written handoff summary, close the thread, and start fresh. That technique rescued this project as much as the model swap did.

Honestly, Opus was a capable engine. I’m not particularly pleased with Sonnet, at least for sleuthing code and hardware problems. Fable burns through credits faster, but I was very pleased with how thoroughly and surgically it developed a solution. As noted, though, the work I did with Sonnet gave Fable a leg up as we reached the finish line.

5. Hermes Agent: Complex and Powerful

Some weeks ago, I set up an instance of Hermes Agent on my home server. I started by powering the reasoning side with Grok, but it burned through my credits faster than expected, so I downscaled to Gemini (free), which worked well.

Hermes Agent is an open-source AI agent framework, and “agent” is the operative word — it’s not a chat window, it’s a system meant to run unattended and act on your behalf. It can execute multi-step tasks autonomously across your terminal, your IDE, and more than ten messaging platforms (Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, Signal, email). It remembers things across sessions — your preferences, your environment, lessons learned — and it can save reusable procedures as “skills” so it gets better at your specific workflows over time. You can point it at almost any LLM provider (OpenRouter, Anthropic, OpenAI, DeepSeek, local models) and swap between them mid-workflow, run multiple isolated instances with their own memory and config, and extend it with plugins, custom tools, webhooks, and cron jobs. On paper, it can handle coding and debugging, research, system administration, data analysis, content creation, and even home automation.

That list alone tells you something: this isn’t a “download an app and go” tool. Getting it running means configuration files, API quotas, provider swaps, and troubleshooting that assumes you’re comfortable poking around under the hood.

I spent a couple of days putting it through its paces — switching models, testing its WordPress and GitHub integrations, watching how it handles tool-calling. It’s genuinely capable, and I came away with real respect for what it can do. I also hit real friction: a crashed gateway, a free-tier quota that ran out faster than expected, and copy-paste quirks that took some digging to sort out.

Here’s my takeaway. If you have a specific need for an autonomous, always-on agent — something that runs unattended, chains multiple tools together, or watches your systems continuously — Hermes Agent may be worth the investment of time it takes to learn. But that’s not the problem I have. I mostly want a smart assistant to review my writing, help me code, or think through a problem. For these tasks, a standard AI chat interface gets me there with a lot less overhead. Hermes is a great solution for a problem I just don’t have.

6. PoC Radio Followup: I Ordered One

I’ve had some interesting exchanges about my push-to-talk over cellular deep dive (see: Buying Push-to-Talk Over Cellular Without Getting Taken). Even though I’ve previously purchased three PoC units, those were generally low-end devices. I’ve ordered a modern unit at a higher price point that meets these criteria:

• Cellular connectivity

• Wi-Fi connectivity

• Can use the HamLink PoC app by Talk2Me

Why? Two reasons. First, I want to put myself in the shoes of a typical buyer who is trying to find the device that meets his/her needs. Second, I want a PoC device that will also let me connect to America’s Kansas City Wide Network, and HamLink PoC offers that capability. I ordered through Talk2Me specifically because it appears to be one of the leading vendors in this market space, which gave me more confidence going in than I’d have with an unknown seller.

Worth saying up front: I trusted Talk2Me enough to send them $200 for a radio I hadn’t yet held, on the strength of that reputation. That’s the lens for everything below. These are observations from a buyer who chose them for good reason, not grievances against a vendor I regret choosing — and precisely because I went with a name I trusted, the friction points I ran into are worth knowing for anyone buying a PoC radio, from any vendor.

So far, the buying experience is about what I expected. Details about each radio choice were hard to find. The HamLink PoC app was supposed to be free with a radio purchase — instead, I was charged for it, and later told that charge will be refunded. This kind of behavior (“it’s free” but then you get charged) makes it harder to trust vendors. To be clear, these observations are necessarily about Talk2Me, since that’s who I bought from, but I have no reason to think Talk2Me is worse than other vendors in this space. If anything, the fact that friction shows up even with a leading vendor is the point: these are things any PoC buyer should watch for, regardless of who they order from.

I was pleased that for the HamLink PoC app, I was asked to provide a copy of my FCC-issued amateur radio license. That gives me confidence that app usage will be limited to licensed operators.

The radio was originally tracking to arrive Saturday, July 18, at the early end of the vendor’s 7-11 day estimate. Since then I’ve received a delay notice pushing delivery to July 20. Another friction point worth flagging for anyone shopping this category: the delay notice didn’t explain a cause, and there’s still no order-status page or tracking link that gives more detail than “delayed.”

I also received a new terms of service notice before the radio or the app were even in my hands. The timing felt odd — as though placing the order triggered it, rather than it being a routine notice sent to all customers. If it’s the latter, the coincidence is remarkable. I can’t say which it is, and I’m not accusing Talk2Me of anything here. However, a buyer in the middle of an active order is not in a great position to evaluate a new ToS agreement on its merits. That’s worth naming as its own category of friction, separate from the pricing and shipping issues above.

For a purchase already made opaque by pricing and add-on confusion, a shifting delivery date without explanation and an untimely ToS update amount to small trust deductions. None of this is disqualifying on its own, but it’s the kind of accumulated friction that shapes whether a buyer sticks with a vendor for a second purchase.

I’ll have more on this once the device arrives and I get it configured — and with a radio in hand, issue 192 will shift away from the purchasing process and focus on the device itself. Fingers crossed this is not a $200 mistake. I’m actually hopeful the device and service will prove useful and enjoyable!

7. Have You Heard of CascadiaMesh?

Thank you to subscriber Joe who brought CascadiaMesh to my attention.

CascadiaMesh is a volunteer community project (not a company or nonprofit) that’s building out a regional mesh network across British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon, using solar-powered nodes for “grid-down” resilient comms. It’s grown fast — over 2,300 active nodes as of today. The network runs on MeshCore, an open-source LoRa mesh protocol, and the site provides onboarding guides, device recommendations, node-building tutorials, a live map, and links to sibling regional meshes (Puget Mesh, Salish Mesh, etc.) across the US, Canada, and Europe.

My take? CascadiaMesh appears to have positive momentum. Here’s a 30-second screen recording of the live map to give you an idea of the vibrancy of the network. It is operating not just across town, but across state and provincial lines.

Important: MeshCore has its own iOS/Android app, its own web flasher (flasher.meshcore.dev), and its own config tool. A MeshCore node can’t talk to a Meshtastic node — they use different protocols and encryption.

OK, color me interested. I ordered a small solar-powered node from an Etsy vendor. I’m hoping to put it up on top of the galvanized steel chimney cap which sits above the peak of the roof. Maybe there are other MeshCore nodes near me!

If MeshCore interests you, too, you should probably be aware there is a battle going on over trademarking the MeshCore name. Ultimately, I don’t think this will affect the codebase or the community, but it could result in the project getting renamed. I hope not, because MeshCore is perfectly descriptive.

8. QSO One, Part 2 — Testing

QSO One‘s pitch is bold: “Amateur radio, reimagined.” The marketing promises a single modern client that puts AllStarLink, EchoLink, DMR, and M17 all in one app, on Windows or Android, with no node to build, no hotspot to flash, and no radio interface to wire up — twenty-five dollars and five minutes between you and being keyed up on any of it. It’s framed as the client nobody else had bothered to build: a clean, cross-platform answer to IAXRpt’s abandonment, DVSwitch’s complexity, and the fragmented, one-app-per-mode reality most of us have been living with for years.

If this is real, it will have real value for radio amateurs. So I downloaded the QSO One app and installed it on my Windows laptop. This is what I like doing: poke at something to make sure it lives up to its billing. I’ll have a full write-up on this in the near future because the experience was a bit rocky. Essentially, the UI doesn’t really lead you through how to get set up and connected. I spent quite a bit of time poking around, trying to figure things out.

But once I got it connected with my AllStar node 588418, it worked well. The audio had a bit of choppiness to it but I suspect that is my network, not the app. To test that, I shut down QSO One and used the venerable iaxRpt app to connect to my node, and heard exactly the same choppy audio.

I was not successful at getting M17 to connect. It did find my reflector M17-PNW but then errored out. This appears tied to a connection-handoff bug in the app rather than something wrong with M17.

At this point, I would describe QSO One as a very good “built from the ground up” new app that is still rough around the edges, in active development, and shows promise. This one is definitely worth watching.

9. Chasing a Weird APRSdroid Display Glitch

A few weeks ago I noticed something odd in APRSdroid’s Hub view on my Android smartphone: my mobile’s SSID was showing up as “KJ7T-9_1” instead of “KJ7T-9.” At first I assumed I’d fat-fingered something on the radio, so I changed the SSID to -11. Same thing happened — “KJ7T-11_1.” Then I saw Jeff’s portable, W7NEE-9, and it had its own additional underscore and number: “_3.” Whatever this was, it wasn’t just me, and it clearly wasn’t an SSID problem, since the SSID itself was displaying correctly in the title. The mystery character was showing up as a second line, like a comment.

The next step was to stop guessing and go look at the actual data. Pulling the raw packets for KJ7T-9 from aprs.fi’s raw packet view showed the underscore-digit baked right into the transmitted Mic-E packet. APRSdroid was not inventing this — it was real. And critically, aprs.fi wasn’t displaying it as a comment at all. That told me the “_1” was actual data that one piece of software was interpreting correctly and another wasn’t.

It turns out this is a documented part of the Mic-E spec. Bob Bruninga WB4APR (SK) produced a reference table of Mic-E “device identifier” bytes — a two-character suffix that radios append to the end of the Mic-E info field to identify themselves, positioned right after the base-91 altitude data. Per that table, “_1” decodes to a Yaesu FTM-300D and “_3” decodes to a Yaesu FT5D. The spec is explicit that receiving software should recognize these bytes and strip them from the displayed text (or use them to show the radio model) rather than showing them as if they were part of a comment. aprs.fi does this correctly. APRSdroid, at least as of the current release on my phone, doesn’t.

Rather than just grumbling about it, I filed a bug report on APRSdroid’s GitHub page. I made sure to include the actual raw packet as evidence, a link to the spec document that defines the correct behavior, a clear statement of what I observed versus what should happen, and a specific suggested fix. I also included my app version and Android version, since that’s the first thing any maintainer will ask for anyway.

I’d encourage anyone who runs into a quirk like this in ham radio software to consider doing the same thing. Many of these tools — APRSdroid included — are maintained by one or two volunteers in their spare time, often for free, and often for years. A report that says “this looks broken” is easy to ignore. A report with raw data, a spec citation, and a proposed fix is something a maintainer can act on in five minutes instead of an hour. It also means the next ham who hits the same weirdness can search the issue tracker and find an answer instead of struggling to figure out a diagnosis from scratch. Bug reports help the maintainer, but they also help the community.

10. Speaker-Mic for Uniwa F400 Phone

Will it work? That has been on my mind since I ordered this through Amazon (this is an affiliate link):

Portbale Microphone for UNIWA F400 and Anysecu W400 4G Network Radio

(Yes, portable is misspelled. That’s the way it is listed.)

It certainly makes the smartphone look more like a radio, but will it work? It arrived, I attached it, and it works well as a remote speaker. However, the push-to-talk button works the same as the PTT on the phone itself, which is to say it doesn’t work with DVSwitch Mobile or DroidStar. I didn’t really expect it to, but I also haven’t explored button mapping apps to see if I can get the PTT to work with one (or both) of those apps.

Two resources I’ll be exploring to try to get the PTT functioning the way I want.

• Button Mapper: Remap your keys (by developer flar2) — the most established option, free, no root required for most actions, works via Android’s accessibility framework. Nearly 11,000 reviews on Google Play. Handles volume keys, camera buttons, headset buttons, and “custom buttons” (which is the category a PTT accessory would likely fall into). Find it in the Google Play Store.

• Key Mapper (open source, by sds100) — more technical/granular option, popular in the XDA/hobbyist crowd. Supports multi-key combos and sequences, and unlike Button Mapper it’s fully open source if your readers want to see exactly what it’s doing under the hood before granting accessibility permissions — which is a reasonable thing for a security-conscious ham audience to want. Find it on GitHub.

Note that both of these apps rely on Android’s accessibility service to intercept the keypress. Also, remapping only helps if the target app already accepts input from some other bound key (like volume-down) that these tools can redirect the PTT press to. It’s a promising rabbit hole, not a guaranteed fix.

11. What’s On The Bench

• Antenna Launcher — I still have my pneumatic antenna launcher to complete. The wiring diagram for the electrical trigger was not clear, so I requested (and received) additional information from the vendor. But that was months ago, so I need to review it all again before I commence with the last phase of soldering. Considering that my end-fed halfwave wire fell out of the tall Douglas fir tree, completing the launcher has become more urgent.

• UHF/VHF dipole — A small dipole antenna is coming from a vendor in Oregon. I’ll strap this to a telescoping painter pole to get my LightAPRS Gateway antenna out of the garage and higher in the air. That should improve performance considerably.

• T-Beam ordered — I plan to set up an APRS-over-LoRa digipeater on 70 cm. This is different than normal APRS on UHF because LoRa uses spread spectrum radio — the two types of APRS on UHF are not compatible. Maybe I’ll discover a few more people are doing this; I hope so. The device was shipped on July 16 and may arrive in time for Random Wire 192.

12. Recipes for Radios

I had a problem with APRS on my Yaesu FTM-300DR mobile radio. VFO B is set to use SmartBeaconing while I’m mobile…but it stopped working right after I made a backup copy of the frequencies and settings to a microSD card. Thinking about it, I realized I must’ve fumble-fingered a setting while trying to remember how to write a copy of the radio to the card. It’s also possible that a voltage spike scrambled some settings.

Short version: I got it working again. SmartBeaconing had been turned off and the beacon interval was set to manual. Enabling SmartBeaconing and setting the interval to Smart solved the problem, as shown in the track below for KJ7T-9:

You can tell it is using SmartBeaconing because the dots are farther apart on the lengths of road with higher speed limits. Closer to town and in town, at lower speeds, the dots are closer together. (The other thing I’m happy to see is at the end of this track when I returned home, my own KJ7T digipeater picked up my beacon.)

The takeaway: I’m again reminded of the value of recipe cards. In the IT space, we call the step-by-step instructions to accomplish tasks not done very often by a special term: runbooks. However, I think of them as recipe cards. Even though I know some of my mother’s favorite recipes by heart, I always refer to the old recipe card while I’m making one of those dishes. The same kind of system — a recipe card for a particular configuration you want to work right every time — also works for your radios.

If keeping a notebook or computer file of particular steps seems too onerous, try some 3×5 cards contained in one group with a rubber band. This system does not need batteries or an internet connection.

For important settings you rarely change — or perhaps as memories fade with time — recipe cards can save you from an immense amount of frustration.

13. Short Stack

Community

• Join Hams Over Video Conference 24/7 — What is this? It’s a Jitsi Meet server hosted by the same ham who runs AmateurWire (Roger Radcliff KE8LCM), and it appears he has a partner in this (Murray Green K3BEQ). I tested it in a browser on my laptop and in the Jitsi app on my Android phone, and both work fine. Ham radio is about connecting with others, and this service helps you do that.

Podcasts

• HRWB 267 – Designing The Pebble Radio — “In this episode we meet Becky Spiceland N4BKY, Mike Spiceland N4FFF and Barb Asuroglu WB2CBA the amateur radio operators behind the Pebble radio project.”

• Solder Smoke episode 265 is available — listen to it or watch it on YouTube.

APRS & Digital

• aprs.world — “APRS World is a modern, open-source client for the global APRS-IS amateur radio network.” Accessible through a web browser and has an Android app.

• DroidStar 9M2PJU Mod — I installed this customized build of DroidStar on my Android phone and found it works fine. I tested it on YSF, M17, and IAX. For those of us who have been waiting for DroidStar connections over IAX to be fixed, in this build, it works!

• Learn About FlexRadio’s Aurora Transceiver from the Team that Developed It (Video) — “A few months before Hamvention, DX Engineering’s Michael, KI8R, caught up with Tony, K1KP, Steve, N5AC, and Gerald, K5SDR, from FlexRadio during Orlando HamCation for a deep dive into this breakthrough rig.”

Computing & AI

• Microsoft Just Patched a Record 570 Flaws in Windows — The takeaway? Patch now as this release included patches for three zero-day vulnerabilities.

• Someone connected a Raspberry Pi 4B to an old, unsupported Kindle, and now it’s an e-ink dashboard — Probably because I have old Kindles and some Raspberry Pi boards, this looks like a great way to combine old and new tech.

• The People Who Will Thrive in the AI Age — “The general pattern that the research points to is that many people don’t use the time they save using AI to do less; they use the time to take on new tasks.”

14. QRT: End Transmission

I thought it would be an easier week but a plumbing leak in the kitchen dispelled that notion. As I type this, I have a fan going to keep air moving and a dehumidifier operating to try and dry out the wood under the kitchen linoleum tiles.

The good news is we have a new faucet. The bad news is the cost of the plumber to install the faucet was about what a new mid-range HF radio costs. When I heard the price, I was gobsmacked. But it works well and that is what is important.

I added a few nylon mooring cleats to my little dinghy to make it easier to tie to the dock. When I say little, I mean tiny: it is a six-foot-long fiberglass dinghy I bought for dragging behind the sailboat. Right now, though, it’s at the lake house with a small electric motor on it. As long as it’s not too windy or choppy on the lake, I feel perfectly safe out on the water. On the weekends when the wakeboard boats are generating big, sharp waves? The dinghy stays tied to the dock.

We have been settling back into a regular routine since last week’s ER visit. That gave me a little more time to work on the lawn and flower beds. My lavender plants really took off this year, making the bees very happy. I have a long line of nasturtiums coming up along a border and am looking forward to those flowering, too. The bees and hummingbirds are enjoying my flower pots on the deck, and that is where I sit with my Kindle e-reader and keep an eye on my spouse through a window.

Closer to radio, I realized it’s been a while since I logged into my Mastodon account: @kj7t@mastodon.radio. I think I need a weekly reminder to do that, so I don’t abandon folks who are waiting for a response.

I have much to be thankful for and appreciate my amateur radio hobby and radio friends very much.

73, and remember to touch a radio every day!

1. QRV: Are You Ready?

This week has raced by. It’s Thursday as I type this, and I’m behind schedule because of, well, life.

On the good news front, I got my LightAPRS Gateway device working. The story is on EtherHam. What I didn’t write about is learning about APRS over LoRa 70cm radio. While that has nothing to do with the LightAPRS device, it does touch APRS. I’m curious about this so I ordered a device (T-Deck Plus with GPS on 433MHz) to experiment with. Here’s the kicker, though: when I look at a map of APRS stations using LoRa, I find exactly one in Washington State. It’s an APRS-over-LoRa desert here. However, if I get my device running properly, maybe I can make a contact with the other station about 30 miles away. I might have to find a hill with line-of-sight to Seattle to make this happen. We’ll see!

For the LightAPRS device, I have a small dipole VHF antenna coming. I intended to set that a bit higher in the air on a fiberglass painter pole because I’d like to get a better signal in and out of the digi. I’m feeling pretty good about one watt through a small mag-mount, though:

2. Thank You…Supporters!

I have several people to thank for their support over the past few months. Most support comes in through the “buy me a coffee” system but there have also been EtherHam store purchases. Everything helps and is greatly appreciated.

• Coffees: Thank you to Rich, Ray, and David.

• EtherHam store: Thank you to Jeff, Rich, Joe, and Ren.

3. New on EtherHam

• Buying Push-to-Talk Over Cellular Without Getting Taken — I researched the current market, and this sent me down a deep rabbit hole. The push-to-talk over cellular field is confusing, and that confusion leans in favor of vendors, not buyers. If you’re thinking about buying one, or you already bought one and discovered it wasn’t quite what you expected, this guide walks through what nobody tells you upfront — using a car-lot analogy that will feel uncomfortably familiar. Read more in this EtherHam-exclusive guide.

• Concept: Using the Arduino UNO Q for Home Power Monitoring — What really drew me to this idea was the Arduino UNO Q’s split-brain design: one board handling both real-time sensor capture and higher-level computing. These are jobs that used to require two separate devices. I sketched out (conceptually — not yet built) a whole-house power monitor with non-contact current clamps on the split-phase legs and an isolated voltage sensor. These are all read by the microcontroller side while Linux handles the math, logging, and dashboarding — no direct contact with bare conductors, ever. Full write-up, with parts list, firmware split, and dashboard options, is up on EtherHam.

• LightAPRS Gateway iGate Beacon Success — Troubleshooting Log — A week of ruling out CGNAT, firewalls, servers, and a suspicious libc6 upgrade led nowhere. The real fix turned out to be something I hadn’t considered: the callsign’s SSID itself. This post walks through the manual nc tests, the reboot comparisons, and the variable-isolation process that finally got KJ7T’s iGate beacons landing on aprs.fi — even though the server-side root cause remains a mystery. Bottom line: the digipeater is now working well, and I feel comfortable recommending the LightAPRS Digipeater, available from QRP Labs, as a fill-in digipeater and igate.

• Crossing the Chasm: Which Amateur Radio Technologies Actually Made It — Why did DMR and FT8 become fixtures in the shack while D-STAR and Fusion have not yet achieved that status? This piece maps ham radio’s real technology winners and still-rising projects — CW, SSB, FM, AllStarLink, AREDN mesh, and more — onto the classic “crossing the chasm” adoption curve. Borrowing a framework shared by an amateur radio friend, it asks what actually separates a solved problem from a brilliant piece of engineering still waiting for its moment. Along the way, it builds context to help you place your own favorite radios, modes, and projects on that same curve.

• Weekly Report: July 9, 2026 — The weekly report covers band conditions, digital radio news, and a digest of Groups.io messages. The Repeater Builder group was the most active this week with 142 messages posted.

4. QSO One: A New Way onto AllStarLink

There’s a new app making the rounds in the AllStarLink and EchoLink space, and it’s worth a mention here even though I’m not ready to give it the full workbench treatment over at EtherHam. It’s called QSO One, and the pitch is simple: get on AllStarLink, EchoLink, DMR, and M17 from a Windows PC or Android phone, with no node to build, no hotspot to flash, and no radio interface to wire up. Twenty-five dollars, five minutes, and you’re keyed up.

I’ve spent some time this week reading through the developer’s own posts on the AllStarLink community forum, and the backstory is a good one. A ham out of Willoughby Hills, Ohio — Frank, KD8JKK, node 46369 — got pulled back into the hobby by a bad storm earlier this year, found his local repeaters quiet, drifted over to EchoLink, heard AllStarLink had grown, went looking for a modern Windows client, and found nothing. IAXRpt has been abandoned since 2019. So he built his own, reverse-engineering the IAX2 protocol frame by frame rather than leaning on an existing library.

That’s the kind of scrappy, solve-my-own-problem origin story I have a soft spot for. It’s also exactly why I’m not writing this up as a proper EtherHam review yet.

The open beta only went live in early May. As recently as this month, the developer rebuilt the entire audio engine from scratch — giving each network its own dedicated audio lane — because testers were reporting stuttering and garbled audio, the kind of thing one beta tester colorfully described as “wrestling the alligator to the ground.” Early reports since the rebuild sound genuinely improved, but that’s a few weeks of data, not a few years. There’s also been at least one credential-storage bug that could silently drop saved logins, but that has since been patched with a self-healing backup.

None of that is damning for a young project. But it does mean the honest way to describe QSO One right now is “promising and moving fast” rather than “proven.” Worth noting, regardless of how the audio engine matures: this is, as far as I can tell, a one-person operation. One developer wrote the IAX2 stack from scratch, runs the beta, answers the forum posts, and — per the latest update — now runs the backend account system that stores your saved nodes and favorites.

It’s also a closed codebase, so there’s no way for the community to audit the IAX2 reverse-engineering work, verify what happens to saved credentials, or fork it if Frank stops maintaining it. If Frank steps away for any reason, there may be no one else who understands that code well enough to keep it running. That’s a real single-point-of-failure risk for anyone thinking about leaning on it for a regular net check-in.

So this is an app worth watching, built by someone clearly solving a problem, at a price low enough that trying it costs you little. I find it a very interesting project and hope it continues to mature and grow. I’ll keep an eye on it, and if it’s still standing — and sounding good — in a few months, it’ll earn a proper look on the EtherHam workbench.

5. Claude’s Wild Two Weeks: Export Bans and a New Default

I’ve been seeing changes over the past few weeks in the models made available in Claude, so I naturally wondered what was going on. I learned that Anthropic just had one of its busiest stretches yet. If you use Claude for anything, here’s what you should know.

I’m on the Pro subscription, so the default model change described below affects me, and that change is what caused me to dig into this topic.

The default model quietly flipped. On July 1, Claude Sonnet 5 became the default model for Free and Pro users, replacing Opus. That’s not a small swap — Sonnet 5 ships with a 1 million token context window and performs close to flagship-level Opus 4.8 on many tasks, at a fraction of the cost ($2/$10 per million input/output tokens through the end of August, then $3/$15). Opus is still there if you’re on Max, Team, or Enterprise, but it’s no longer what most people get by default. Anthropic is clearly betting that “good enough and cheap” wins more users than “best but pricey.”

If you are a Claude Pro user, three things change in practice. For those using a Claude Pro subscription, you’ll see three basic changes when you use Claude with the default Sonnet 5 engine:

• Speed and quota: Sonnet 5 is cheaper to run than Opus (roughly a fifth the cost per turn), so on a usage-capped plan like Pro, the same 45-prompts-per-5-hours allowance now stretches much further before you hit a limit. Responses also tend to come back faster since Sonnet is a lighter model.

• Capability: for the bulk of everyday tasks — writing, coding, research, general Q&A — Sonnet 5 performs close enough to Opus 4.8 that most people won’t notice a quality drop. Its 1M token context window means it can also handle very large documents or codebases in one go, which Opus couldn’t always do as cheaply.

• What you lose: for the hardest problems — deep architectural decisions, gnarly debugging, subtle reasoning tasks — Opus 4.8 still has an edge. On Pro you’d now need to manually select Opus for those cases rather than getting it automatically; Max, Team, and Enterprise plans keep broader access to it.

Net effect: most people get faster, more plentiful, “good enough” responses by default, with the option to reach for Opus deliberately when a task actually needs it.

The government forced Anthropic to pull its own flagship model offline. This is the wilder story. Claude Fable 5 and its sibling Mythos 5 launched June 12 — and three days later, the U.S. Commerce Department issued an export-control directive ordering Anthropic to cut off access for any foreign national, anywhere, including Anthropic’s own foreign employees. The trigger, reportedly: Amazon researchers found a jailbreak that got Fable 5 to write exploit code for a real software vulnerability, which was enough to get it treated like a controlled technology. Anthropic complied, access came back starting July 1 once the controls were lifted, and the company extended Fable 5’s free trial as an apology of sorts. It’s a preview of a regulatory fight that’s probably not over — frontier models getting treated like export-controlled hardware is new territory.

Opus 4.1 is on its way out. Deprecated on June 5, hard retirement on the API August 5. Anthropic wants everyone on Opus 4.8 instead, which also came with a real price cut — down from $15/$75 per million tokens to $5/$25, about a 67% reduction. If you’ve got anything hardcoded to claude-opus-4-1, you’ve got a month to migrate.

Cowork is leaving the desktop. Anthropic’s file-and-task agent tool, previously desktop-only, is expanding to web and mobile, with workflows able to keep running without an active browser session. Small item, but it fits the pattern: Anthropic is pushing agents further into everyday, non-coding work.

The takeaway: Anthropic is optimizing for cheaper defaults and broader access, while getting a real taste of what “AI as a national security concern” looks like in practice. It’s worth watching whether the export-control precedent becomes a recurring headache or a one-off situation. This is new ground for all of us.

Sources: Anthropic, TechCrunch, Forbes, Anthropic export control statement, Claude Platform Docs, Claude Sonnet 5 vs Opus 4.8: Price, Limits, and Benchmarks (SmartScope), Opus 4.8 vs Sonnet 5 vs Haiku 4.5: Which Claude Model to Use (The AI Career Lab)

6. An AI Price War Is Underway

While Anthropic was busy reshuffling its own model lineup, a bigger story has been playing out across the industry: the major AI labs are cutting prices against each other, hard.

It started at Google’s I/O conference in May 2026, where Google cut prices on its AI subscription plans — its top-tier Ultra plan dropped 20% — and rolled out a cheaper Gemini tier. Google’s Sundar Pichai pitched the math directly to enterprises: shift 80% of your AI workloads to Gemini and save over $1 billion a year. That was a shot aimed squarely at OpenAI and Anthropic.

Both companies responded. OpenAI has pricing pressure of its own to manage, and Anthropic followed with steep cuts on its side: Opus 4.8 came down from $15/$75 to $5/$25 per million tokens, and Sonnet 5 launched even cheaper at $2/$10. Meanwhile, cut-rate entrants like DeepSeek are underpricing all of them, competing with frontier-class models at a fraction of the cost.

The catch is this isn’t discounting from a position of strength. Running these models is genuinely expensive, and by most reporting, OpenAI and Anthropic are both still losing money at scale even before the price cuts. One data point making the rounds — Uber reportedly burned through its entire 2026 AI budget in four months after Claude Code adoption jumped from 32% to 84% of its engineering division. Cheaper per-token pricing helps users, but it raises the obvious question of how long labs can keep pushing prices down while costs stay high.

Sources: Welcome to the OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google price wars (Sherwood News), Following Google Gemini price cuts, OpenAI also set for price reduction wave (TradingKey), AI Price War: OpenAI and Anthropic Face New Economics (The AI Chronicle)

7. Retevis RA89R Radio: FM and Weather Radio

Retevis advertises that the RA89R includes NOAA weather radio and weather alerts. I did not find pre-programmed weather frequencies in the radio. You can enter those frequencies directly in VFO mode, or program them yourself into the radio. That seems different from other radios that advertise NOAA weather channels — at least in my experience, with most including those as pre-set frequencies in the radio and accessible with the press of a button or two.

Here’s where the mini-manual let me down. How to tune to FM broadcast radio stations and how to receive NOAA weather broadcasts are not made clear. Exploring the Retevis app on my Android phone makes it evident you can set FM broadcast radio frequencies in the app, and when you write the data to the radio, they are also saved there.

The only place I found to set NOAA weather radio frequencies is in the app, then you write the data to the radio and call up those frequencies as saved channels.

So: if you are looking for FM broadcast radio frequencies or NOAA weather stations in your new Retevis RA89R radio, they aren’t there. The easiest solution is to use the app over Bluetooth to program those into the app and then write those settings to the radio.

8. EFHW Came Down

Monday morning dawned, and since I was up early, I thought I’d fire up the IC-7300 MK2 transceiver and work some FT8 while my wife was waking up. First things first, though: check the antenna. And surprise: it had come down from the tall branch above the deck!

This could be the catalyst for me to finally finish soldering the last few wires on my pneumatic launcher kit.

9. QRT: End Transmission

Another interesting week is in my rearview mirror.

I’m on my high school class reunion committee. A few years ago — at my urging — we formed a 501(c)(7) nonprofit “social club” to govern the finances and provide activities for our surviving classmates. Why? Because some classmates have substantial net worth and did not want to be held personally liable if something went wrong at/after a reunion event. The nonprofit social club approach tackles that exposure (along with event insurance), and it also helps us not to lose track of each other in the years between events.

We actually have a great time when we get together. This year will be a picnic and barbecue, and we’ll take lots of pictures for our classmates who could not attend.

On the IT side of this, I’m in charge of the class database and the website. We had more than 500 students in our senior class, so it’s a bit of a lift to keep up with all of them. Many people have passed and we’ve lost touch with quite a few folks, but we remain in contact with more than 200 classmates. All in all, I think our news reaches about 300 classmates. While I wish it could be more, that’s pretty good, considering how many years it has been since we flipped our tassels and walked off stage.

The other big challenge this week was a medical issue with my wife, resulting in a trip to the emergency room. I always figure a minimum of four hours to get in and out of the ER — this one consumed eight hours. The ER was swamped with people, so my wife’s procedure was done in the hallway, and that’s where I stayed by her side that entire time. The important conclusion to this: she’s back home and feeling better.

73, and remember to touch a radio every day!

The Random Wire newsletter is a weekly amateur radio and tech journal by Tom KJ7T, with deeper technical content posted to EtherHam.com.

1. QRV: Are You Ready?

Welcome to Random Wire 189.

This past week was interesting as I worked on this Random Wire newsletter. The week prior, I got busy with projects while writing RW 188, including experimenting with the Arduino UNO Q. That struck a chord with about a dozen subscribers, and it was apparently not a welcome sound: they unsubscribed this week. I’m guessing about why they dropped, of course. At the same time, I welcome the several new subscribers who joined the Random Wire family this week.

As I’ve thought about this, I think it’s probably a natural outcome of how people choose to subscribe. They find something about the Random Wire newsletter in a publication or by word of mouth, and since they learn of this newsletter from amateur radio sources, they assume it’s all about amateur radio. And of course, it is about amateur radio, but it is not only about radio. I look at the modern, internet-connected, technology-focused side of amateur radio. For subscribers expecting “all RF, all the time,” this would be a disappointment.

I have my RF-only days, too. I get it. At the same time, focusing only on RF is a bit like driving a car with a manual transmission, manual steering, and roll-up windows: it works, but it isn’t as comfortable as a modern personal vehicle. We live in a technology-dominated world, and I choose to let tech augment my amateur radio play. Not everyone chooses to do that, and that’s okay.

For those of us who do marry technology and radio, you are in good company. I call us “EtherHams” and it’s why I named the workbench-focused side of this newsletter EtherHam.com.

And speaking of EtherHam.com, a big thank you to Jeff for purchasing a quality Champion-brand hoodie from the EtherHam store. Store purchases help support this newsletter and the EtherHam site. I wish I had permission to use his photo because it looks great!

2. Thank You…Paul N4FTD

Community shows up in all sizes — sometimes it’s a hoodie purchase, sometimes it’s something that changes how you see the whole hobby. This week I want to talk about the second kind.

Coming straight from the heart, this won’t be a highly polished thank you note.

I extend my sincere gratitude to Paul N4FTD who took time months ago to reach out and build a friendship with me. It turns out we share many of the same things, from caring for our spouses to how we grew up. It has been, and continues to be, a joy to recognize someone traveling alongside me, albeit on the other side of the country. You can find Paul’s radio writing in ROTA-Radio.

As radio amateurs, we usually talk with our radio friends about radios, antennas, and technology. But much of this hobby is really about connecting in a meaningful way with other radio amateurs. I’m reminded of how COVID impacted some of our most vulnerable amateurs who, it turned out, didn’t just look forward to being with like-minded people at their monthly ham radio club meeting — they needed that contact. When COVID took that away, they suffered. Socializing at the monthly meeting was vital for their well being. When meetings resumed, they made sure to attend each one. I noticed their joy at being back in the room with other amateurs.

We are important to each other in ways we may not always see or understand, but it is real and impactful. I hope you’ll choose to reach out to someone new to you in our wide, far-reaching amateur radio community, even if only to say hello.

That kind of connection is the reason I do any of this. But most of my hours this week were spent somewhere less sentimental — the workbench.

3. New on EtherHam

I didn’t do any original coding this week. Instead, I’ve been fixing code, testing my Arduino devices, and starting a few more projects.

• Weekly Report: July 2, 2026 — Catch up with band conditions, digital radio news, and the Groups.io digest.

• LightAPRS Gateway 1.0 — First Impressions — There are updates posted at the end of the article, because while I thought I solved the issue, it turns out I had not. RF beaconing has been reliable, igating has not. It does not appear to be a fault with the device but I’m not sure yet what the problem is. I worked on this for three days before reaching out to LightAPRS support for help. We’ve been changing parameters, letting the device run, then looking at logs. Hopefully this will get resolved very soon.

4. In The Shack

While the LightAPRS mystery simmers, a new radio showed up that deserves its own writeup.

4.1 Retevis RA89R: Very First Impressions

I saw a review of the Retevis RA89R radio and was intrigued. The $65 Retevis RA89R arrived Wednesday evening and I immediately put it on the charger. Thursday, I turned it on for the first time.

Retevis RA89R Ham Radio, Cross-Band Repeater, APP Setting, Dual Band Handheld Radio, High Power Two Way Radio, 2800mAh USB-C Rechargeable, IP54, Long Range Walkie Talkies for Emergency, Survival (this is an affiliate link)

My very first impression? Solid build. The radio with the battery installed has some heft to it. The battery back is rounded, making it fit nicely in your hand. The two PTT buttons take a moment to get used to, because if you are trying to use VFO B but are pressing the VFO A push-to-talk button, it’s not going to work (more on this in a moment).

When I went into the menu, I immediately noticed the radio was set to a wider frequency range than my license allows. I changed the start and end frequency to 144-148 MHz for VHF and 420-450 MHz for UHF, per the ARRL band plan.

I was able to set frequencies through the radio keypad but my CTCSS tone did not stick when I saved it (probably user error). So I cranked up the Retevis app on my Android phone, connected to the radio over Bluetooth, and set the tone there. Once saved to the radio, that worked fine.

In a few minutes, I was checking my audio on my duplex AllStar node 588418. That node intakes RF on 431.180 MHz and transmits to my radio on 147.47 MHz. The 431.180 frequency also requires a CTCSS tone. I have the RX frequency (147.47) in VFO A and TX (431.18) in VFO B. While testing and not having any success, I realized I was pressing the VFO A PTT instead of the VFO B PTT. It’s a simple thing, but it will trip you up if you’re not used to having two PTT buttons. (Note that the manual calls these Band A and Band B buttons.)

Here’s another counterintuitive “aha” moment: it doesn’t matter which VFO is active on the radio. If the arrow is pointing at VFO A and you push the VFO B PTT, you will transmit on VFO B.

The display is easy to read…indoors. Outside in the sunshine, it fades and is hard to read, even set to the brightest setting.

The radio sounds good…maybe not quite as nice as my BTECH UV-PRO, but the audio is clear and has plenty of volume for me.

USB-C charging is a welcome feature, with a USB-C charging port on the battery and on the desktop charger. This makes it easy to grab the radio and go, knowing you can recharge it in the field. However, I noticed that none of my Power Delivery-capable chargers would charge the radio. Instead, I had to use a small “dumb” wall wart like we used to get when we bought a Kindle e-reader. One advertisement indicates it requires a 5V 2A charger, and that agrees with my experience.

The belt clip attaches to the battery. I’m not a fan of this arrangement. The base of the radio is large enough and flat enough that it stands nicely on a desk or shelf.

The product page says it has airband receive, FM broadcast receive, and NOAA weather alerts, but I have not yet tested those capabilities.

One ad says the radio is “moisture resistant” but without an IP rating, I can’t determine what this means.

One other slight gripe is the functions associated with keypad buttons are not labeled on the radio. You have to look at page 6 in the manual to know what they do. Nobody wants to carry a manual with them. Fortunately, the manual is not just a sheet of paper — it’s a real mini-manual that is well written.

So two strikes right out of the gate are: dim display in sunlight and the belt clip attaches to the battery instead of the radio body. But on the plus side, this dual band radio has a solid build, good audio, and a 2800MAh battery, at a very attractive price point. If you need a tough analog VHF/UHF radio and don’t want to spend much money, consider the Retevis RA89R.

The Retevis will need more bench time before I trust a verdict. The other project living on my bench this week has already earned mine: the UNO Q ASL node.

4.2 The UNO Q ASL Node is Working Well

Last week I went all-in on the Arduino UNO Q, and after setting up and using a couple of different Q devices, I’m still a fan. They are working delightfully well. Unlike my Raspberry Pi devices, I worry much less about the Q-based devices because they use durable eMMC storage instead of damage-prone microSD cards.

The AllStar node I’m running on a UNO Q uses Ampersand-ASL for AllStarLink connectivity and an AllScan USB Communications Interface for audio. It’s a very compact package:

In the view above, the UNO Q is in a metal case, forming the bottom layer of this little cake. A small USB-C hub is the next layer up, and the AllScan UCI80M tops the pile.

The user interface (UI) for Ampersand-ASL looks different than what you may be used to. You add favorite nodes on the Configuration screen, then on the Home page, you select one of those nodes to connect to it. In the screenshot below, you can see the favorites (green buttons) I’ve set for node 588414 on the UNO Q:

A quick note about the two different parrots. Node 2002 (ASL Parrot) is a standard parrot node running on the conventional ASL3/Asterisk and app_rpt stack. That stack has a hard-coded 8kHz sample rate. Node 2002 is locked to 8K audio because that’s simply what Asterisk/app_rpt does everywhere, including in parrot mode.

Node 61057 (AMP Parrot) runs on Ampersand-ASL, Bruce MacKinnon KC1FSZ’s from-scratch C++ reimplementation of the AllStarLink protocol that implements the IAX2 protocol directly, uses ALSA natively for audio, and does not use Asterisk at all. Because it was built from the ground up rather than inheriting Asterisk’s legacy code, it was easy to support 16Ksps codecs — that’s the whole point of the project’s design freedom. (16Ksps is 16,000 samples per second — a sampling rate of 16kHz. In contrast, standard telephone-quality audio that Asterisk-based systems use is 8,000 samples per second.)

4.3 Ampersand-ASL Gets an Update

Bruce MacKinnon KC1FSZ isn’t done improving Ampersand-ASL. He pushed a fresh update to Ampersand-ASL this week, and I applied it to my AllStar node without a hitch. The update tidies up compile warnings, fixes the sluggishness that had been making the Configuration tab painful to use, and folds the boot race condition workaround — the ExecStartPre=/bin/sleep 10 fix I documented on EtherHam — into the official user documentation. The full update procedure and what changed is covered in the updated EtherHam article, How to Run AllStar on the Arduino UNO Q.

I also discovered this week that Bruce was kind enough to mention KJ7T on the main Ampersand project documentation page — both as a link to the EtherHam article and in the project’s contributor acknowledgements. That’s genuinely appreciated. Bruce is doing interesting work, he’s responsive to feedback, and he’s building something that matters to the ham community. If you’re running an AllStarLink node — or curious about running one on hardware that ASL3 doesn’t yet support — the Ampersand project is worth your attention.

4.4 Amp-ASL and the Pi Zero 2 W — A Quick Experiment

I looked down on my bench and saw TomStick, a Pi Zero 2 W in a Geekworm USB dongle case, and wondered: could Ampersand-ASL by Bruce KC1FSZ run on this single-board computer? The Zero 2 W is arm64, Debian-capable, and a lot of hams have one sitting around. If it worked, it would be a compelling option for a low-cost, low-footprint AllStarLink node using hardware you might already own.

The short answer: you can’t build Amp-ASL on a Pi Zero 2 W. The compiler ran out of memory twice trying to compile WebUi.cpp, even with a 512MB swap file added. The second time, the OOM (out of memory) killer was aggressive enough to terminate the SSH session along with the compiler. TomStick was fine afterward, but the message was clear: you can’t build Amp-ASL on this platform.

This isn’t really a knock on Amp-ASL — it’s a build-time constraint, not a runtime one. On my Arduino UNO Q node, the running amp-server process uses about 4.2MB of RAM. The Zero 2 W would probably run Amp-ASL if you could get the binary onto it. The problem is getting there: WebUi.cpp is simply too large to compile on 512MB of RAM, and the OOM killer has the final say.

Could you cross-compile on a more capable machine and copy the binary over? Probably — but that’s a different project for a different afternoon.

The practical takeaway: if you want to build and run Amp-ASL on arm64 hardware, you need more than 512MB RAM. It’s worth noting that Bruce’s documented test platforms are a Raspberry Pi 5 and a Dell Wyse 3040 mini-PC — both with substantially more RAM than the Zero 2 W’s 512MB. I knew when I started this little side trip that the Pi Zero 2 W was going to be outside the tested envelope.

The UNO Q with 4GB RAM had no trouble at all. A Pi 3B+ (1GB) or Pi 4 (2GB or better) would be worth trying, and those results would be interesting. If you try it, let me know how it goes.

4.5 LightAPRS Digipeater: Hold the Phone

Not every experiment this week ended cleanly — and the LightAPRS saga from last issue still isn’t over.

The LightAPRS Gateway I mentioned last week turned out to have a subtle reliability problem: it was beaconing to APRS-IS once on startup and then going silent. I thought I fixed it with a watchdog script to restart Direwolf if it stopped sending packets. However, the timer interval was too short, creating a doom loop that prevented the 60-minute scheduled beacon from firing.

As I continued to monitor the device, I discovered my watchdog script didn’t really fix the problem. Even with the fix, Direwolf’s iGate beacons were reaching APRS-IS on startup but subsequent scheduled beacons were silently disappearing. They appeared in the local journal as sent, the APRS-IS connection shows as verified, and yet neither aprs.fi nor findU.com shows they were received.

The most telling clue is that packets marked qAR — those received via RF and gated by other iGates in the area — appear on aprs.fi consistently. Only packets marked qAC, sent directly from this gateway to APRS-IS, go missing after the initial startup beacon. I have reproduced this using different APRS-IS servers and can rule out local network issues. I’ve submitted a detailed bug report to LightAPRS support and am working with them on a solution.

4.6 GitHub, git, and Me

Bug reports and waiting rooms aside, I’ve been fighting a different kind of frustration this week: GitHub.

I am discovering that I don’t speak GitHub at all well. If you want to post some code on GitHub.com, there are several sequential steps you must follow. I’m sure for experienced coders who have adapted to GitHub, it all makes sense. For me? Not so much. The sequence to accomplish anything strikes me as a bit convoluted and arcane. The interface and sequential process were crafted by coders for coders, and it is taking me some time to get used to it.

It’s getting better, though. I still look at my “GitHub recipe card” when I’m updating code in my GitHub EtherHam space or creating a new repository, but I’m starting to think ahead of the recipe.

Behind the scenes, I’m also using git. If I thought GitHub was oblique, git doubles down on that. However, git is ultimately made simpler to use and understand because there is no graphical user interface like GitHub uses: git is 100% through the terminal. That means I don’t have to split my brain between terminal and GUI, and I do find that a bit simpler.

One thing I am certain of: it’s going to take me a while — months, maybe years — to really grok GitHub and git. These systems do not align with how my brain processes information and procedures. But as with all things about amateur radio, part of the joy is in learning new things, and GitHub and git are definitely stimulating learning! They no longer feel quite as new and raw when I use them.

4.7 Panasonic ToughBook CF54 Media Bay

GitHub isn’t the only thing that fought me this week. My ToughBook did too — just with screwdrivers instead of a terminal.

The batteries in my ToughBook appeared to be original and were no longer holding much of a charge, so I replaced the main battery. Talk about a night and day difference! Where I would get about an hour out of the main battery, now I get at least five hours.

The ToughBook’s media bay held a similarly worn-out accessory battery. Replacing it would be expensive at about twice the price of the main battery so instead I ordered a multi-drive.

Well. Installing the DVD multi-drive proved to be more complicated than I expected. It isn’t plug-and-play. Instead, the bottom plate on the laptop must be removed, then several bits of black plastic shielding need to be pulled back or removed to expose the socket. It takes a ribbon cable that is attached to the back of the drive. Once the drive is inserted, the ribbon cable goes in the matching socket…but this one looked odd. No release levers on it. No cover over it. It was not like any ZIF (zero insertion force) socket I’ve seen.

I tried sticking the ribbon cable under the socket — nope, no space. No place for it to go in the socket, either. Trying to manipulate the socket I could feel how brittle the plastic was. It wasn’t going to accept much force before breaking. I concluded that the cover on the socket had previously been broken off, so this was never going to work.

I backed out of this and reassembled the bits, then ordered a dummy plug to seal the media bay from dust and foreign objects. That will be good enough. I have an external USB drive for CDs and DVDs, and that will have to do. Once everything was buttoned up again, I tested to make sure the computer booted up cleanly…and it did.

4.8 Try the Random Wire Archive Search

After all that hardware wrangling, it was nice to end the week with a piece of software I wrote that just worked.

If you are a Substack author, you already know how abysmal is Subtack’’s search capability. I wrote Substack Search to be a full-text search index for your Substack archive, self-hosted on your own web server. The code and instructions are available in my EtherHam GitHub space.

For my subscribers, the value of building my own search function is in the improved search results. Try it yourself at: https://etherham.com/rw_search/index.html

The interface is very simple. If you want to search on a phrase, enclose it in parentheses.

I’ve updated the code a couple of times to address update and search issues. All should be working well now, but if you encounter problems, please do let me know.

5. Are ESP32 Processors Used in F1 Racing?

Not everything on my bench this week was a repair or a tool, though. Some of it was just a question I couldn’t let go of.

While watching the Formula 1 Austrian Grand Prix race, I wondered: do the sensors on the race cars use ESP32 boards? The short answer: definitely not in actual F1 cars, but surprisingly, ESP32s show up around F1 in some really fun hobbyist ways. Here’s the full picture.

On the actual cars

Real F1 cars are a world apart from consumer microcontrollers. An F1 car has around 300 sensors, and the standard ECU — the TAG-320B — monitors over 4,000 parameters. Those sensors connect either through analog systems to the ECU, or through a series of CAN buses (Controller Area Network — an automotive-standard network bus). There are 17 separate CAN buses on a car in its typical configuration, each communicating with many different devices. (More: Feature: Data and Electronics in F1, Explained!)

Today’s F1 cars generate on the order of 1 terabyte of data per car per race weekend. Teams use high-bandwidth radio systems to send telemetry in real time to the garage, where engineers monitor car health and performance on multiple screens. The central data logger runs on an Intel Atom-based unit on a Linux RTOS, with 1 GB of integrated logging memory, GPS, and an integrated telemetry unit. (More: How Many Sensors Does Formula 1 Have?)

So the electronics are custom aerospace-grade hardware — nothing close to an ESP32 in terms of specs, hardening, or regulatory approval.

Where ESP32s show up

The hobbyist/maker community has embraced the ESP32 for F1-adjacent projects:

• Makers have built F1 pit wall displays using an ESP32 CYD (a ~€10 board with a built-in 320×240 touchscreen and Wi-Fi) consuming live timing data from the OpenF1 API. The architectural lesson from that project is telling: the ESP32 works best as a display device, not a data processor — a Raspberry Pi or other server handles the API aggregation, and the ESP32 makes a single HTTP request for pre-digested data. (More: Build an F1 Pit Wall Display with ESP32 CYD and OpenF1 API)

• In lower-tier electric racing (not F1), ESP32 microcontrollers have actually been used for real telemetry — handling analog data acquisition, local preprocessing, and wireless communication via LoRa in Colombia’s National Electric Drive Vehicle Competition. (More: An IoV-Based Real-Time Telemetry and Monitoring System for Electric Racing Vehicles: Design, Implementation, and Field Validation)

• Sim racing enthusiasts use ESP32s to parse the UDP telemetry packets that the F1 video game series broadcasts, building physical dashboard displays for their rigs.

So ESP32s are great tools for watching F1, but the actual cars run purpose-built, FIA-regulated electronics at a scale and spec where a $5 Espressif chip would be completely out of its depth.

What about radios?

As I was diving headfirst into ESP32s and Formula 1, I also wondered: what radios are used in F1 racing? Are they anything we are familiar with? It turns out there are two distinct radio systems at work.

Vehicle telemetry data

According to a former F1 engineer, the telemetry system uses a proprietary WiMAX 802.16 implementation managed by McLaren Applied for all teams, based on technology from former startup Picochip. It runs on 3.5 GHz spectrum that’s virtually available worldwide. For each circuit, temporary base stations are built so the mesh provides complete coverage. (More: F1 telemetry dissected: from sensor to strategy in milliseconds)

Data is sent using 1,000 to 2,000 telemetry channels, transmitted wirelessly at around 1.5 GHz or a frequency allowed by local authorities. All data is sent in encrypted form, and the typical delay between data collection and reception at the garages is 2 milliseconds.

So the telemetry is operating in the 1.5–3.5 GHz range, depending on the source. The discrepancy in this range isn’t fully explained by what I found, but let’s agree these are outside the frequency ranges most radio amateurs use.

Team voice communications

Voice communications use a completely separate system. The vast majority of F1 teams and officials use a single TETRA digital trunked radio system provided by Riedel Communications, operating in the 420–430 MHz range (downlink) and 410–420 MHz (uplink). Some teams use alternate systems — Williams and McLaren switched to a Kenwood NXDN Nexedge system operating in the 446–473 MHz range. (More: Formula 1 (F1) by TheRadioReference Wiki)

In amateur radio terms: voice comms are solidly in the 70 cm UHF band, while the data telemetry is up in the microwave range — much more like 802.11 Wi-Fi territory.

6. Short Stack of Internet Finds

As you might expect immediately following Field Day, a Google search on “amateur radio” yields a trove of Field Day news items.

Radio

• REMINDER: RadioID.net to require annual verification — “Beginning July 1, 2026, RadioID.net will implement an annual verification process. On the anniversary of each account’s creation, RadioID.net will send an email to the account holder requesting confirmation that the assigned ID(s) are still needed and that the account information remains accurate and up to date.”

• Requiem For Long Wave, As The BBC Goes Silent — “Something happened…which will have been unnoticed by many, but which for a certain breed of radio enthusiast marks the end of an era. The BBC stopped broadcasting Radio 4 on their 198 kHz Long Wave frequency, ending over a century of transmission in the band.”

• Measuring Radio Noise and Interference in Amateur Radio: Field Strength Meter, Gauss Meter, and Better Tools — “The short answer is this: for amateur radio interference, a radio-frequency field strength meter, SDR, spectrum analyzer, or receiver with a suitable antenna is normally more useful than a gauss meter or tesla meter.”

• America’s 250th Birthday Bash Special Event Station — “Join me on JULY 4TH on the hf bands and help me help you celebrate America’s Birthday.

  I have secured the special event callsign W2A.”

• Overview of Retevis RA89R and RA89G — I’m intrigued by the RA89R as it advertises dual bands with cross-band repeat, suggesting that it might actually have independent VFOs. I doubt it, especially at this price point. I believe it is actually a half-duplex radio. But I do think it might work for pseudo-duplex use with a full-duplex AllStar node by configuring one VFO for transmitting and one for receiving, but I won’t know until I try it. With USB-C charging, Bluetooth programming, and up to 10 watts of output, it’s worth gambling $65 on this.

• Ham Radio Digital Mode Frequencies Chart [HF Through 70cm] — “Unlike voice contacts, where activity is spread across an entire band, digital operators usually meet on well-established “watering hole” frequencies.”

• HRWB 266 – All About AMSAT With Drew Glasbrenner KO4MA — “In this episode we meet Drew Glasbrenner, KO4MA, the new president of AMSAT, the amateur radio satellite organization.”

Computing

• It’s now the Arduino Uno Q’s turn to get a price hike — “Two versions of the single-board microcomputer will be $15 to $20 more expensive starting next month.” Glad I stocked up with a few spare boards!

• Best Raspberry Pi Alternatives: 4 Options to Consider — This is an article I wish I had written. It’s a good overview of alternatives, even if it doesn’t include the Arduino UNO Q board.

• 5 things to build with the $4 chip that’s outselling the Raspberry Pi — “There are tons of cheaper Raspberry Pi alternatives that work just as well, and one among them is the ESP32. It won’t run Linux or host your home server, but at just $5, this chip can do more than it lets on.”

• Raspberry Pi Locator Website To Shut Down In July — “As announced by [André] on Bluesky, next month the much loved Rpilocator.com website will cease displaying the stock status and pricing of Raspberry Pi computers from various online retailers.”

7. June 17, 1936: The Day Radio Heard Itself Clearly

One story from ninety years ago felt worth pulling out of the noise…literally.

On June 17, 1936 — ninety years ago this month — Edwin Howard Armstrong walked into the Federal Communications Commission headquarters and changed what radio sounded like. He played a jazz record over conventional AM radio, then switched to an FM broadcast. A reporter in the room wrote that if the fifty engineers present had closed their eyes, they would have believed the jazz band was playing in the same room. No static. No hiss. No interference. Just music.

Armstrong had been working toward that moment for years. Frustrated by AM’s vulnerability to static and interference — a physics problem baked into amplitude modulation itself — he pursued a different approach: instead of varying the strength of the radio wave to carry sound, he varied its frequency. The result was a signal that natural static simply couldn’t touch. FM didn’t reduce interference. It eliminated it. The silence between the notes was actually silent.

You would think that kind of demonstration would change everything immediately but it didn’t. RCA’s David Sarnoff, who had been Armstrong’s friend, saw FM not as a breakthrough but as a threat. Thousands of AM transmitters and millions of AM receivers could become obsolete. The broadcast networks had enormous investments in AM. And Sarnoff had his eye on television — he didn’t have the bandwidth to also champion a new radio system. So RCA used its considerable influence to slow FM down: lobbying the FCC, disputing Armstrong’s patents, and eventually developing their own FM technology while refusing to pay royalties on his.

The fight consumed the last years of Armstrong’s life. By 1954 he was financially exhausted from the legal battles and deeply depressed. He died by suicide in January of that year, never knowing how the story ended. His wife Marion continued the patent fight after his death, and in 1967 the Supreme Court ruled that Armstrong had indeed invented FM. He was right all along — he just didn’t live to hear the verdict.

Every time you tune an FM radio, every time a silent passage is actually silent, you’re experiencing what Armstrong proved in that FCC hearing room in 1936. He didn’t get the recognition or the royalties he deserved, but he got the physics right. For radio amateurs, his story is a reminder that the people who build the tools don’t always get to enjoy the world those tools create. We work the bands they made possible, often without a second thought about who fought to make them available.

8. Gadgets: Headphones, DAC, and Player

I found myself thinking about Armstrong and audio fidelity again this week for a much lighter reason: new headphones.

I bought a pair of SENNHEISER HD 599 Open Back Headphones on special during Amazon Prime Days. They were roughly one-half their normal price. I’ve paired them with a Fosi Audio K5 Pro DAC. My digital music catalog is stored on my Beelink network-attached storage box, and I play that library with MusicBee on my laptop. Player Preferences in MusicBee is set to WASAPI (Exclusive) to bypass the Windows sound system.

If you’re a basshead, these are probably not the headphones for you. They deliver a flatter response across audible frequencies and present a more open, airy soundscape. Of course, you can dial up the bass with an equalizer or with the DAC. If I dial up the bass all the way on the DAC, audio is still clear but the deep tones overpower mid and high frequencies, at least for my ears.

I am not an audiophile but I do like clear audio where I can separate instruments and voices, and where I can feel like I’m in the hall with the performers. The open back headphones provide a wonderfully open sound without the sound pressure that some closed headphones can project. The funny thing about saying “I’m not an audiophile” is good quality recordings and equipment provide an experience that is viscerally and audibly better than poorer equipment. You don’t have to be an audiophile to appreciate good sound.

On the DAC, I have the bass and treble controls set at the one o’clock position. To me, this moves the sound stage a bit forward, as if the performance is closer to me. Need more bass? Try setting the DAC bass control to three o’clock or more. In MusicBee, I’ve set the equalizer to the Acoustic profile, which I find most pleasing for the music I listen to.

One of the wonderful things about this combination is the silence. Silence during pieces, and between songs, have no hiss, no hum, no thrumming sound, nothing. Just silence. That really plays well with The High Kings when they punctuate their tight harmonies with moments of silence before the next attack.

I would describe this combination of headphones, DAC, and player as a solid mid-tier setup for someone who likes to hear parts and harmonies. As I write this, I’m listening to acoustic sounds by The Wailin’ Jennys (40 Days album) and The High Kings (Grace & Glory, and The High Kings). Also, The Corrs, as well as Chris Botti.

Acoustic Highway by Craig Chaquico sounds amazing. I can hear the left and right background instruments clearly. There is more texture to his music than you might hear over a radio. And Jazz Samba by Stan Getz and Charlie Byrd is astounding: very present, very clear.

It’s not all quiet stuff. Earth Wind and Fire’s punchy, percussive music sounds delightfully crisp. The overtones of Eddie Van Halen’s high notes on Eruption come through with clear brilliance, and Ain’t Talkin’ ‘Bout Love sounds like it is being played on a wide sound stage. If you like that song but also like musical interpretations, I invite you to compare it with Ain’t Talkin’ ‘Bout Love by Scott Bradlee’s Postmodern Jukebox on the Lounge Language Models album.

9. QRT: End Transmission

Good sound isn’t the only thing that’s mattered to me this week.

Earlier this week, two women who taught alongside my wife for fifteen years came to visit her. My wife can no longer speak, but she was present in every way that mattered — attentive, tracking the conversation, trying to engage. Watching her with her friends, I was reminded of what I wrote earlier in this issue about Paul: we are important to each other in ways we may not always see or understand.

That evening, she looked over at me and said, “Hi Tom.”

This was more meaningful than it might appear, because twice in the past month, she has looked at me and asked: “Who are you?” So you’ll understand why two words — my name, spoken by her — stopped me cold.

I’m glad she knew me in that moment. I’m glad her friends came. Some things matter more than radio.

73, and remember to touch a radio every day!

00 QRV: Are You Ready?

This was the week of Q — no, not the Q from the James Bond franchise, but a tiny Arduino-based computer board. The UNO Q is featured in three articles about using it for amateur radio use. One is a comparison with other platforms, one details an AllStar build with Ampersand-ASL, and the other describes setting up a Q with WSJT-X and GridTracker2 for HF digital work.

It’s ARRL Field Day weekend! Enjoy yourself on the air, and hopefully you’ll be able to attend a local Field Day event. For some, it’s a contest. For others, it’s a party. For many of us, it is a fine excuse to visit with our radio friends.

01 Thank You…ARISS

Some things lodge themselves in your memory so firmly that you can still feel them sixty years later.

I was almost six years old on February 20, 1962, when John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth. I remember sitting transfixed, listening to his voice coming live from space. I didn’t fully understand what I was hearing, but I understood that a human being was up there, and his voice was coming down to us through the air. That moment planted something.

The Mercury program didn’t involve amateur radio, but the connection between space and radio has deepened considerably since then. Through ARISS — Amateur Radio on the International Space Station — astronauts have been talking to schoolchildren from orbit for decades. A kid with a handheld transceiver and lightweight beam antenna can have a two-minute conversation with a crew member on the ISS. I can’t think of a better recruitment tool for this hobby, or a better use of the radio spectrum.

So: thank you, John Glenn, for planting the radio bug in me. And thank you to everyone at ARISS who turned that wonder into something kids can still experience today. You bring the magic of radio into young hearts and minds.

02 New on EtherHam

With three new articles this week about the Arduino UNO Q board, it is apparent that I’m quite taken with this little ARM-based computer.

• LightAPRS Gateway 1.0 — First Impressions — I received this device last night and had it on my network and working within 20 minutes.

• Resurrecting a Forgotten HSR-USB as an AllStar Node — A forgotten HSR-USB board in the back of the drawer had no documentation and I had no memory of what frequency it was programmed on. Eventually, I was able to interrogate the SA818 chip to determine frequencies and CTCSS tones. The device is rescued from the drawer and back in service as AllStar node 578498.

• The Arduino UNO Q: Affordable, Ready to Run, and Surprisingly Capable — In this piece, I develop a high-level comparison of the UNO Q with the Raspberry Pi 5, Dell Wyse 3040, and N-series mini PCs. If you’ve never thought about trying the UNO Q, start with this article.

• How to Run AllStar on the Arduino UNO Q — Seeing that this had been done by a few others, I dove in and documented how to get Ampersand-ASL running on the UNO Q platform.

• FT8 Digital Modes on the Arduino UNO Q: Installing WSJT-X and GridTracker2 — This was a big little project this week and a quite satisfying one, at that. The result? I have a dedicated WSJT-X/GridTracker2 platform attached to my Icom IC-7300MK2 transceiver. I no longer have to set up my ham radio laptop to do FT8 work, and even better, I can run FT8 remotely from another part of the house.

• Build Your Own Substack Archive Search — I started publishing on Substack in 2022, and over the years, I’ve grown more and more frustrated by the truly abysmal search capability on that platform. So I did something about it with my own search system.

• Weekly Reports: June 25, 2026 — The 20 and 17-meter bands should be reliable workhorses this coming week. Digital radio news was very light this cycle. On the Groups.io front, I checked 26 groups with 465 messages.

03 Built and Working: AllStar with an Arduino

I’ve been wanting to try building an AllStarLink node with an Arduino UNO Q board for a while. The UNO Q runs full Debian Linux on a Qualcomm ARM64 processor, costs around $60, and fits in your hand. If you’ve been eyeing a Raspberry Pi 4 or 5 for a project like this and balking at current prices and availability, the UNO Q is worth a serious look.

Getting AllStar running on it turned out to be more interesting than I expected. The mainstream ASL3 software stack doesn’t quite work on the UNO Q yet — the board’s custom Qualcomm kernel is missing an audio interface that ASL3 depends on. That’s being worked on, and it might be resolved by the time you read this. But today, the proven path is a project called Ampersand-ASL, written by Bruce MacKinnon KC1FSZ. Bruce built a complete AllStar node implementation from scratch in C++ — no Asterisk, no DAHDI, no kernel module compilation. Just clean code that speaks IAX2 natively and connects to the AllStarLink network the same as any other node.

I named my ASL node the QNode. It’s running on the AllStarLink network as node 588414 under KJ7T, connected via a USB radio interface and a Motorola speaker-mic. The audio quality is solid — I pulled a clip from ARRL Audio News through the node and it came back clean and clear. You can hear it below:

(For the audio fade in and out, I used Tenacity, a fork of Audacity.)

The software build itself took an afternoon, mostly because I ran into three non-obvious gotchas that anyone attempting this will hit: a HID device permissions issue that silences PTT, a missing group membership for the arduino user, and a systemd race condition that causes silent audio on every boot until you add a ten-second startup delay. None of them are hard to fix once you know what you’re looking at.

I’ve written it all up in detail over at EtherHam, including the ASL3 situation, the full build walkthrough, and the troubleshooting steps. If you want to put an AllStar node together on a budget and don’t mind building from source, this is a genuinely satisfying project. The article is titled How to Run AllStar on the Arduino UNO Q and it’s live now at EtherHam.com.

04 SuzieQ Gets a Job: FT8 with an Arduino

A subscriber sent me a note a few weeks ago saying he’d gotten WSJT-X and GridTracker2 running on an Arduino UNO Q. That was enough for me.

I spent a Saturday getting it working on my own UNO Q (named SuzieQ) which now lives next to the IC-7300MK2 in the sun room. The short version: it works, and it works well, with WSJT-X decoding signals, GridTracker2 painting stations on a world map, QSOs logging automatically to QRZ. All this runs headless on a board half the size of a playing card, accessible from anywhere in the house via RustDesk. I made the first confirmed QSO from the other side of the house, which felt like the right way to prove the point.

The total hardware cost — UNO Q, case, power supply, and USB hub — came to $120. For comparison, a 4GB Raspberry Pi 4B kit with storage runs $130 and up today, and with that you are stuck with a microSD card instead of the UNO Q’s soldered eMMC. I’m not saying the Pi isn’t a fine machine. I’m saying the math has changed.

The full write-up is at EtherHam.com, with all the commands, settings tables, and gotchas documented in enough detail that you should be able to follow along with your own hardware. If you have a radio with USB connectivity and you’ve been thinking about a dedicated digital modes platform, this is worth your time: FT8 Digital Modes on the Arduino UNO Q: Installing WSJT-X and GridTracker2

05 Code Fix: Substack Search

In continued testing of the Substack Search tool, I discovered I didn’t code it right the first time. Searches for common terms like “Meshtastic” were returning HTTP 500 errors instead of results. The error log told the story: fts5: missing row 63 from content table. The full-text search index and the posts database had gotten out of sync.

The culprit was the update tool — the web page that lets me upload a fresh Substack export zip to add new issues to the index. The original code was doing incremental updates: deleting each post’s entry from the search index and reinserting it. That approach scrambled the internal row numbering that SQLite’s FTS5 search engine depends on, and searches started failing.

The fix was straightforward once the problem was clear. Instead of updating the search index one post at a time, the new code processes all the posts first and then rebuilds the entire index in a single clean pass. The result is the same — all posts indexed and searchable — but the internal bookkeeping stays consistent no matter how many times you run it.

If you grabbed the code from the EtherHamRadio/substack-search repository before this week, pull the updated update.php. If you built your initial database using Claude as described in the article, you may also need to rebuild the database from a fresh Substack export — the corruption only affects databases that have been through the update tool at least once.

06 In the Shack

Some Trouble with WPSD

I had some trouble with my Raspberry Pi 5 hotspot running the great WPSD software. My Wi-Fi would no longer connect and the region showed AD (Andorra), not US. When I reconfigured and hit save, nothing actually saved. I could boot up with the Ethernet cable connected and all was well. But I had no Wi-Fi connection: my router didn’t see the device and my settings wouldn’t save.

I downloaded a backup of the configuration and burned a fresh image, then booted up while connected via Ethernet. That gave me the opportunity to configure Wi-Fi, and this time, it saved it. Then I disconnected the Ethernet cable and rebooted again. After a few minutes, the dashboard came up. I restored my saved backup and the hotspot was functioning once again over Wi-Fi.

At first I thought: did I find a bug? But as I ran through the logic chain in my mind, I realized it was more likely the microSD card had become corrupted. To eliminate that possibility, I started over fresh. It turns out this was the right move.

If your Wi-Fi settings aren’t saving and your region keeps reverting, don’t waste time troubleshooting — just burn a fresh image. It’s faster than chasing a corrupted filesystem.

A few days later, it wouldn’t boot. Eventually, I removed the cover and pulled off the MMDVM hat. Then it booted cleanly. While it was running, I put the MMDVM hat back on and suddenly there was my display. I suspect a bad connection on one of the GPIO pins…could be due to heat, could be oxidation. In any event, once I re-seated the hat, my problem went away.

And then I noticed my Raspberry Pi 4-based WPSD was set on simplex, not duplex. The modem version matched, so I wondered: if I restored my saved RPi 5 hotspot configuration to the RPi 4 machine, would it work? It should, since the hats were the same. At least that’s what I postulated, so I tried it. And it did work. My separate frequencies for TX and RX came in on the RPi 4 machine after restoring the RPi 5 backup to it. One gotcha, though: the hostname carried over from the RPi 5 backup to the RPi 4. This was easy to correct in the configuration screen.

Now I have two hotspots with frequencies programmed exactly the same, meaning one is now turned off and waiting in the wings in case my primary hotspot bites the dust.

ToughBook Battery, Part 2

I mentioned last week that the batteries in my old Panasonic ToughBook MK2 laptop appeared to be (a) original and (b) worn out. Accordingly, I bought a generic replacement battery and crossed my fingers that it would work. Well, it worked great. After charging it in the laptop, I got several hours of operating time from the battery. I ran it until the laptop shut down to condition it (although new tech batteries probably don’t need it like the older ones did).

The cost of the battery for the media bay is rather high — about twice the cost of the main battery for only 2/3 of the contained watts. The better play is to buy a media drive for that bay (done!) and buy a second main battery as a spare (not done). One main battery plus a spare will give me plenty of cushion for a long POTA session with the ToughBook.

Just Arrived: APRS Digipeater

My APRS device is being shipped from halfway across the planet, from Mugla, Turkey, to be exact. Surprisingly, it took just seven days for this to arrive on my doorstep.

This is the LightAPRS Gateway 1.0 sold by QRP Labs, and I’ve posted my first impressions in LightAPRS Gateway 1.0 — First Impressions.

DAC for laptop and headphones

I like small, capable devices. And I like listening to music while I work, often with headphones rather than earbuds. My Surface Laptop 7 computer has a 3.5mm audio jack but not all of my computers are so equipped, so several months ago, I bought a USB-C digital audio converter:

Moondrop Echo-A 32Bit/384kHz Portable USB Type-C to Headphone DAC/AMP with 3.5mm Audio Jack Adapter (this is an affiliate link)

The current cost of the Moondrop DAC is $22 but when I bought it, it was on a deal for about one-half that. Does it work? Yes.

This week, I tried a newer, similar product, for $18:

USB C to 3.5mm Headphones Adapter, Dual Chip CX31993 MAX97220 DAC Dongle with HiFi Amplifier, 8-Strand 4N Single Crystal Copper Silver-Plated Cable, USBC to aux for All USBC Devices (this is an affiliate link)

I can’t actually tell the difference in sound between the two devices. Both work well to convert from USB-C to a 3.5mm headphone connection. They even work with my cell phone that has no headphone jack. Both sound great. Oh, and if you have an inline microphone with your headphones, both of these USB-C devices pass transmitted audio, too.

If you need separate lines for RX and TX, try this Creative Labs product for $19:

Creative Labs Sound Blaster Play! 3 External USB Sound Adapter for Windows and Mac. Plug and Play (No Drivers Required). Upgrade to 24-Bit 96Khz Playback (this is an affiliate link)

I have all three devices. They all work well.

USB Dongle Board

As I was digging through the parts drawer, I found a GeekWorm USB Dongle Board (this is an affiliate link) stuffed all the way in the back. Apparently, I bought it in 2025, mounted it to a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W, and then it migrated to the dark recesses of the drawer. The dongle costs $8.

What does it do? The Geekworm USB Dongle Board converts a Raspberry Pi Zero or Zero 2 W into a USB stick form factor by adding a full-size USB-A connector, allowing it to plug directly into any USB-A port. When configured for USB gadget mode, the Pi can present itself to the host computer as a network adapter, serial device, or keyboard — or it can simply draw power from the port while communicating wirelessly over WiFi.

I did not configure it in gadget mode. Instead, I have it plugged into my ORICO USB hub ($34, this is an affiliate link) where it is running as a utility Debian Linux machine over Wi-Fi on my home network.

My first test? Install uCareSystem to automate system updates. Unfortunately, OpenPGP verification failed, and the alternative methods to install the key also failed. The good news? I didn’t impact one of my working systems with this test!

07 Opinion: Just Read the Manual

For years, I’ve been seeing the same response when someone asks a question about how to operate a specific feature of an amateur radio: just read the manual. I saw it again this week when someone on Facebook asked a question I didn’t know the answer to — despite having read the manual myself, more than once.

It used to be easier. Fewer configuration choices meant the radio had buttons and dials instead of deeply nested menus. Manuals were logically organized and clearly written. Those days are largely gone, at least for the handheld transceivers that arrive at my door from distant lands.

Today, the manual is often poorly written in English — sometimes a translation, sometimes written by someone whose language skills don’t quite meet the demands of clear technical writing. And since many of us are now above a certain age, our memory may not retain information the way it once did. I recognize that the sponge in my head is simply not as absorbent as it used to be.

So there are three real problems with “just read the manual” advice: manuals that are poorly organized — or in the case of at least one radio brand I’ve wrestled with, nonexistent; English that isn’t up to the task of technical guidance; and the perfectly normal fact that human memory fades over time.

Telling someone to “just read the manual” solves nothing. I don’t think the people who say it realize how they come across to others.

The good news is that they’re easy to ignore — and doing so leaves more room to appreciate the hams who genuinely want to help others learn. That community is larger, and it’s the one I choose to spend my time with.

08 Short Stack of Internet Finds

There’s just not a lot for the Short Stack this week, which is a surprise, considering Amazon Prime Day sales and Field Day events.

Radio

• SwR Shortwave Radio: A New Android App for Listening to Public Online Shortwave Receivers — “This is an Android-only app that lets users easily listen to KiwiSDR and Web-888 receivers. The app appears to be free, with no in-app purchases.”

• The Ultimate Handheld Walkie-Talkie Guide for Amateur Radio Beginners — “This comprehensive guide breaks down how to choose your first HT, why more functions cost more money, the best upgrades for portable operation, and the top brands dominating the global market.”

Software

• DokuWiki Markdown Support — This may only matter to me, but… DokuWiki is a flat-file wiki system that I truly love. Except for the DokuWiki editor which does not match standard Markdown formatting. It looks like Markdown support will soon be baked into the core, and I think this is a tremendous thing.

09 QRT: End Transmission

I began crafting Random Wire 188 on Sunday, June 21: Father’s Day. It was a bittersweet moment as I recalled my father who walked on some years ago. This week, I replaced the mailbox Dad put up by the road oh, about 20 years ago. The metal bracket had become weakened due to rust and the wooden bits had grown quite soft. Frankly, I’m surprised the postal delivery person didn’t complain. It was a rickety thing.

But what I found endearing as I deconstructed Dad’s construction were the several generations of fixes Dad had implemented. I could see the first installation: a couple of lag bolts to secure the bracket to the 4×4 post and a couple of machine bolts to hold the mailbox to the bracket. And then there was a plywood bracket he added as the lag bolts lost their purchase, apparently to try to stabilize the main bracket. Finally, there were several applications of deck screws, inserted at various angles, to hold things together as the whole assembly began to weaken.

He would have installed the mailbox around age 70. As he and the mailbox aged, his reasoning got softer just as the mailbox support system did. I could see that by how he tried to use deck screws — probably in his 80s — to hold it all together. As I removed Dad’s work and replaced it with my own, I felt very close to him. Happy Father’s Day, Dad.

73, and remember to touch a radio every day!

00 QRV: Are You Ready?

Walter Cronkite has been a silent key since 2009, so there is now an entire generation who know nothing about him…but I remember him. I remember his calm demeanor. I remember the feeling that this is someone who is telling me the truth. And I remember the origin story of Cronkite becoming a licensed ham. This strongly influenced my decision to seek my license, so Random Wire 187 opens with a thank you to Walter Cronkite KB2GSD (SK).

RW 187 also brings you:

• Four new EtherHam articles

• Some shack notes

• An APRS device I ordered

• The ARRL radio comparison table

• A new music player on my network-attached storage box

• Some gadgets (headphones and USB hubs)

• My Panasonic CF-54 ToughBook needs a battery

• An opinion piece about using AI as an assistive tool for hams that need some help

• And the Short Stack of Interesting Internet Finds

01 Thank You, Walter Cronkite KB2GSD (SK)

Walter Cronkite was born on November 4, 1916 in St. Joseph, Missouri. His family later moved to Texas, where he spent most of his childhood, and his passion for journalism ignited when he read an article in Boys’ Life as a young boy. He enrolled at the University of Texas at Austin to study political science, economics, and journalism, but left school to take a position at the Houston Post — and never looked back.

His career accelerated during his time at the United Press, where he served as a World War II correspondent and afterward as Chief Correspondent for the Nuremberg trials. He joined CBS News in 1950 and was named anchor of the CBS Evening News in 1962. The defining moment that made him a household name was his announcement of President Kennedy’s assassination. Over nearly two decades behind that desk, he was the calm, steady voice that walked Americans through the moon landing, Vietnam, Watergate, and a string of national tragedies that might have broken lesser men.

He is the last news anchor I fully trusted, and I don’t think I’m alone in that. There was something in his delivery — no spin, no wink, no performance. He became something of a national institution, known as “Uncle Walter” to many, with an unflappable delivery and a voice that guided viewers through national triumphs and tragedies alike. On March 6, 1981, he anchored his final newscast and signed off with: “Old anchormen, you see, don’t fade away, they just keep coming back for more. And that’s the way it is.” For me, the world felt a little less reliable after that.

Now here’s the part that matters to us. At CBS, Cronkite was surrounded by hams — most notably his friend and the program’s radio engineer, Steve Mendelsohn, W2ML, who over time talked about the hobby often enough to ignite a slow-burning interest in his news anchor friend. Cronkite had even purchased a receiver and would listen on the bands from time to time, but he resisted taking the licensing exam because of the Morse code requirement.

The breakthrough came in the studio one evening before the nightly broadcast, when Mendelsohn needed to test the tone of the audio recorders. He grabbed a copy of the New York Times and sent Morse code with the tone key for ten minutes. After the broadcast, Cronkite walked into the control room and presented his script — on the back of it was the entire text Mendelsohn had sent in code. Mendelsohn and CBS Evening News Director Dick Muller, WA2DOS, exchanged a look and told Cronkite he had just passed the Morse code test. Cronkite laughed and asked when the formal exam was scheduled — only to learn that with two licensed general class operators present as witnesses, he had already passed.

Weeks later Cronkite took and passed the written test, and became officially licensed as KB2GSD. His first QSO was on 10 meters. He was immediately snubbed by a Midwestern ham who didn’t believe the famous newscaster was who he claimed to be: “That’s the worst Walter Cronkite imitation I’ve ever heard!” followed by, “Walter Cronkite is not even a ham, and if he was, he certainly wouldn’t be here on 10 meters.” Mendelsohn said the two of them laughed about that one for weeks. Walter Cronkite, KB2GSD, passed away on July 17, 2009 at the age of 92 — but this story of hams helping others become licensed is exactly the kind of thing that makes this hobby worth thanking people for.

02 New on EtherHam

• After Elwood: A Survey of HamClock Successors and Alternatives — I take a look at the variety of HamClock-like systems available and manage to extend appreciation for Elwood Downey’s great contributions to our hobby.

• Getting the Arduino UNO Q Running Headless with Remote Desktop — This is cutting-edge stuff for me and I’m enjoying it. The Q has been running quite well for a week. Since I booted it up, I’ve also learned you can run WSJT-X and GridTracker on it! I’ve not tried that…yet.

• One Step Better: The Gamma 601 and the Bitaxe Firmware Underneath — The key takeaway: for three times the cost of the lightweight Nerd Miner, I’m getting 1,000 times more hashing.

• Weekly Report: June 18, 2026 — Band Conditions This Week, Digital Radio News, and the Groups.io Digest.

03 Radios

“Touch a radio every day!” is my closing tagline for this newsletter. I certainly did that this week. I organized the chargers for various handhelds:

• BTECH UV-PRO

• Wouxon KG-UV9D Plus

• Yaesu FT-3D and Yaesu FT-5D

• Connect Systems CS 7000-M17 Plus

• Baofeng UV-5R Mini

• Various TIDRADIO handhelds

I discovered that when I rebuilt the hotspot I use for YSF/C4FM, I changed the frequency. Rather than revert to the old frequency, I chose to manually reprogram two radios. I got the FT-3D configured with split TX and RX frequencies but have not completed that task with the FT-5D radio.

While I was doing these things, I was listening to our local C4FM repeater, to the W6EK repeater, to America’s Kansas City Wide network, and to the ISS. These regular stops provide good company all week. I also participated in the weekly M17 net held every Saturday on KC-Wide; I always learn new things there.

A radio friend asked for help so I spent some time testing an installation package for a radio system. Yes, I’m being a little cagey here because this package is not yet ready for prime time, but it is coming along very nicely. I’ll have more on this in a future issue.

On the HF side, I started organizing my HF rigs, too. I brought multiple Ten-Tec Scout radios with me to the lake house to test and haven’t had time to try them. My tried-and-true Yaesu FT-450D is in a Pelican-brand case next to my desk. The Icom IC-7300 MK2 is in my wife’s room. The other radios are in Harbor Freight cases, ready to be shifted to the garage.

04 APRS

I’ve been wanting to stand up a small fill-in digipeater, but I rarely have a lot of time to dig into projects like this. That’s why I was very pleased to see the LightAPRS Gateway by QRP Labs. I have one on order and am looking forward to getting it on the air.

Since I’m using my sister’s lake house right now, I can’t really drill holes in the wall to pass coax through. However, there are a few unused TV cable pass-throughs available. I have the bits and pieces coming to run coax from the galvanized chimney cap to a TV pass-through. While I know the TV F-connector and cable have 75-ohm impedance and we want 50 ohms, I don’t think it is going to make a lot of difference for this application.

What will make a difference is getting a good mag-mount above the roofline with a reasonable metal ground plane under it.

Maybe this will work fine, maybe it won’t. As is my way, I’ll try it and let you know how it goes.

05 ARRL Radio Comparison Table

This may be useful for radio amateurs: Find the Right Rig: New Comparison Tool for ARRL Members.

In the screenshot below, I tested by selecting handheld VHF/UHF radios with APRS capability:

As you can see, there are a number of well-known APRS-capable radios missing from the list, including the Kenwood TH-D74/75 radios. Why? Because the database only covers radios tested by ARRL. If a radio wasn’t tested, it’s not in the database.

Testing by the ARRL is generally thorough, so if a radio is listed, you can have confidence in the summarized results and the detailed review of the device. If a radio is not listed, that does not mean it performs poorly — it just means ARRL hasn’t reviewed it yet.

06 New Music Player for the NAS

I got tired of the OwnTone interface — slow, clunky, and not particularly friendly. This week, I installed Navidrome, an open source music player/streamer. It is working quite nicely. Fingers crossed that it continues to do so.

I could have installed it in a Docker container, but there was no good reason to do so. Instead, I followed the Linux installation instructions to install it directly on the Beelink network-attached storage box. All went well and the interface looks very nice:

There are a variety of client applications for iOS, macOS, Android, Linux, and Windows that can pull from the Navidrome instance. It’s nice to have choices.

I’ve kept OwnTone for now because I have some audiobooks in it. In the meantime, I’ve installed AudioBookShelf as a potential replacement.

07 Gadgets

Headphones

I’m always on the lookout for comfortable headphones that sound good. I’m not an audiophile — my hearing is no longer good enough to hear the very highest notes. I’m also not a bass head, so that opens up possibilities with off brands.

I am pleasantly surprised by a pair of wired headphones that arrived this week:

NUBWO Studio Monitor Headphones, Hi-Res Wired Over Ear Headphones with 1/4 inch to 3.5mm Jack, 45mm Drivers, Professional DJ Headphones for Piano Guitar APM Recording Mixing-HD01 (Black) (this is an affiliate link)

They sound pretty good. I got them on a deal for $50 and so far, I think they are worth more than that. They are comfortable on my head and ears, and the sound is crisp and clear. These headphones come with two cables.

At this price point, long-term durability is always a question. Nevertheless, I like them. My test? Listening to The Ultimate Yes, a three-disc album set. I’m pushing the volume and not encountering distortion. If you are a Yes fan, you know the bass work is exceptional, and while the bass is probably a little light for some folks, I find it just right. The sound has some sparkle in the upper registers, I can clearly hear the bass line, and the mid-range is ample.

Even Nickelback and the Bee Gees sound good with these phones.

USB Hubs

I bought two USB hubs, one for the Arduino Uno Q and one for my desk. The UGREEN hub I bought for the Q did not work for me, but this Acer model did:

acer 6 in 1 USB C Hub with Ethernet, 4K@60Hz USBC to HDMI Multiport Adapter, 100W PD Charging, USB A/USB C Data Ports USB C Splitter for MacBook Neo/Pro M5/Air, Acer, iPad, iPhone 17/16/15 (this is an affiliate link)

The UGREEN got quite warm when it was connected to Ethernet but the Acer 6-in-1 hub is staying nice and cool. More important for me is I’m able to pass data and power through the single USB-C port on the Q. Also, the Acer hub is about the size of my Roku remote control, meaning it doesn’t take up much real estate on the desk.

The other hub I picked up for the edge of the shelves beside my desk.

ORICO Clip Docking Station, 8-in-1 Clamp USB C Hub with 4K@60Hz HDMI, 100W PD, Gigabit Ethernet, 4xUSB Port, AUX, 10Gbps Clamp Docking Station for Laptop, MacBook, PC (Adapter Not Included) (this is an affiliate link)

This device clamps onto the edge of a shelf where it stays close at hand but still out of the way. Unlike many other hubs, this device features a variety of ports. Very handy.

08 My Panasonic ToughBook CF-54

I picked this up a few years ago, finding it to be a solid — if unspectacular — performer. However, the batteries (yes, there are two) are not holding a charge for very long. When I pulled them, I saw they are Panasonic-brand batteries which means they are probably original to this ruggedized laptop.

Time to go shopping.

Buying specialized batteries online can be a hit-or-miss proposition. In this case, I headed to Amazon and started looking at reviews. I found the reviews not entirely helpful. It feels like there is a lot of gaming of the system going on when it comes to battery reviews.

Eventually, I picked one that had a very large number of reviews. It wasn’t the highest-rated battery, but a large review count feels more trustworthy than a handful of five-star ratings.

I had one other surprise with the CF-54. With nice weather, I like to take a laptop or tablet out on the deck from time to time. My Kindle Paperwhite works brilliantly in the sunshine, but my laptops become very hard to see due to insufficient nits (brightness) and their highly reflective screens. Then I tried the CF-54 in full sunlight and was shocked at how well it performed, once I turned the screen brightness up. Of course, this consumes a lot of battery power, which is why (and now the story comes full circle) I need a new battery!

09 Keeping Every Ham at the Table

A friend of mine has some special needs that make conventional computer use difficult. Thinking about his situation in the wake of setting up a self-hosted AI agent on my home server, I realized: this could open a door for him that other technologies have kept closed. The agent can speak, listen, remember, and respond — offering an alternative path around the screen and keyboard entirely. That thought led to a bigger one: how many hams are in situations like his, and are we paying any attention to what technology like this could mean for them?

Here’s the thing: you’ve probably already worked someone over the air who has significant special needs. You didn’t know, because they were smooth. They had figured out how to do what the rest of us unthinkingly do, just by a different route. That legally blind net control operator running a clean, efficient session. The ham with tremor who has adapted their keying. The operator whose memory isn’t what it was but whose passion for the hobby hasn’t dimmed one bit. They’re already in our community. They’re already on our repeaters. And most of us have no idea.

We don’t talk much about accessibility in the amateur radio community, but we should. The demographics of our hobby are skewing older. A significant portion of licensed amateurs are in their post-retirement years, and with age comes a familiar constellation of challenges you’ll hear on many repeaters: vision changes, arthritis, tremor, hearing loss, cognitive shifts. These are not reasons to leave the hobby. They’re reasons to think harder about the tools we use and the tools we build. Organizations like Blind Hams (blindhams.network) and BlindHams.com have been doing this work quietly for years. The conversation is not new. What’s new is what technology now makes possible.

What I’ve been experimenting with is called an AI agent. Specifically, I’m trying Hermes Agent, an open-source project from Nous Research. Unlike the chatbots most people are familiar with, an agent is persistent — it remembers what it learned. It can be given tasks and then carry them out autonomously. And critically, it doesn’t have to live in a browser tab on a bright screen. It can live on a server in your shack, accessible through a phone, a voice interface, or a messaging app. I’ve not seen it examined anywhere. Who has explored what this kind of tool could mean for operators with special needs? That gap is what this piece is trying to close.

That last point is where accessibility enters the picture in a new way. One of the most interesting configurations I’ve been contemplating pairs the agent with Telegram, a messaging platform available on any smartphone. With that connection in place, a ham could interact with an AI agent entirely through voice messages. Speak your question into your phone; the agent transcribes it, thinks it through, and speaks the answer back. No keyboard. No screen that needs to be read carefully. No bright display in a dark room. On the other side of the microphone, you’d never guess the radio operator had any difficulty because the tools help instead of hinder.

The applications practically write themselves. Imagine an agent that knows your callsign, your equipment, and your operating habits: one that can tell you current band conditions, look up a frequency, summarize what’s happening on a net, or walk you through a procedure step by step in plain language. For someone with macular degeneration, that’s not just a convenience. It’s the difference between staying active in the hobby and stepping back from it. For someone with arthritic hands who finds typing painful, a voice-commanded assistant could dramatically change the calculus of using a radio and logging contacts.

Dexterity issues affect more hams than we acknowledge. Essential tremor, post-stroke motor changes, the simple stiffening that comes with decades of living: these make keying harder, tuning harder, and interacting with software harder. An AI agent that responds to voice, that can look things up and report back, that doesn’t require precise finger movements on a keyboard, addresses a real need we rarely discuss. The hams managing these challenges mostly figure it out on their own, quietly, without asking for help. We could be doing better by them.

Cognitive support is another frontier worth taking seriously. Early-stage memory changes are more common than people let on, and they don’t disqualify someone from enjoying the hobby they’ve spent decades building. An agent with persistent memory, one that knows your station, your typical contacts, your preferences, can serve as a patient, non-judgmental assistant that helps fill in the gaps without any stigma attached.

The self-hosted dimension matters here too. Many hams in this demographic are rightly cautious about privacy, about subscriptions, about depending on services that might change their terms or disappear. A self-hosted agent runs on hardware you own, on your local network, with no data leaving your house. It doesn’t require a monthly fee. It works when the internet goes down. These are not small things for someone on a fixed income who has learned, over a lifetime, to be skeptical of anything that requires a recurring payment and a Terms of Service agreement.

I don’t have a complete solution to offer yet. The Telegram voice interface I described is still in development on my end, and there’s real work ahead in making any of this genuinely accessible rather than just theoretically possible. What I have is a working experiment, a growing conviction that this is worth pursuing seriously, and a question for the community: who among us has thought about this? The AI tools now exist to make amateur radio more accessible in ways that weren’t previously possible.

The need is real, and the people who could benefit are already part of our community: running net control, logging contacts, maintaining repeaters, Elmering new hams, doing extra things we never have to think about, just to stay at the table. They deserve tools that make that easier. And the rest of us? We benefit, too. Those are experienced voices, hard-won skills, and decades of institutional memory. We are all made better when we keep the table full.

10 Short Stack: Interesting Internet Finds

Radio

• New Annual Verification process by RadioID.net — “Beginning July 1, 2026, RadioID.net will implement an annual verification process.”

• Beyond the Sunspots: Understanding 10 Meter Propagation — “…the dramatic differences we see between seasons on 10 meters are driven by complex changes in the Earth’s atmospheric chemistry and magnetic field.”

• Unbox the Affordable HamSpot 5 Digital Hotspot Today — “The HamSpot 5 is a notable innovation in the world of amateur radio, offering a versatile and affordable solution for digital voice communication.”

• Ham Radio: The Hobby of a Thousand Hobbies — I chuckled at this title because when I describe amateur radio to my friends, I call it a hobby of hobbies.

• BTECH FRS-A1 All-Purpose Walkie Talkies — Not all of our family members are licensed, so sometimes an FRS radio is the way to stay in touch. The selling point for me? USB-C charging.

• Comms Cards by Ready Radio — “Comms Cards are quick-reference guides for radios that give you instant access to frequencies, channel layouts, and key settings without needing an app, signal, or memory.”

M17

• LinHT Rev B status: what works, what broke, and why Rev C is next — “This post summarizes that progress. It starts with what Rev A proved, then goes through what we changed in Rev B, how we built the first boards, what worked during testing, what failed, and what we need to fix before Rev C.”

SDR

• SDR++ Setup Guide: How to Install and Configure SDR++ — “For years, SDR# (SDRSharp) was the default recommendation for most SDR enthusiasts. While SDR# remains extremely popular, many hobbyists have migrated to SDR++ because of its modern interface, excellent performance, and support for Windows, Linux, and macOS.”

• I Built My Own Flight Tracker with a Raspberry Pi — “For this project, I’m using the FlightAware Pro Stick Plus, which combines the filter, amplifier, and SDR receiver into one USB dongle. You plug it into the Raspberry Pi, connect an antenna, and install the software.”

Meshtastic

• Meshyface — “Meshyface is a chat-first Meshtastic dashboard that runs as a single Python service and serves a single-page web UI over HTTP.” As near as I can tell, it’s a web interface that shows the topology of a Meshtastic network.

AI

• How AI Is Changing Ham Radio (And What Operators Can Use Today) — “Artificial intelligence is rapidly finding its way into amateur radio, and many operators are already using AI-powered tools without realizing it.”

• Google’s Gemini-Enabled Home Speaker Is Officially Available for Preorder — “Google’s chatbot is fully integrated into its newest smart speaker, known as the Google Home Speaker, and it’s almost here: You can preorder it today for $99.99, and it will officially launch on Thursday, June 25.”

• I’ve tested so many desktop AI tools, but Hermes with Ollama is my new favorite – here’s why — “Local AI is the way to go, and Hermes with open-source Ollama is my preferred setup right now.”

11 KJ7T Shack Notes

• Using the Groups.io Digest script means I can eliminate a bunch of daily emails in my inbox! Find the script on GitHub.

• A subscriber made some needed corrections to my code in the HFWatch repo, and I appreciate those improvements.

• The Great Plains Super launch is gearing up for the weekend. Many balloons beaconing on APRS.

• I’ve been noticing more stations popping up on 6 meters in my HamClock display, so the “magic band” season must be upon us.

• When I started reading about Tailnet Lock for Tailscale users, I became quite interested…until I realized this is really an edge case that is unlikely to affect my use case. Shared here in case it lands for you.

• Internet failures are happening more frequently at the lake house than they have for several years, so I’m thinking about a low-cost cellular hotspot for resiliency.

• You may be aware of a service called Ham.live that allowed net control operators to also check in people over the internet and have side chats during radio nets. Well, Ham.live is going dark but the dev has released the code on GitHub. Want to run your own version? Now you can.

12 QRT: End Transmission

I did not get as much writing time in this week as I wanted. Instead, I spent last weekend preparing for a board of directors meeting for my state association — the one meeting each year I think of as The Most Important Meeting. Why important? Because the board debates and decides on our annual budget, and this year, we had to pull from reserves to balance the budget.

Why did it weigh on me so heavily? The state association exists to serve our 45 member districts, and they in turn deliver programs communities depend on. When the association hits a budget speed bump at the same moment state agencies are being squeezed, the ripple effects are real. That’s the context — and it’s why I didn’t sleep much last weekend.

The good news? My board adopted the budget as proposed. The bad news? We know we’ll have a tremendously difficult challenge next January, so we’re going to be investing a lot of time and energy preparing for that. Making this even more complicated is the turnover in the state legislature — we won’t know until early November who will be representing Washington State citizens when the Legislature convenes in January.

Fortunately, I have a lot of radio things and thoughts to keep my mind busy. Thank you for sharing this journey, and as always, please let me know your ideas and feedback. Without you, there would be no Random Wire newsletter or EtherHam.com website.

73, and remember to touch a radio every day!

This has been a very thoughtful, introspective week for me. I had a birthday a few weeks ago and my wife’s birthday was a few days ago. In a couple of months, we’ll celebrate 49 years of marriage. I am, quite simply, amazed…and when I look back in time, there is an awful lot to remember.

But those marker moments are also cause for reflection, and some of my ruminations spilled over into the amateur radio realm. The first piece in this issue of the Random Wire is about where AI is taking our hobby: The Machine Learns to Listen. The second piece is about re-centering the Random Wire and EtherHam, and seeking feedback: The Journal and the Workbench.

As a fun diversion, I wrote up how to use a small ESP32-powered device to mine for Bitcoin: Playing the Bitcoin Lottery at Home. The crossover with amateur radio? Learning about ESP32 devices in general. The ESP32 is everywhere in the maker/IoT world. I’m hoping the Bitcoin article will give hams a friendly on-ramp through something as immediately tangible as “plug it in and it does a thing.” Bitcoin lottery mining is probably the most motivating possible introduction to the platform — much more fun than blinking an LED. I expect to be learning, and sharing, about the ESP32 platform in future issues.

I also did some Python coding to pull recent topics from a variety of Groups.io conversations into a one-page summary: Groups.io Digest with Python. I already learned something new from making it easier to harvest this information.

Yesterday, I went looking for a traffic reporter for YSF/C4FM/WiRES-X, and that took me to a place of realization I didn’t quite expect. The full piece is on EtherHam at Walled Gardens and Unlabeled Mazes: Why C4FM Users Can’t Find Each Other.

And I fiddled with some radios and added a fan to a Raspberry Pi 4-based AllStar node. Nothing special, but certainly enjoyable. Lots of projects on the bench to work on, including an Arduino Uno Q board — I’m really looking forward to playing with this platform. It has 4 GB of RAM and 32 GB of eMMC storage for just $59. Fingers crossed.

The bench didn’t slow down just because I was feeling reflective. Let’s dive into the Random Wire topics for this week!

A Thank You Long Overdue

Some tools become so woven into how you operate that you stop noticing them. APRS is like that for me. The little icons moving across a map, a beacon confirming a friend made it over the pass, a weather object appearing before the storm does — it’s just part of the fabric of how I think about being on the air. My Yaesu FTM-300DR radio in the pickup truck runs APRS automatically.

None of that would exist without Bob Bruninga, WB4APR (SK).

APRS traces back to 1982, when Bruninga wrote his first data map program to plot the positions of U.S. Navy ships on an Apple II computer. A few years later he was running packet communications on a VIC-20 and C-64 to support an endurance race. By 1988 the program had moved to the IBM PC, and in 1992 it got the name we know: APRS. He kept pushing it — not just as a position reporting system but as a live tactical picture of whatever a community of operators needed to share.

Bob was a retired U.S. Naval Academy senior research engineer who never seemed to retire from the work that mattered. He founded the Appalachian Trail Golden Packet event, fielding APRS nodes from Stone Mountain in Georgia all the way to Mount Katahdin in Maine every July. He wrote. He answered questions. He kept the vision alive long after he could have handed it off and walked away.

Bob passed away on February 7, 2022, at age 73, after a battle with cancer complicated by COVID-19. His key is silent now. The network he built is not.

I’m lucky to know someone who carries that tradition forward locally. Herb, KB7UVC, is one of those hams who has forgotten more about APRS than most of us will ever learn — and who will actually sit down with you and work through a problem until it makes sense.

So: thank you, Bob. Thank you, Herb. APRS may mean “automatic” but I know the work to build and support APRS has been anything but.

This “thank you” section is a weekly feature to share my gratitude and appreciation for radio amateurs that have helped make my journey more enjoyable.

The Machine Learns to Listen

Those of us who came up turning dials have watched amateur radio change beneath our hands. The rigs got quieter, then smarter, then started doing things we couldn’t do ourselves. I’ve been thinking about that arc lately — from the glow of a tube radio warming up, to FT8 pulling signals out of noise I couldn’t hear, to what comes next.

Because something is coming next. Machine learning is already reshaping weak-signal decoding and interference rejection. Further out are transceivers that model your RF environment and learn your operating patterns over time — not radios that operate themselves, but genuinely intelligent partners. The hardware headroom already exists. This is a software problem now.

I wrote a longer piece about all of this over at EtherHam — where the arc came from, where it appears to be going, and what I think the real question is for our hobby as AI starts showing up in high-end rigs. If you’ve ever felt the particular unease of watching a machine exceed your capabilities, or wondered whether the vintage operators and the SDR experimenters are in conflict or in conversation, I think you’ll find it worth the read. See: The Machine Learns to Listen.

Exciting News: M17 Audio Over RF

Jeff AE5ME posted this YouTube video early this week about using Greg W5GGW’s M17 app on iOS with a Mobilnkd TNC4 to send M17 audio over RF, and to receive it in the app from an RF signal. This is a great moment for M17!

This nine-minute video describes and demonstrates how to configure the M17 app and the TNC4 to send and receive over-the-air M17 audio.

Jeff’s video was also picked up by the M17 Project.

The Journal and the Workbench

I started writing the Random Wire because I wanted to capture what I was doing so I didn’t have to relearn it later. I had been keeping project notes and a radio friend suggested I publish what I was working on because “other hams are having the same problems.” So I did, and I named this journal of my amateur radio explorations the Random Wire newsletter.

As time went on, the articles got longer and more detailed. Deep dives with plenty of workbench-level detail. Some of them amount to A-to-Z how-to guides. At some point I realized I was writing two different kinds of things: a journal of what I was experiencing, and a workbench record of what I actually did and learned. That’s when EtherHam was born.

The Random Wire is the journal. EtherHam is the workbench.

Everything published on both platforms comes from direct personal experience. I built it, or it broke and I fixed it, or I tried something and it didn’t work the way I expected. The knowledge sitting in my head does nobody any good if I don’t share it — and whatever problem I just solved, someone else has already hit that same wall, probably at 11pm with their soldering iron in hand.

This split in style is not a true dichotomy because the two often overlap. You can’t really separate what you are experiencing from what you are doing. But they come at the same territory from different directions, and I think of them as a complementary pairing rather than competing platforms.

Along the way, I added sections to the Random Wire — band conditions, radio history, a digital news digest — that felt like things a newsletter should have rather than things that naturally belonged here. Good content, wrong home. I’m moving those sections to EtherHam where focused reference material belongs, and the Random Wire goes back to being what it started as: a craftsman’s journal, written at the end of a week at the workbench.

I wish I knew more precisely how subscribers and readers perceive these two platforms. The available metrics are genuinely useless unless you think total subscribers or page hits tell you something meaningful. I don’t. What matters to me is hearing from you that something I wrote was useful, or saved you an evening of frustration, or pointed you somewhere worth going. That’s the whole measure of success here.

So here’s what I’d genuinely like to know: when something I’ve written has been useful to you, what kind of article was it? A build walkthrough? A troubleshooting story? A short take on something new? Tell me in the comments or drop me a note. That feedback helps shape what lands on the workbench next.

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TIDRADIO TD-H9: More

Since I’ve always had good luck with programming software and cables from RT Systems, I ordered their programmer and special cable for the TIDRADIO TD-H9. I have two TD-H9 radios. One will probably be largely devoted to APRS work. The other will be for general analog use. Being able to program them both with one program and one cable will be efficient.

The RT Systems package arrived and I loaded up the programmer on my old ToughBook. However, I was taken aback by the sparseness of the programming interface. I had hoped to be able to configure other aspects of the radio, such as APRS beaconing, through the programmer. I’m not seeing where to accomplish that from within the RT Systems software. This means that to get the radio working correctly for you, you’ll still need to dive into the radio menus through the front keypad.

It’s easy to enter a frequency, specify whether it is simplex or a repeater frequency with an offset, and set the power level. That is truly more convenient than wading through the menus in the radio. But if you want to enable GPS, turn APRS on or off, and enable beaconing, you’re stuck doing that directly on the radio.

I don’t regret buying the RT Systems package for the TIDRADIO TD-H9 radio. It works brilliantly for what it is. But I wish it did more than just the basics of frequencies, channels, offsets, and power level.

Groups.io Digest with Python

I monitor a lot of Groups.io mailing lists — ARDC, PNW DMR, LinuxHam, TinySA, and a bunch of others — and I got tired of checking them one at a time. So I built a Python script that does it for me. When I want to catch up, it hits the Groups.io API, pulls recent activity from every group on my list, and generates a digest report that opens in my browser with everything ranked by activity and every thread title linked directly to the discussion. It took longer to figure out the API quirks than to write the script, but the result is exactly what I wanted.

The script is free, requires no external Python libraries, and runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux. I wrote it up in detail on EtherHam — including how to handle subgroups, restricted groups, and scheduling it to run automatically every morning. Grab it at etherham.com or directly from the EtherHamRadio GitHub repo (and thank you to the subscribers who urged me to set up a GitHub space for code like this).

Listening to W6EK on Baofeng UV-5R Mini

While grinding up my wife’s morning meds, I grabbed the Baofeng UV-5R Mini transceiver to listen to traffic on the W6EK repeater. I never thought I’d say that I like a Baofeng radio…but I do like this one. It sounds fine, it slips easily into a pocket, and is just a very convenient package to use:

BAOFENG UV-5R Mini Ham Radio Long Range Handheld Two Way Radio, Bluetooth APP Programming Walkie Talkies 2 Pack, 999CH One-Key Copy Frequency, NOAA Weather, USB-C Charging, Dual-Band, Green (affiliate link)

I added a stubby antenna to make it even more convenient at home:

ABBREE Ham Radio Antenna Dual Band VHF/UHF 144/430Mhz 1.96inch AR-805S SMA- Female Long Range Stubby Short Antenna for Baofeng UV-5R Mini 5RM BF-F8HP PRO, K5 Plus, DM32, UV32 Radio Accessories, 2 Pack (affiliate link)

In this photo, the radio is sitting on the kitchen stove while I listen to the W6EK repeater through my AllScan ANF101 node that is transmitting to the Baofeng.

Later, while finishing this section, I listened to ASL node 516221 which carries ISS radio traffic, passing through my local ASL node 588418.

I shared my first impressions of the tiny UV-5R Mini back in February. I continue to be surprised at how much I like this little transceiver.

B.B. Link Adapter: Last Chance

If you use an iPhone or iPad and have a Kenwood TH-D74 or D75A transceiver, this alert may be for you. Georges WH6AZ reached out to me last week with an aloha and a note about the last stock of his B.B. Link adapter.

Meet B.B. Link, the adapter that allows iPhones and iPads to connect to Kenwood TH-D75 and D74 radios via Bluetooth. iOS devices, which are limited to Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), can’t pair natively with these radios. With this adapter, iOS applications like RadioMail can access the radio’s built-in KISS TNC packet modem for off-grid communication. Simply plug the adapter into a USB-C port for power, turn your radio on, and you’re set.

Georges authored Transceive, an AllStar app I use on my iMac. Transceive received a rare Random Wire Recommended sticker from me. I like Transceive.

His B.B. Link product is reaching the end of its production run and he does not plan another run. He writes:

Nearly two years ago, I introduced the B.B. Link, an adapter that allowed apps like RadioMail, Packet Commander, and now Radio Messenger to use the built-in packet TNC of the Kenwood TH-D74 and TH-D75 radios. At the time, iPhone-friendly ham radio interfaces were scarce, and B.B. Link filled a real need.

The landscape has evolved. We now have capable audio adapter options such as the Digirig Lite and AIOC, which let software modems interface over audio directly. We also have reasonably priced HT radios like the UV-PRO and VG-N76 that expose their TNCs over BLE.

I hope radio manufacturers continue this trend and ensure future hardware exposes a TNC, or at least a Bluetooth or Wi-Fi–accessible audio interface, so more people can participate with less friction.

I never set out to become a hardware maker. I built the first prototype for myself and hoped I might sell the initial batch of 100 to recoup my cost. Demand far exceeded that, and I’ve been humbled by the reception.

But B.B. Link has always been a handcrafted project. Managing supply chain challenges, tariffs, assembly, testing, order fulfillment, and support has been meaningful work, but also time consuming. It’s time for me to reclaim that bandwidth and focus fully on software development, where I can deliver the most impact for the community.

With that in mind, B.B. Link availability will end once the current batch sells out. I expect most who want one already have it, but if you need a spare (or know someone who would) now is the moment.

The firmware remains open source for anyone who wants to build their own DIY version.

If you use an iPhone or iPad and have a Kenwood TH-D74/D75 radio platform, this is a “last chance” notice to get a useful tool that eases access to the TNC in those radios. I do have a TH-D74A so this notice applies to me, too!

Playing the Bitcoin Lottery at Home

A friend of mine has been running a tiny Bitcoin miner on her home network for the better part of a year. She knows — with complete mathematical certainty — that she is almost certainly never going to find a block. She does it anyway. “It’s the cheapest lottery ticket I’ve ever bought,” she told me, “and it never expires.” That was enough to get me curious.

The device is called a NerdMiner — an ESP32 microcontroller running open-source firmware called NMMiner — available on Amazon for around $22. It draws a fraction of a watt, connects to your WiFi, and quietly submits hashes to a solo Bitcoin mining pool around the clock. Your odds of finding a block are approximately those of winning the Powerball. But the hardware costs less than a tank of gas and runs indefinitely on any USB charger, so the ongoing cost is a few cents a day.

Setting one up is more involved than plugging it in — the shipped firmware is out of date, there’s a specific pool configuration that actually works for low-powered devices, and there’s one bootloader quirk that will stop you cold if you don’t know about it. I’ve written up the complete walkthrough, including the COM port gotcha that would have saved me time if I’d known it going in.

If the idea of a perpetual lottery ticket running quietly on your shelf sounds like your kind of thing, the full article is at EtherHam.com.

Added a Fan to the RPi4 AllStar Node

My AllStar node 588410, built on a Raspberry Pi 4 platform with an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) hat, was running rather warm. Not the 80°C temperature where the SoC (system on a chip) begins to self-throttle, but much warmer than I liked.

I bought a very inexpensive 30mm fan from Pi-Shop that was made to fit my tall RPi4 case. It fit perfectly. Even though it is a 5-volt fan, I powered it from a 3.3V GPIO pin on the hat. Why? Because the fan runs slower at 3.3V, and slower means quieter. It is running silently and doing a good job of bringing the 60°C temps down to the mid 40°C range: quite acceptable.

I’m happy with this small addition to the package. Node 588410 now has the RPi4 and UPS and cooling fan inside a single case.

During this journey, I learned of a useful alternative to the Enhanced Parrot node 55553, and that is AllStar node 2002. I knew this but had forgotten it until I read this in the SHARI Groups.io group: “…call Allstarlink node 2002, which is a parrot that has a built-in IAX ping diagnostic. If after you connect, it comes back and says ‘your node is unreachable’, then either your port is not forwarded correctly, or something upstream is blocking incoming packets to that port, i.e., CG-NAT.” Node 2002 provides useful information, whether you are testing the accessibility of your node or just checking your transmitted audio volume.

Walled Gardens and Unlabeled Mazes: Why C4FM Users Can’t Find Each Other

If you’ve ever keyed up on a WiRES-X room and heard nothing but silence, you’re not alone — and you’re not doing anything wrong. The problem isn’t your radio or your node. It’s that the C4FM ecosystem was never built to help you find where the conversation is happening. This week on EtherHam I went looking for the monitoring tools that should exist for YSF and WiRES-X users — the kind DMR and AllStarLink operators take for granted — and what I found was a more interesting story than I expected.

It turns out open protocols don’t automatically produce open, navigable ecosystems. Somebody still has to build the town square. WiRES-X and YSF aren’t just two names for the same thing — they’re two fundamentally different systems with different governance, different infrastructure, and different reasons why the tools that would make them navigable never got built. One is a classic corporate walled garden. The other is something stranger: an open protocol that the community never quite organized around…but still could.

The full piece is on EtherHam. It gets into why this happened, what partial solutions exist, and whether it’s fixable. Spoiler: one side of that answer is more hopeful than the other.

Weekly Reports Moved to EtherHam

I’ve moved the Band Conditions, Digital Radio News, and Groups.io Digest reports to the EtherHam website. This week’s post is Weekly Report: June 11, 2026.

I’ll use the same header image as shown here for each weekly report. That will make it easier to key in on this regular informational feature. In general, I run my routines once a week, on Thursday, for publication by Friday morning.

Short Stack

APRS

• LightAPRS Gateway 1.0: A Standalone APRS Digipeater and iGate in a Small Box — $130 for a standalone digi and igate!

• Build a Low-Power APRS Station with Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W — “Building a low-power APRS station using a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W…a comprehensive guide on setting up Graywolf on Tixie OS Lite, allowing you to operate a compact and efficient APRS station or digipeater.”

• Radio Messenger Is What Ham Radio Chat Should Have Been All Along — “Radio Messenger is a new iPhone and iPad app that…takes the underlying technology of APRS – the same open amateur radio protocol that’s been quietly running on VHF frequencies worldwide – and wraps it in a messaging interface that looks and feels like a chat app.”

• APRSdroid NA7Q Edition: The Most Feature-Rich APRS Client for Android — “While the official APRSdroid project remains a popular choice, the NA7Q Edition takes the application significantly further.”

Shortwave

• Tecsun PL-520: An Excellent Upgrade — I don’t find this nicely reviewed radio in stock on Amazon. Apparently, “stock fluctuates.”

Windows

• This 20-year-old Windows tool fixed my dead PC when nothing else would — I’d forgotten about Hiren’s, but I’ve used it in the past few years. When I look through my collection of saved USB sticks, I see one labeled: Hiren’s. “If you’re an oldhead like me, you probably know all about Hiren’s BootCD, but it’s one of the most useful tools anyone can have handy.”

AI

• I’ve tested so many desktop AI tools, but Hermes with Ollama is my new favorite – here’s why — “Local AI is the way to go, and Hermes with open-source Ollama is my preferred setup right now.”

Support

Occasionally, I remind subscribers that supporting the Random Wire and EtherHam is very helpful. There are many ways to give support as described on the Support EtherHam page, should you choose to do so.

I’ve been trying to add a summer hat in time for Field Day but my EtherHam store is rejecting the custom embroidery for some reason. Looks like a nicely ventilated booney hat will have to wait until I get that sorted out.

As I noted several issues back, the location of the EtherHam logo on the Champion sweatshirt was not quite right. I adjusted it and the new location looks better.

Thank you to all who support the Random Wire and EtherHam. Support doesn’t mean you contributed money — it also means you subscribe and read and comment from time to time.

And who are EtherHams? We are. Since we all use computers in some aspect of our amateur radio activities, I think we are all EtherHams.

Home

I found a box of old compact discs in the closet. It’s a box of memories, really, of the many great times my wife and I shared with music. She was a music educator her entire working life, so music was ever-present in our lives. For many years, I also functioned as her roadie, setting up music concerts, repairing band instruments, and fixing amplifiers and wires. Those are great memories, both of helping my wife and of all of her great students.

Many of the CDs are so old they don’t have metadata encoded on the disc. When I rip the music to my network storage, it often shows up as Unknown Artist and Track 1, Track 2 instead of names, and doesn’t show any cover art.

To fix this, I started using Mp3tag to edit the metadata for tracks I’m saving on the new network-attached storage box. This is a bit time consuming, but it also lets me dwell a bit on the songs. (Lots and lots of memories!) After editing the metadata, I open the album in MusicBee and ask it to find the cover art…and it usually does. Then I re-scan my music folder on the NAS to add the album and named tracks to my music library.

But then I discovered a shortcut — I found I can rip CDs directly into MusicBee. The app does a good job of finding metadata and album cover art as part of that process. I rip the CD to my laptop, then copy the entire folder to my NAS drive and tell OwnTone to rescan my music library. Very easy.

Music really does touch the soul. When I listen to these songs, I’m remembering where we were, what we were talking about, how we were feeling. What’s more important is that these old songs evoke memories and emotions in my wife, despite her cognitive challenges. It’s truly amazing and I’m happy to help her experience such moments.

Right now? We’re listening to a two-disc collection of Tom Jones greatest hits. There are a ton of memories embedded in those tunes!

73, and remember to touch a radio every day!

00 QRV: Are You Ready?

Welcome to Random Wire 185.

On the amateur radio side, I’m very pleased to share a positive outcome after a month of trying to get APRS beaconing working reliably on my TIDRADIO TD-H9 handheld transceiver. As is often the case with stubborn problems, the solution ended up being a simple on-off setting, but finding that took extensive trial-and-error testing. It’s a small thing that felt like a very big thing when I finally cracked it

On the technology side, I’m also happy to share my new network-attached storage (NAS) solution using a Beelink ME Mini PC. It’s affordable, quick, and should be reliable. This project is well within reach of anyone who runs Linux on a computer, and it’s a great learning opportunity if you’re just getting started.

Find links to these below in the New on EtherHam section.

01 Thank You…America’s Kansas City Wide Network

This week’s thank-you goes to the team behind America’s Kansas City Wide Network — one of the most reliably busy watering holes on the digital amateur radio scene. Dedicated volunteers keep the lights on, and a very active group of regulars keeps it from ever getting too quiet.

I tune in when I travel. There’s a Portland repeater on the network, which means I can monitor and participate whenever I’m in range — a small thing that makes a long drive considerably more interesting. What I especially appreciate is that KCWide hasn’t stood pat. They’ve linked an M17 instance, extending a warm welcome to the new kid on the block. That kind of openness matters.

If you haven’t found your way to KCWide yet, consider this your invitation. Thank you to everyone who keeps it going.

02 New on EtherHam

It was a very satisfying week with several big wins.

The TIDRADIO TD-H9: A $70 APRS Radio Worth the Effort

The TIDRADIO TD-H9 offers 10 watts, VHF/UHF, AM airband, a built-in TNC, GPS, APRS, Bluetooth, and a spectrum analyzer for around $70. The hardware delivers on that promise. Getting APRS automatic beaconing to work reliably, however, took two radios, weeks of testing, packet log analysis, and a lot of time on aprs.fi. The culprit turned out to be an undocumented interaction between two settings — and once identified, it was a one-sentence fix. This is what I learned, so you don’t have to learn it the hard way.

The full writeup is on EtherHam: settings, firmware notes, real-world packet data, and more. Make the jump to Getting APRS Working on the TIDRADIO TD-H9 for the details.

An AllStar Node on the Seeed reRouter CM4

The Seeed Studio reRouter CM4 1432 is a compact mini-router built around the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 — and unlike standard Pi builds, it stores its operating system on onboard eMMC flash rather than a microSD card. For AllStar node builders who’ve lost a node to card corruption, that’s a compelling detail. This article walks through converting the reRouter from its factory OpenWRT installation to Raspberry Pi OS, installing ASL3 on Debian 13, and building a fully functional AllStar node — including UCI radio interface setup and thermal testing of the passive cooling system.

Read the complete article: An AllStar Node on the Seeed reRouter CM4.

Retiring the Pi 4: Building a Better Home NAS with the Beelink ME Mini

The Beelink ME Mini is a purpose-built NAS mini PC that competes directly with a Raspberry Pi 5 kit on price but wins decisively on performance, thermal design, and expandability. It ships with an Intel N150 processor, 16GB LPDDR5, a 1TB NVMe, dual 2.5GbE ports, and six M.2 slots — all in a compact enclosure with a substantial internal metal heatsink and a built-in power supply. If your Pi-based NAS is running out of steam, this is worth a serious look. Here’s my experience migrating a home NAS and OwnTone music server to this platform, running Debian 13 and OMV 8, including the gotchas worth knowing before you start.

Visit Upgrading the Home NAS: From Raspberry Pi 4 to Beelink ME Mini for more.

DroidStar IAX Still Broken — But the Fix Exists

DroidStar’s IAX/AllStar connection mode stopped working for many users in early 2026 — the Connect button simply does nothing. This article traces the bug to its root cause, tests available prebuilt Android APKs, and then builds DroidStar from source on a Raspberry Pi 4 utility machine to confirm that the fix is real, the IAX handshake works, and the problem is that nobody has shipped a working Android build yet.

Learn more at DroidStar IAX Connections: Broken Builds, a Working Fix, and a Rabbit Hole Worth Falling Down.

03 Gadgets

USB Cable Tester

I got a little frustrated last week trying to find a USB-C cable that carried data. It seemed like every cable I pulled out of the box was a charge-only cable.

Time for a cable tester. I ordered this one, even though it requires the user to interpret the LED lights displayed when testing:

Treedix USB Cable Tester USB Cable Checker Data Wire Fast Detection for Type-C, USB-A 3.0, Micro-B 3.0, Micro-B 2.0, Mini-B 2.0, and for Lightning Cables by Checking the LEDs (this is an affiliate link)

It is rated 4.5 stars by more than 100 users. For $19, I think this will save me a whole bunch of frustration. There is a less expensive version with clear acrylic panels and open sides, but since this will get tossed in the radio bag, I was more comfortable with an enclosed case.

Marking tested cables was the next problem — I didn’t want to test the same cable twice. I thought about heat shrink, but that seemed like overkill. Colored electrical tape would work, but cables hit the floor and tape ends lift, collecting lint and dirt. The solution I landed on: red and green gel nail polish. Charge-only cables get red. Data-capable cables get green. I cure the dots with the UV flashlight I carry when I travel.

365nm Black Light Flashlight, UV Flashlight Rechargeable with LCD Display, Powerful Ultraviolet Lights for Pet Urine Detection, Resin Curing, Rockhounding, Scorpion, Uranium Glass, A/CLeak (this is an affiliate link)

That seemed to work. It took about a minute of exposure to cure the nail polish dots to the point they were firm and no longer tacky.

And I have another use planned for the red polish. Mom used to love going trolling for trout. Her favorite lure was a Dick Nite spoon. She always used a spot of red polish to put an eye on her lure. She called it her “Tricky Dicky” lucky lure. Good memory.

Earbud for AllScan UCI80M

I went looking for a way to monitor conversations on AllStar using one of my nodes configured with an AllScan UCI80M USB Communications Interface. The UCI80M uses a Motorola M1 speaker-mic connector. I found an earbud with an M1 connector and gave it a try. These are common in K1 (Kenwood) configurations but harder to find in M1.

It works. The push-to-talk mic tested as “good audio” with the Enhanced Parrot on node 55553. Transmitted audio isn’t studio quality, but it’s understandable.

More interesting is the earbud itself. It’s a single unit with a rubbery tip that fits comfortably in the ear canal. When I first plugged it in, the audio level was painfully high and distorted.

In AllStar, TX and RX audio levels are set in /etc/asterisk/simpleusb.conf. It’s somewhat counterintuitive: the audio you hear is set on the TXMIXASET line, and the audio you transmit is set on RXMIXASET. I worked my way down from the default of 500 — tried 400, 300, 100, 50. Still too loud. At 40, still too loud. At 30, clear and comfortable. Below 30, no output at all. So 30 it is.

The package also included an acoustic tube earbud. I normally skip those — never liked how they feel — but tested it anyway. Surprise: barely any audio at 30. Cranked TXMIXASET back to 500 and got excellent, clear audio at a comfortable level. Pro tip: if the standard earbud is too loud, try the acoustic tube before fiddling with the config. Also, if you’re getting static, try rotating the plug slightly in the PTT housing.

2 Pin Earpiece M1 Ear Piece Headset Ptt Mic to 3.5mm Aux Audio Earphone for Motorola cp100 cls1410 gp300 cp200d bpr40 CLS 1110 1410 cp185 dlr1060 rdm2070d dlr1020 rmu2040 rdu4100 dtr700 (this is an affiliate link)

This device has only 3.1 stars on Amazon, but from a sample of seven reviews. I thought it was worth the gamble at around $20. I’d give it 3.5 stars myself — maybe 4 if it proves durable. It does exactly what I needed: a way to monitor and participate in AllStar conversations through the UCI80M.

Fair warning: overmodulated stations really punch through when the speaker is millimeters from your eardrum. Great in a noisy environment. In a quiet room, bring TXMIXASET down.

04 Run Your Own NotebookLM — Locally

If you’ve used Google’s NotebookLM, you already know the appeal: drop in a document, ask questions, get answers grounded in your actual source material rather than whatever the model feels like inventing.

Open Notebook is the self-hosted version of that idea. Same workflow — upload PDFs, web pages, or documents, chat with an AI about the content, generate notes and summaries — but running entirely on your own hardware, with your choice of AI provider. It supports Ollama, so if you’re already running local models, you’re most of the way there.

I spun it up in a morning in an LXC container on my Proxmox server, pointed it at my existing Ollama instance, and had it ingesting a budget document within the hour. The install is Docker Compose — two containers, a config file, and you’re done.

The Open Notebook project is at github.com/lfnovo/open-notebook. If you’ve got a home lab and you’ve been curious about NotebookLM but prefer keeping your documents off Google’s servers, this is worth your time.

05 Digital Radio News Digest

Digital radio news is a bit light this week.

Recent developments in amateur radio digital voice and VoIP linking modes include updates to AllStarLink, with improvements to QSO One stability and the introduction of YAAMon, a new AllStarLink monitor. The MMDVMHost repository has also seen an update, and the app_rpt repository has received several commits, including fixes for call failures and additions to non-blocking PTT kick pipes. The Amp-ASL amp-server repository has been working on a custom Pi image to streamline installation.

06 Band Conditions This Week

With a solar flux of 144 and a sunspot number well into the triple digits, the higher HF bands are in fine shape right now — 10 through 20 meters should reward anyone willing to spin the dial, and DX contacts are well within reach. Today’s K-index of 1 points to quiet, stable conditions, but don’t let that lull you into thinking it’s been a smooth week; a max K of 4.3 tells us the geomagnetic field threw a minor tantrum at some point, likely giving the polar paths a rough go and knocking the low bands around for a stretch. If propagation felt frustrating earlier in the week, today’s the day to get back on and make up for lost time.

• Solar Flux Index (SFI): 144.0 — Good — solid conditions on 10m through 20m

• K-Index (current): 1.0 — Quiet — excellent conditions

• K-Index (7-day max): 4.3 — Minor storm — HF disruption likely

• A-Index: 42 — Minor storm (predicted)

• Sunspot Number (NOAA/USAF daily): 211

• Sunspot Number (SIDC daily EISN): 149

• Active Solar Regions: 14

Source: NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center (swpc.noaa.gov) + SIDC (sidc.be)
Generated: 2026-06-04 21:03 UTC

07 Radio History

Sixty-three years ago this week, radio amateurs put their second satellite into orbit.

OSCAR 2 lifted off from Vandenberg Air Force Base on June 2, 1962, riding piggyback as ballast on a Thor-Agena B rocket carrying a classified military reconnaissance satellite. The irony is hard to miss — while the Air Force was running a spy mission, a group of volunteer hams had quietly hitched their homebuilt spacecraft along for the ride.

OSCAR 2 was nearly identical to OSCAR 1, which had launched just five and a half months earlier in December 1961. The team had learned from the first flight. They adjusted the thermal coatings to keep temperatures lower inside the spacecraft, tweaked the temperature-sensing system to get better data as the batteries aged, and dropped the transmitter power from 140 mW to 100 mW to stretch battery life. The satellite operated for 18 days before going silent, re-entering the atmosphere on June 21.

What’s remarkable isn’t the hardware — it was a simple battery-powered beacon in a metal box — it’s what it represented. By June 1962, amateur radio operators had already placed two satellites into orbit, making them among the earliest civilian participants in the Space Age, arriving only four years after Sputnik. That Project OSCAR lineage runs in a direct line to today’s AMSAT satellites, CubeSats, and the ARISS station aboard the ISS.

Not bad for a bunch of volunteers working on weekends.

08 Short Stack

Digital Radio

• The Iconic aprs.fi App Finally Lands on Android! — “If you are an APRS enthusiast, a portable HF operator, or an automation geek, this is arguably the biggest software drop of the year.”

• Empower Your Emergency Communications with ACK Off Grid Server — “The ACK Off Grid Server presents a transformative solution for emergency communications, catering specifically to amateur radio operators and emergency response teams.”

• Discover Graywolf: The Ultimate APRS Station Software — “Graywolf emerges as a revolutionary all-in-one APRS station software, combining multiple functionalities into a single, user-friendly interface.”

• What Is FT8 and How Does It Work? — “FT8 is a digital ham radio mode designed for making reliable contacts using extremely weak radio signals.”

• APRStac: A Modern APRS Suite in a Single Binary — “APRStac is an APRS web client, digipeater, I-Gate, BBS, fileshare host, email gateway, and multi-protocol bridge developed by KN4MKB under the ModernHam project.”

SDR

• How to Listen to Aircraft with an SDR — “This guide will walk you through everything you need to know to start listening to aircraft using an SDR.”

LoRa

• When Amateur Radio Meets Search and Rescue: LoRa APRS in the Search for Missing Hiker Jaslinda — “As search and rescue teams worked tirelessly to locate missing hiker Jaslinda Saludin, technology from the amateur radio community became part of the operation. Members of the Cameron Highlands Amateur Radio Club supported the effort by providing LoRa APRS tracking devices…”

Antennas

• Should You Disconnect Your Antennas During Thunderstorms? — I do. “If a thunderstorm is close enough that I can hear thunder, I disconnect my antennas. That practice is common among experienced ham radio operators and shortwave listeners alike.”

• Ham Radio Tech: Do Nearby Metal & Trees Significantly Affect Antennas? — “Radio waves don’t exist in isolation. Every antenna interacts with its environment. Houses, gutters, vehicles, power lines, aluminum siding, steel towers, wet leaves, and even your neighbor’s rusty trampoline all become part of the antenna’s ‘neighborhood.’”

Gadgets

• HRWB 264 – Gadgets For The Shack With Randy Hall K7AGE — There are plenty of gadgets listed in the show notes, and as always, the Ham Radio Workbench podcast is a great time.

AI

• NotebookLM finally has an open-source rival, and I’m hooked — “Open Notebook is a project by developer Luis Novo, available freely on GitHub. It does what NotebookLM does. You upload sources, chat with them, ask questions, generate summaries, and even make podcasts.”

• Engineer builds AI laser defense system that wiped out every mosquito in his home — My first thought was: what could go wrong? “A computer vision specialist has built a system that uses deep learning and a laser-based targeting setup to hunt down mosquitoes. Steven Cheng, who works in computer vision and robotics, documented the project as he developed what he calls “the ultimate mosquito killer,” turning a simple household annoyance into an engineering challenge.”

Security

• Your Android phone is already a security key and most people never turn it on — I just don’t know about this. We are so dependent upon our phones that they are becoming single points of failure in our lives. Making my phone my security key? I just don’t know.

09 Privacy-Focused Document Software

Do you need an alternative to Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace? If so, you’ve probably looked at LibreOffice and OnlyOffice, or maybe Nextcloud. These are document creation and editing packages, sometimes self-described as content collaboration systems.

Something new is on the near horizon: Euro-Office. This software is based on OnlyOffice but comes with a consortium of vendors backing it. It is being updated for the European market with an initial release date of June 9.

Euro-Office doesn’t have the email offering that draws people to M365 or GW. However, it appears that Office.EU will combine Euro-Office and email into a Europe-focused suite, compliant with GDPR and avoiding the U.S. Cloud Act (but I’m not a lawyer, so don’t bank on this conclusion). If all that sounds attractive to you — and it kind of does to me! — head over to https://office.eu/.

If privacy-centered software is your cup of tea, you may also want to think about where your website is hosted. Hetzner, based in Germany, is an affordable option with a solid reputation.

10 If I Win the Lottery: Coffee, Curiosity, and Radio

I’ve often thought: if I win the lottery, I’ll build a clubhouse for my local amateur radio club. It would be great to have a space with different operating stations, maybe some workspaces for making and repairing gear, and since we’re hams: coffee — lots of coffee.

This is purely a thought experiment. As I’ve pondered this, I’ve started to wonder if this might be a way to attract new people into the hobby: a coffee shop with amateur radio operating stations. Certainly the local hams would visit, so we’d often have licensed, experienced people available. But would younger people visit? Maybe — if it was positioned as a coffeehouse where makers and radio operators were doing things with hardware and software and radio waves.

Is that enough of a draw? I don’t know. I do know it’s different than what I hear in conversations about attracting people to the hobby. Clearly, what brought licensed hams into the community over the years has varied. Service in the military is one group of people. Silicon Valley folks another. I’m a Sputnik/Apollo kid, so NASA and hearing radio coming to Earth live from space was a big deal for me. Later, we’ve seen preppers getting licensed.

People in each of these groups saw amateur radio as something they could use to do something with. And for most of them, worldwide communication was not something they carried around in their pocket. That has changed. Getting connected is no longer the draw — the smartphone solved that problem decades ago, and younger generations have never known a world without it.

But maybe, just maybe, connecting locally over a cup of coffee in a tech-oriented space would pull the curtain back on this mysterious thing called amateur radio, at least for some people.

Will I ever do this? I would have to buy lottery tickets, and that’s something I almost never do. But if I did, and if I won, I think creating a radio maker space with coffee would be a grand thing to do. The best part: I’d never run out of coffee.

11 QRT: End Transmission

New Mini PC by HP

HP announces new OmniDesk Mini PC: World’s first “AI Mini PC” with Intel Core Ultra and Thunderbolt Share — I do love me a good PC by HP. No idea how much this is going to cost (undoubtedly too much) but might be worth watching for on eBay in a few years!

The Knack

I overheard some conversation on the W6EK repeater in California about “the knack.” This brought back memories of how I would disassemble many things in my childhood…and only occasionally getting them put back together again in working order. I share this Dilbert YouTube in case you find the humor entertaining. I do.

I’m guessing that “The Knack” is a real thing. The disassembly-to-reassembly success ratio in childhood is probably a reasonable predictor of career trajectory in this great hobby of hobbies: amateur radio.

73, and remember to touch a radio every day!