It’s been quite the week of radio related nonsense for me, where I’ve been channelling my time and brainspace for radio into activity on air and system refinements, not working on Debian. POTA, Antennas and why do my toys not work? Having had my interest piqued by Ian at mastodon.radio, I looked online and spotted a couple of parks within stumbling distance of my house, that’s good news! It looks like the list has been refactored and expanded since I last looked at it, so there are now more entities to activate and explore. …

This was originally posted on SOTA Forums. It’s here for completeness of my writing. To Quote @MM0EFI and the GM0ESS gang, today was a particularly Amateur showing! Having spent all weekend locked in the curling rink ruining my knees and inflicting mild liver damage in the Aberdeen City Open competition, I needed some outside time away from people to stretch the legs and loosen my knees. With my teammates/guests shipped off early on account of our quality performance and the days fair drawin’ out now, I found myself with a free afternoon to have a quick run up something nearby before a 1640 sunset! Up the back of Bennachie is a quick steady ascent and in 13 years of living up here I’ve never summited the big hill! Now is as good a time as any. In SOTA terms, this hill is GM/ES-061. In Geographical terms, it’s around 20 miles inland from Aberdeen city here. …

This year I attended EuroBSDCon 2024 in Dublin. I always appreciate an excuse to head over to Ireland, and this seemed like a great chance to spend some time in Dublin and learn new things. Due to constraints on my time I didn’t go to the 2 day devsummit that precedes the conference, only the main event itself. The Event EuroBSDCon was attended by about 200-250 people, the hardcore of the BSD community! Attendees came from all over, I met Canadians, USAians, Germanians, Belgians and Irelandians amongst other nationalities! …

I do a lot in free software for ham radio, and Steve at Zero Retries encouraged me to take this email I sent him and translate it into something here. UK Packet Radio Network UKPRN is going nicely, with the Nottingham and South segment really quite impressively interconnected over RF - https://nodes.ukpacketradio.network/packet-network-map.html?rfonly=1 I’m excited to see the growth down there! We’re sorting out forwarding and routes in Aberdeen too, and working to grow the RF path to Inverness. …

As mentioned before, I use sbuild and gbp to build packages for debian. Since I first started out, this has developed some and now runs on a different machine and uses zfs! I’ve been building a private repo for our packet radio project to ensure that users on Raspberry Pi and other platforms have the most recent code backported. It’s very frustrating as a user (and as one of the more experienced heads in the community) for people to be approaching a task with software that’s 3+ years out of date at this time. I believe Raspi Foundation are, at the time of writing, about to release a new revision of their OS. This’ll be great for users but it makes things a moving target for me! …