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.

We’re still selling and shipping NinoTNC boards & controllers - see the current preorder happening [https://ko-fi.com/s/981d919ea3[(here). New people are coming on air - it’s fun to see new bubbles of activity slowly appear. This month has seen a number of UK Foundation licencees (Technician equivalent) set up unattended ‘GB7xxx’ callsign packet nodes - a privilege that was previously restricted to Full (Extra) license holders only - they are limited to 5W ERP, but it’s made growing the network infrastructure hugely more accessible to all interested parties.

Packet Radio Guide

In the odd periods of quiet I’ve found, I’ve been fiddling with writing Hibby’s Packet Radio Guide - https://guide.foxk.it/ as a method of documenting what I know in an accessible format for our new users to accompany my repository. This is largely written from a Debian/Ubuntu/Raspi perspective and makes the assumption you’ll install packages from my Repository, but hopefully the Beginners guide and Linux Primer will prove helpful. I’m slowly building out bits as creativity hits me, but the process of writing, thinking about presentation of information and focus is quite therapeutic!

Writing the guide has been a great excuse to focus on the ‘first timer’ elements of Linux - specifically why are things different from Windows, what do I need to learn, how do I edit text (as much as I love vim & nano, they aren’t really beginner friendly!) and I’ve been trying to incorporate elements of that.

Maxwell

HPRG has made me focus quite a lot on the new-user experience - resultantly I have been toying with the idea of starting a Debian based Distribution that contains a set of sensible default packages to get people on the air with the packet guide onboard as a help reference and recommendations of next steps for explorers. It feels like quite a natural progression for the repositories - pre-installed, just download and go.

I have the first live-tests of the project codenamed ‘Maxwell’ running in a VM and a laptop. I want a common interface and package set across both x86/64 and arm64/armhf architectures, so it’s predictably usable and understandable across laptops and Raspberry Pis. It’s not yet publicly available, maybe by the end of summer. I think there’s a lot to be said for something that ships both pre-prepared and documented and has a bit more focus/face than ’the Debian Hamradio Team’ or ‘Ubuntu Hamradio’ and builds on the work I already do.

This project is beginning to get off the ground - I am simultaneously working on build infrastructure, live-cd build infrastructure, QA testing and learning hard. I’m focussing a lot on it - I find learning quite intoxicating and get into really tight iteration cycle where experiments and changes absorb all of my time and attention for days at a time.

EuroBSDCon

I am speaking about packet radio, open software and UKPRN at EuroBSD Con in September - https://events.eurobsdcon.org/2024/talk/VMBGCY/. This means I need to finish and test my FreeBSD port of BPQ32! I know it’s worked in the past, but I probably need to do some work to get it working again.

Debian Work

Hello! I’m a Debian Developer now, I’ve been once since January and have been contributing to the project since 2015!

I’ve been chipping away at bugs in Debian too! Cqrlog has been broken in Ubuntu for some time now - I’ve fixed the root cause and now it’s a work-in-progress to get the updates backported to older Ubuntus. This in particular has been on my todo list for a little too long, but Ubuntu’s SRU feels impenetrable to me as an outsider/upstreamer. Svxlink has been updated as well so that it doesn’t start all its services on boot - that was stealing soundcards from the OS and making a system unusable for anything requiring audio (including radio fun!) if you had installed the hamradio-all, hamradio-rigcontrol or hamradio-digitalvoice software collections.

WSJTX

Sadly, WSJTX, which we hold up as an example of ‘ham radio done right’ thanks to an open spec and open implementation is looking to ship binary executables with no code for their new ‘Superfox’ feature - this has already arrived in ~rc5 of their upcoming release that we’ve not yet added to Debian. I understand that it’s related to the DXPedition signing process by NorCal DXF - they will be the only group able to ‘approve’ DXPeditions (concerning for someone who’s not US based already - why do they get to be the sole arbiters of what’s real and isn’t?).

We’ll need to patch out the functionality to ship it to Debian as we cannot distribute this nonfree software, which is a great shame - our users will become second class citizens, as will Ubuntu users and other families like the Fedora users etc.

We manage to handle trusted cryptographic signatures to produce the Debian OS using only free software, but sadly the stakeholders of signatures in Superfox seem determined that obscurity and hiding the secret sauce is the correct way to combat DXPedition Piracy. The discussion is on their development mailing list around https://sourceforge.net/p/wsjt/mailman/message/58790809/