I’ve been talking to Iain, MM0ROR a bit on the radio. After I persuaded him to build a 70cm version of the 1/4 wave vertical antenna I built earlier this year, I helped him test it on the radio tonight from my new /m setup. Initially I drove to the picturesque Aberdeen Beach, then the less pretty 57North Hacklab, and finally I took the long road to the very lovely Balmedie Beach, and for the bulk of the drive nattered away to Iain about nonsense and radios. …

This post is part of [tj]’s blog more in June challenge. You should join us and take part - just make 4 posts in June! As part of the general move to do more radio / do radio in a field, I’ve been doing radio in a field instead of preparing for it. This laptop was first set up and somewhat extensively tested at home, and then used in the field to prove it worked. …

I’ve had a plan to build a 1/4 Wave Ground Plane antenna based on this calculator and the data available on that site for some time. I’m doing the 2m band first (144MHz) - I’ve got piece of 4mm brass diameter pipe for my driven element, and 6mm aluminium pipe for my radials. The radials are to be angled at 45° from each other, at 45° below normal. Click the link for what that looks like! …

So I’ve had a lot of GPG issues over the last few months, and part of that has been me not bothering particularly to ensure I’ve got a consistent setup across my machines. Part of the issue is that I’m using a yubikey, and keep having to look at external references to make sure it works consistently. I’m going to keep this as a reference for what I’ve used recently to make everything work. …

I tried to set this up so I could use my yubikey as a portable authenticator following the Debian guide, and ran in to a bit of an issue. Despite what I was doing, ssh-agent would auto start, set environment variables and give me lots of trouble. Killing ssh-agent and manually setting the $SSH_AUTH_SOCK to my gnupgp socket fixed the issue, however I couldn’t get ssh-agent to stop starting and setting that variable on login. …