A lot of people look back on their year in December. I think it doesn t make sense to look back on a year until it s done. And then take a little time to let it simmer. That s my excuse for not doing this until almost February, anyhow. 2010 started with a 3-day ordeal of taking out the trash, nearly snapping the hood off my pickup while closing it, and Greek poetry. I then dived right into reading the Odyssey, and my post suggesting we read the Old Testament of the Bible like we read Greek mythology generated almost 100 comments. I guess I said something controversial I also read a number of other books last year. Our family had quite the year. In March, Terah and I got to visit Europe for the first time. A few months later, we visited New York City for the first time and I attended Debconf10. Jacob predictably loved our train trip to NYC, calling our room in the sleeper the best place of ever. Terah had thyroid surgery, and Jacob survived a tractor accident with amazingly minor injuries. But as I look back at my posts from last year, I m struck that most of them were about more everyday, ordinary events of life. Jacob loved the switchbox he and I built, Oliver somtimes acts like Yoda, and they both loved camping. I have made probably way too many posts with photos of them last year, but I m making no promises to slow down this year! Jacob and I built a computer together, and he loves bashing random words at the Linux shell. He also developed an interest in some half-broken FRS radios, and had tons of fun with them. Eventually this kindled in interest in amatuer radio in me. At the end of 2009, I finally completed my computer science degree and mused about what I might do next. I m a curious, inquisitive person that enjoys both challenge and knowledge. I thought that perhaps I would dive into reading more, or perhaps take some more college classes. Turns out I instead picked up amateur radio one of the big unexpected twists of the year. Jacob really did kindle that interest in me, and by July I had passed my technician and general exams and was on the air. I continued to study, and passed my extra class exam in October. Since then, I ve rigged up my bicycle for amateur radio operation, made some fun contacts, set up outdoor antennas, and got going with digital operation. It has been a lot of fun, and will keep providing opportunities for a challenge for me for a very long time. Also on the technical side, I made my archive of Gopherspace available for download. It s hard to cut off the list I have dozens of other things I could mention but I suppose I should end it with the Christmas gathering / piano moving episode.

Since I got my amateur radio license back in July, I ve had a lot of fun with it. It s a great hobby for anyone technically-inclined or anyone socially-inclined, and between those categories that includes a lot of people. I ve learned quite a bit over the last few months and really enjoyed it all. I passed my extra class exam back this fall, and thus got my new callsign, KR0L. So long, KD0MJT. I ve enjoyed some contesting, as well as general conversations on the system. I ve also done some work with the keyboard-to-keyboard digital modes on HF. Debian includes a very nice program called fldigi for this. Of late, I have developed an interest in packet radio. Packet radio uses a networking protocol called AX.25 over RF links. AX.25 bears a familial resemblance to TCP/IP, and in fact, you can run TCP/IP over AX.25 and AX.25 over TCP/IP. My learning curve on packet was somewhat steep. It has declined in popularity significantly since the growth of generally-available Internet access, though seems to be once again growing now. So a lot of information about it is 10 years old. As I was learning about packet, I of course was using my Debian system. The Linux kernel has long had AX.25 support integrated as a first-class networking protocol. You can open AX.25 sockets, monitor AX.25 traffic, etc. from the Linux kernel. You can use soundmodem to make a software-defined packet modem (called a TNC), or you can use kissattach to hook up to a traditional TNC via a serial port and a protocol strongly similar to SLIP (which, for those of you with shorter memories, is a predecessor to PPP). Linux can do what you d expect out of a modern networking system: multiplexing with AX.25, handling lots of simultaneous users, etc. So I was a bit surprised and baffled to keep running into systems that only supported 1 user at a time, couldn t easily do some things I was taking for granted, etc. Until I realized that Linux is the only major operating system with integrated AX.25 support in the kernel. Things started to make a bit more sense. I hadn t realized just how awesome a setup I had until I started learning about the hoops some other people went through. It is pretty easy to run a basic client on Windows, but to run the server side of things as I am doing well some of the features just aren t there or are really kludgy. Anyhow, I have decided to start documenting things I learn as I go. Beyond amateur radio, I also have sometimes wanted places to stick bits of information. Things that other people might benefit from if they Google, but that maybe aren t the best blog fodder or website material. So I have set up a wiki, openly editable of course, at http://wiki.complete.org/. To date, only the amateur radio section has much content in it. I m also sending in patches and bug reports to the various projects involved in amateur radio in Linux, and am glad to see development has resumed on several of those.

It was back in July that I got my amateur radio license, and I haven t written much about it since. It s about time I do. I ve been really enjoying it. I am now wishing I hadn t put off getting into it for so many years. It s a lot of fun and promises to be a lot of fun for a long time. Why? I am frequently asked, What can you do with amateur radio? Yes, you can talk to people all around the world, but of course you can do that with the Internet. Talking to people all around the world can be done with no infrastructure in between, so that s a pretty neat feature, but not compelling to everyone. I have realized that the question is poorly-framed. I had asked that question myself for a long time and only recently realized that I was asking the wrong question. I think the better question would be, What makes amateur radio fun and a good way to spend your time? One thing I ve discovered is that the amateur radio community has an amazing sense of community. Hams, almost universally, seem to love helping out each other, whatever the task may be: setting up antennas, learning how to operate a radio, even fixing a flat tire. I ve seen this directly, and heard about it from others, time and time again. There s an excellent article out there by Nate Bargmann called Why I consider Amateur Radio an asset in my life that makes for good reading. There is a lot of fun in amateur radio. It was quite exciting the first time I talked to someone out of state, realizing that the piece of wire in my trees, and 100W of transmitter power, were all it took to get a message 700 miles away. And even more exciting when I talked to a person in Kazakhstan the same way. No satellites, no phone lines, no undersea cables just my antenna, his, and radio waves. Then there s the fun in talking to somewhat random people. It s not completely random, as I m only talking to people that have passed a test there are about a million of us in the USA. (And for the long-distance HF communication, a more rigorous exam is required, so the number is probably less than that.) But when I call CQ an invitation for anyone listening to reply I never know who will reply. I ve talked to a retired Canadian museum curator, a Mississippi farmer, a resident of Long Island, Russians participating in a contest, two Hawaiians participating in a different contest, and the list goes on. Some of these have been brief contacts lasting only seconds, while others have been conversations that stretch on towards an hour. I liken amateur radio to buying my first iPod. I had never owned a portable MP3 player. I had always figured, why bother? How often am I away from a computer or a CD player? But once I got one, I realized how nice it was. It was convenient to just store my entire library on there and not have to try to sync it across multiple devices. It was convenient to not have to carry CDs with me in the car, and to listen to music at places I hadn t tried to before. The same sort of thing applied to getting a Kindle, and to amateur radio. I didn t realize how much fun it would be until I tried. Some Memorable Moments Towards the end of showing you some things that have been exciting, here are a few memorable moments from my ham radio experience so far. Saturday night was one. I was tuning around listening to anybody to talk to. I heard some people calling CQ in heavy accents. I eventually realized that the All-Asia contest was going on, and figured out how to participate. I made my first voice-mode contact with people on a different continent and it was with Kazakhstan! Within a few minutes, I also talked with three stations in Russia. I had not expected that. I ve made contact with several stations in the Indianapolis area, where I used to live. It was particularly fun to talk to W9IMS, located at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, which operates around race times only. Again I discovered that station simply by tuning around on the band. I took a 5W handheld radio with me to New York City during my trip there for Debconf. It was a lot of fun to talk to random New Yorkers while visiting, and they were all very interested in my impression of the city, what I ve done so far, and what they thought I ought to do. Some offered specific tips (such as which train from Manhattan to Brooklyn offers a good view while elevated). A local ham, W0BH, gave me some basic training on how to operate during amateur radio contests. During these contests, hams try to make contact with as many other hams in as many places as they can. I didn t think this sounded like a lot of fun. Until I tried it. It was indeed a lot of fun, and interesting being occasionally that rare Kansas station that a bunch of people are trying to talk to at once. One evening, we lost power. I tried calling the electric company, but there was no answer over there for some reason. We re out in the country, and there are no neighbors visible that can inform us whether it s a big problem that the power company probably knows about, or whether it s localized to us. So after wondering what to do for a minute, I thought I d get on the radio and ask. (We own a backup generator for these situations.) Almost right away I heard from a person driving in his pickup. He told me he saw a widespread outage, and heard on his police scanner about other towns that were down for the same reason. I wouldn t have known otherwise.

Wow tonight was thrilling. It s hard to explain why, but it s pretty exciting to have a radio setup that is all wrong in so many ways work well enough for me to sit in my kitchen in Kansas and talk to someone in Indianapolis using only two-way HF radios. I recently passed my technician and general amateur radio exams. I ve been talking to some very nice people locally on the 2m band, which permits local (say, 100-200mi radius) communication. It s been fun, but Kansas is sparsely populated enough that sometimes there just isn t any activity. At all. Earlier this week, my Yaesu FT-857D and two antennas arrived. I tried it first on VHF, and had a nice chat with Kent (KB0RWI) a few miles away. But tonight was the big experiment. I bought a 20m dipole antenna. This is basically a 30-foot-long wire, connected to a balun and a coax feed line in the middle. You re supposed to put it at least 30 feet off the ground, and away from trees, houses, etc. You re supposed to have a nice RF ground for your transmitter, power supply, antenna tuner, and all that stuff. You re not supposed to just run the coax under that (until today, annoying) small hole in the seal under the kitchen storm door. You re supposed to have to have the correct connectors on your coax, instead of soldering an RG-8 PL-259 onto some RG-8X because you re new at this and didn t realize that you need to buy an adapter. And, I m really pretty sure that you re not supposed to have an aggressive outdoor cat complete with a full set of claws and teeth attack the coax RG-8X cable as it s being pulled through the grass. Fail to do any of these things, and the thing might not work well, or might not work at all, or for people that use old equipment, might burn out your radio or something. So anyway I got out the ladder today, and I got the antenna maybe 10-15 feet in the air. I have three trees in a row with the perfect separation to hang each end and the center balun from. So while Jacob went around playing with water and trying out the ladder on occasion (with my help), I used some string to hang the antenna. In the trees, not far from them. Near the house. Not 30ft off the ground. I strung the feed line into the house, set up all my equipment on our kitchen table, flipped the switch. And nothing. Just the occasional familiar whine while tuning. I tried the 20m band, then the 40m, then even 15, 12, and 10. No activity anywhere. So what was wrong? I improvised some grounding extracted the ground conductor from an old strip of AC house wiring, shoved it into the ground, and grounded the tuner and transmitter. No difference. I unplugged the coax, and tested it with my multimeter. It tested out OK. I plugged it back in and wiggled the connector. Turns out the connector isn t in great shape, but it had been working. I tried transmitting. The tuner made a whole bunch of alarming-sounding clicking noises (sounded like a symphony of relays), indicated SWR over 3, and the ammeter on my power supply went a bit nuts. Later I realized that I just wasn t giving the tuner enough time to tune up; with a few more seconds, it tuned up just fine on every frequency. (So yes, it was supposed to do that.) And, it turns out, that all I needed to do was wait a little while longer to hear some signals. Pretty soon I was finding stuff all over the 40m band. I heard a discussion from Chicago, another from Oklahoma City, some apparent broadcasters from Africa. I decided I would try and transmit. I was hearing one side of a discussion very clearly and decided I would wait for an opportunity to try to contact that person. I heard his callsign, K9RM. I looked it up, and realized he was near Indianapolis, where I had lived for awhile. Eventually he invited a station trying to get in to participate. And: KD0MJT (I announced my callsign, as a request to join the conversation) He said he only made out the 0, but eventually we were talking quite well. It was a brief conversation, but interesting; the person he was talking to was in Portland, and couldn t hear me (and I could barely hear him, but not loud enough to make out). That with no phone lines, no Internet provider needed, etc. And with a rig that is far from being at peak efficiency. I had no idea what to expect tonight and was surprised that just tossing an antenna up in a tree let me talk to someone in Indiana. That s 650 miles away. I wonder what I ll be able to do once I get things done the right way. This hobby is going to be fun. Many thanks to Mike_W for equipment suggestions, Kent and Dan from Newton ARC for encouragement and coming out to the house to test things, Kent for being my first ham radio contact ever (on 2m while I was using an old 1981 radio), Chuck (K9RM) for taking a few minutes to be my first HF contact, and my dad for helping plan out exterior wall penetration methods that will eliminate this coax under the kitchen door and lack of grounding business. Jacob, by the way, still loves his radios and is starting to take an interest in mine. It wouldn t shock me at all of he s one of these kids that gets his technician license in the 2nd grade or something. I think he and I can do this together for a long time.