Discovered the Linux in the Ham Shack podcast the other day, and downloaded my first episode last night so that I could listen to it during the morning commute.

There were a lot of good links mentioned in the episode. I decided to listen to the show again and go through and collect all of the links mentioned and post them here as they’re not listed on the LHS site yet.  This is not a slight against KB5JBV or K5TUX – a lot of times real life can get in the way of things that you need to do online.  Just decided to put this up for myself, as much as for anyone else who can benefit from the list.

• The Princeton, KY Ham Radio Club mentioned the Linux in the Ham Shack podcast.
• Hacker Public Radio is going to have KB5JBV and K5TUX contribute some stuff in the future.
• Windows 7 Is The Same As Ubuntu is a post at ZDNet which points out that there’s very little difference between the two.  Seeing as how the browser is really the platform now, this makes good sense.

Need to run some callsign searches?  There’s no shortage of search plugins for Firefox that can do this.

• AE7Q has a plugin for callsign searches, as well as showing your grid square on a Google Map.
• QRZ also has a callsign lookup plugin (this is the one that I use regularly)
• The ARRL has it’s own version of the callsign lookup plugin too.

More ham stuff for Firefox?  Sure.

• N0HR puts out a Firefox plugincalled Propfire that will give you solar information in the browser.  I use this one myself.
• N0HR also put together the PropStats page, detailing how to add solar info to your website, and the Ham Radio Toolbar, which will add a lot of this functionality as a toolbar to your browser.

And some eye candy…

• FoxTab brings 3D browsing functionality to Firefox
• Cool Iris does the same thing for photos on the web

If you want a software-based KVM, have a look at Synergy 2.  There are numerous front ends for the OSX platform, including: Synergy KM, Quick Synergy and Mac OSX Synergy Configurator.

For those of you who are just coming here for the first time, you’ll probably notice that my last post was back in August of 2008, which puts this one about 10 months later.  Not really a good way to build up any sort of a regular readership, is it?

Every summer when vacation time rolls around, I start to pull out the radios, both the 2m HT and the 803A and get ready for a few more months on the air, with the idea that I’m going to keep it going through the winter.  But it never seems to work out that way, unfortunately.

I still check into eham.net and QRZ, when I decide that I can put up with the negativity that seems to flow out of them in the comments to their posts, but I seem to forget about getting on the radio. 

At least I get bitten by the bug each summer, but it doesn’t bite hard enough to last me the whole year.  Plus, every radio club around here shuts down for the summer, which really gives me no place to go to reconnect with the hobby.

But I did go to the local club’s meetings back in the spring, before coaching baseball started up and made attending the Tuesday night meetings pretty much impossible.  The meetings start up again in September, though, so I’m going to drop my dues on the table again and keep going. 

I don’t want it to just be a summer hobby – it’s something that I enjoy too much when I get into it.  There’s too many cool things that I want to try, and if I’m only active for two or three months per year, those experiences probably aren’t going to happen.

So I’m going to keep at it.

While the trip up to the Cariboo was uneventful, I’m happy to say that the T2H worked flawlessly, getting in to repeaters that I didn’t think were going to be possible. Needless to say, when I was able to hit the VE7RTI repeater in Williams Lake on low power from about 60km away, I was more than slightly impressed.

Okay, so I know that it was the antenna on the repeater end that did all the work, because I wasn’t able to hit any other repeaters in Williams Lake (even on full power) from Rail Lake, which is where I was staying. Still, it was good to know that if we needed to get in touch with civilization for any reason, that it wasn’t going to be a problem.

Coming back through the Fraser Canyon wasn’t a problem either, as I was still able to get into the VE7HGR repeater in Lytton from well beyond Yale (a distance of about 83km or 50 miles). Those wide area repeaters are the ones that you always want to find about because they’re the ones that are going to come through if an emergency comes up.

Next up is the Okanagan next week, so I’ve already got the HT programmed for that region, including the Manning and Thompson/Shuswap wide area repeaters.

Last summer was the first time I’ve gone on a vacation without a 2m rig in the car. The old Icom 2SA finally gave up the ghost, and considering that a lot of the areas that I travel to don’t have cell service, I was determined to not repeat the same thing next year.

Happily, I was able to get my hands on an older Icom T2H HT, which while it may be 10 or so years old, is still an upgrade for me from the 2SA, if for no other reason than it has a DTMF keypad, which the 2SA lacked. I found a way around it, but repeaters requiring PL tones were inaccessible to me. Now that’s all changed.

I’m heading away for a bit, and will be in grid square CO91 for a few days early next week. If anyone else is going to be in that area, perhaps a contact can be arranged.

I’m also in the process of seeing what’s involved in getting a satellite setup in place, as this is something that really interests me, particularly after watching K7AGE’s AO-51 videos on YouTube. Very cool stuff.