Professional developer and amateur gardener located near Atlanta, GA in the USA.
I don’t have a lot of experience but I was able to get Baofeng’s GT-18 programming software working and programming on wine. If I was already an experienced wine user it would’ve been easier. It’s the first time I dove in. Even the serial programming worked fine, I just had to see which /dev/ was linked to which COM. Still, native Linux (or CHIRP support) would be better.
OMG, thank you. This was one thing I’d recently returned to Reddit for.
I first learned about SSTV over a decade ago from Portal! I remember I had to get a two sided 3.5mm audio cable to plug my computer’s speaker. https://youtu.be/DlIvnc-AZJQ (Video of someone decoding it.)
You don’t need to know Morse code any longer for the exam, btw.
Ham does require that one studies electric engineering (to a some level)
No, not really. You just need to memorize a few symbols, remember like two equations, and know metric prefixes. You could learn it in a week or so just doing practice tests.
Never been a better time to get into HF communications I think.
Also because the sun is in the middle of some kind of ~10 year cycle that means a ton of sun spots! That makes propagation go further.
Folks, if you’re interested in this hobby I highly suggest you start studying for your technician license right now on hamstudy.org. it’s a great site and free. You can use it as a guest if you don’t want to make an account. The reason I say this is because it can take a few weeks to find a place to take your exam and then get your license. The waiting period sucks. Especially when you want to get into it right away.
Just listening is free and requires no license.
The exam is ~$15 depending on where you take it. The FCC fee is $35. The license lasts 10 years.
Some entry level radios I think are good enough to just mess around with before seeing if you want to dump more money into the hobby are:
Most of these come with accessories. Most of them are garbage. The longer antennas are nice. The programming cable is very important. Once you get one they seem to work with everything. You really need one, especially if the custom firmware on UV-K6 interests you. There is a program called CHIRP that lets you program them. It’s very useful.
Are there any active communities for ham on Lemmy? I recently got into the hobby. The only one I found is !amatuer_radio@sopuli.xyz but it only has two posts, one of them mine.
Think recipe websites that take forever to get to the recipe but it’s for other topics. Like a simple question, “what is the release date for X new game?” And then there will be like 5+ paragraphs of jibber jabber about the game and then finally the last article will say when it releases.
This sort of site has been around for a while but supposedly they’re more common nowadays. Personally I think people just have a better eye for things not written entirely by humans. Either way it’s annoying to deal with them.
That is definitely not how most people use that word lol, message boards are one of the oldest forms of social media around.
Social media is bad for your brain. Social media is full of shit posts.
🙃
It’s like the shittiest QVC and it’s all over my fyp. I hate it. I’ll see the same person selling the same stupid shirt so many times. There were like a dozen people selling a ghost night light. I caved and bought one because it’s actually adorable and my wife loves that sort of stuff and I never give her spontaneous gifts, but it sags in the outlet lmao. Like it just nearly falls out. There’s a bunch of people selling some tub scrubber too right now. It’s so so annoying. I just wanna see shit posts.
My cat used to do this too! Now she doesn’t bring stuff back lol.
Dogs sneeze as a way of communicating that they’re playing and not a threat. She’s probably letting you know she’s just playing!
I wasn’t disagreeing.
I’m saying that when both sides have “infinite money” the “truth” can be found lol.
World is the biggest instance. I think this is just a case of people seeing problems there more often. I’m not convinced it’s inherently worse than other places.
Food based prisoner’s dilemma machine.
No worries! I think this was before Portal 2 and meant as a teaser. The person in the vid clearly has an interesting setup but you could do it with just a normal PC very easily.