Ham Radio

Radios and Stuff

by W4JDH
I talked about ham radio digital voice briefly in my immediately previous post. Well, I’m gonna talk more about it today. As the last post implied, the digital voice mode I have the most experience with is definitely D-STAR. At this point, the standard is well over 20 years old, and other arguably better digital ... Read More

Retrospectives

by W4JDH
In the second post in my portable networking blog’s history, I talked about the WB4HRO Digital Repeater System I was managing at the time. This was my first “real” sysadmin experience, if I’m honest. It also taught me a lot about networking and the state of servers as it went along. This all started in ... Read More

Future Travel Plans?

by W4JDH
While I’ve discussed considerations regarding travel, I have not talked about actual travel destinations. I’m going to mention a few in this post. First on the list is Tybee Island, Georgia. Tybee Island is a barrier island on Georgia’s coast which used to be a 5ish hour drive from where I used to live. The ... Read More

Future Travel Considerations, Part 4

by W4JDH
I’ve written three posts on this subject so far, each one discussing things specifically, and I’ve decided to revisit the subject today. First off regarding charging: I have been made aware of some different charging solutions that parts of the previous entries irrelevant. The push to USB-C for most new things is excellent progress, and ... Read More

Future Travel Considerations, Part 3

by W4JDH
A third post on this? Yeah… One tiny update: I’ve decided to pivot back to D-STAR from DMR. Most of the time I just monitor the radio, and it’s far easier in my opinion to link a hotspot to a D-STAR reflector or repeater. Plus, this lets me use my TH-D74 which does APRS a ... Read More

Future Travel Considerations, Part 2

by W4JDH
I touched briefly on electronics in the last post. Okay, maybe not so briefly, but I think I should do a better job of surveying what I’d be carrying and what charging I would need. Current potential devices (as of Oct 2025): – Personal laptop (Acer Swift X) – while I believe this will charge ... Read More

Future Travel Considerations

by W4JDH
I wrote a post on Pocket Networks yesterday about solo travel considerations related to the project chronicled on that blog, and I mentioned that actual deepdive into the actual onebag travel bit would be on this blog, so here we go. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to attain true “onebag” status where all ... Read More

Radios, Musing, and Adjusting

by W4JDH
In about a month, I’ll have officially held an amateur radio license for 25 years. While the requirement to join the Quarter Century Wireless Association is to be in the 25th year since the date of your first licensing. Mine was in 1999, so I was eligible January 1. At that point, I was unsure ... Read More

APRS Fun!

by W4JDH
Hi folks! I’ve got a bit to report! I’ve been migrating my Linux servers to Debian from RHEL-derived distributions, and the last one to be migrated was the APRS node. I’ve had W4JDH-1 connected to APRS-IS for a long time: at least since 2011 and possibly earlier. For the longest time it was Xastir in ... Read More

CentOS 8 iGate

by W4JDH
Hey, the title rhymes! I spent the past couple of days getting most of my Linux VMs set up on CentOS 8: the two that aren’t are the PowerChute appliance and my UniFi Controller. One of the VMs was set up as an APRS iGate using Xastir on Fedora previously, so I had to come ... Read More