Out of the frying pan, into the fire ...

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Ahoy!

It has been a bit quiet around here for a while. I’ve been busy at work helping to build a new logging platform on top of Splunk and recently attended Kiwicon X which was fricken amazing. Having met lot’s of interesting folk during the con and with a few super relevant (Shout out to Karit for his SDR + GPS hacking talk) presentations I figured it was time to dust off the old SDR that has been dumping 1090 for ADS-B since god knows when and actually start to listen to the radio. The astute among you will see where this is going …

Yup, I am studying for my Amateur Operator’s Certificate of Proficiency (Standard) (AOCP(S). It feels long over due to stop just playing with ISM microwave band’s and get a bit more understanding of all of the various digital modes we take for granted when passing packets around.

Some history though! Many years ago during my NTFreenet days I ran into some members of VK8DA and actually attended a meeting at their Fannie Bay site. But back then it didn’t stick. The SDR revolution (if you can call it that) wouldn’t start for a couple more years and cheap and readily available SOC’s like Raspberry Pi were just not a thing.

Fast forward to now and I’ve started participating in the Waverley Amateur Radio Society VK2BV. Listening in with an RTL-SDR to their FM nets has been a quaint reminder of the simple but effective technology that we have taken for granted and I feel probably neglected in the light of streaming services like Soundcloud (Trust me it still blows my mind streaming HBR1 via 4G LTE while walking into work with nothing noticeable at all - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kzjqBacF1k).

I am hoping to do a bunch of interesting things with WICEN and emergency response packet radio. The things you can achieve these days with 5 volt equipment and emerging technology like LoRa and Outernet is super super exciting.

So uh, stay tuned!

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