M17 is cool stuff. Looking forward to their HT being completed. :) For now an MD-380 can be modified fairly easily. or Droidstar can be used.

All the volunteers could operate under the site license. Maybe?

Microsoft Surface Pro 7, 8 Gb Ram, 128 Gb storage. I was running Linux on it, but just recently made the switch back to Windows.

The Wyse terminal is a smart design choice. These older desktop / terminal systems have plenty of power to run a specialized software package, and they tend to last way longer than the manufacturer intended.

Chips, with no dip. Some reason I like them plain. But, I will never turn down anything that resembles dip.

I completed the codeplug. I will send it to the folks over at PAPA systems so they can post it. It is a lot of work to build so if I can save people some headache I will.

About 1/2 way through building the codeplug. If anyone is a PAPA member I will submit it to the web team for availability on the website.

I was reading a post on the other site about a guy who really had a bad experience. I guess he posted asking questions about material on the test but phrased them in the first person. A number of people really lit him up. Basically accused him of being a war criminal. Needless to say we really should self police when we see stuff like that going on.

Shari nodes are pretty cool. Honestly I jump around a lot between all my nodes. I use one for my D-Star stuff, and another for DMR/M17. M17 is a work in progress. The thing I like most about SHARI nodes, you build them yourself. It feels less like buying a product, and more like buying a fun project. Mine took me about 2 hours to build up. I have a reasonable amount of linux experience.

Building the codeplug for this thing is pretty epic. Of course the code plug isn’t the same as the one for the 390.

The price between this and the KX base aren’t that far off. So probably a decent comparison. The BP-500 battery pack is difficult to come by, but I am considering making my own. For now, I am using bioenno batteries. I was also torn between this and the KX line but this one was available and I was in a sales tax-free state, so I jumped. Others have compared this with the IC-705. I think the 705 is more fully featured, but not really designed to withstand abuse.

It was down a couple of months ago for me. Recently started working again.

That’s super cool. Some day I hope to hear that.

Had a chance to work through some of this during the week. Got the resistor installed and the lead on the battery contact side of the board that goes to the front. Then I found that my soldering iron isn’t small enough to make the contact on the STM32. So now I need to order some new tips for the iron.

Also found something neat last night. I wasn’t expecting this, but sudo apt update && sudo apt dist-upgrade did not break the installation on the nano pi. For ~$50 access points, this software really opens things up. The default software ‘pi-star’ wasn’t maintained as well for the nano pi.

I still need to get proficient with morse code. I was trending toward that goal last year, but deviated off the path.

Nice write-up. Quite clear.

📻 📡

Just installed this on my nanopi spot. It seems to be working splendidly. Now it is time to set up the M17 functionality.

Yeah I can definitely see a situation where they heard something. It was recorded, and then someone put the pieces together. What I doubt happened was the Navy heard something, then concluded that the something they heard was 5 deep ocean tourists dying in a rapid compression event. Then proceeded to keep their mouth shut while the Coast Guard fruitlessly looked for the vessel.

Maybe there was something the Navy could have done more to prevent the search from running for many days. But they had to err on the side of caution. Imagine a world where they said the sub imploded, the Coast Guard gave up looking. Then years later someone found the sub fully intact sitting at the bottom of the ocean. Not a good thing to have on your conscious.