Shack update

The new “shack” setup is in progress.  The main radios are up in the office/shack room, and I’ve got a new PC built for ham use.  I used mostly leftover parts from either older computers or projects that just didn’t work out, like the media center PC.  In the progress I’ve gotten much further with MythTV and some other stuff than ever before, but that’s a different story.

I have the wire cut for the Loop Skywire antenna, but it’s not up yet.  I may need to beg or borrow a HyperHanger from a buddy to get the thing up in the trees.  Right now I have a random length of wire out the window, which hears a little and causes massive RFI in the house when I try to transmit even with low power, so I haven’t made any contacts yet.  I really need to get that loop up before winter!

I’ve been playing with some ham radio apps for Linux.  The biggest problem so far has been the plethora of sound card mixers and management apps on the PC.  OSS, ALSA, and half a dozen others sometimes appear to compete for control.  I am going to try to remove some, but I suspect that dependencies will keep me from doing so.  I think one of the biggest challenges Linux faces is a complete lack of agreement, discipline or even half-hearted effort by app developers to standardize on ANYTHING.  If you want to run six different apps, chances are you’re going to have six completely different sets of dependencies that will cause problems with everything you try to do.

But that’s a rant.  The station is coming along, slowly but surely.  I figure by Thanksgiving I should be back on the air.