Disqus - Latest Comments for midnightcheese

Re: Building the Softrock Ensemble RXTX

Cale Mooth — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 11:15:08 -0000

Hi John, I wish I had an answer, but unfortunately my board gave out years and years ago.

Re: Ham Radio Clubs: It's time to move away from the PDF Newsletter

Cale Mooth — Fri, 03 Jan 2025 12:41:04 -0000

Thanks for sharing, Dan. It's all about meeting audiences across their various channels. There's no central meeting place online. Everyone is scattered across different services with different content delivery preferences. Knowing the audience and targeting the biggest delivery methods for them makes a big difference. There's no one right way.

The Nashville club is at a transition point with its club newsletter. I'd be very curious to see an example of what the Rotary group is doing. Might be inspiring.

Re: Ham Radio Clubs: It's time to move away from the PDF Newsletter

Cale Mooth — Mon, 28 Oct 2024 13:37:00 -0000

Thanks for the thoughtful response. There are pros and cons to each approach. Ultimately it comes down to what the club wants. If they're content to only target their own membership, maybe the PDF makes sense because they're not worried about discoverability or recruiting a wider audience.

If their goal is to reach a larger presence on the web, then they have to invest at least the bare minimum in online publishing best practices.

Re: 10 Years of Amateur Radio Weekly

Cale Mooth — Sun, 27 Oct 2024 19:49:25 -0000

Thanks so much, Sandip!

Re: The State of Linux on a PowerMac G5 October 2023

Cale Mooth — Thu, 07 Dec 2023 10:59:29 -0000

I haven't tried to get X running on this machine, but I have had it running on an old G3 PowerBook. On that device I had to resort to using the framebuffer driver because the ATI graphics card didn't have enough memory to run a modern version of X.

I would imagine that era of NVIDIA card is still viable, but resorting to the framebuffer driver which relies on the CPU could be an option even though it's not ideal.

You might try the Debian PPC mailing list. It's still surprisingly active.

Re: Email Engagement and Privacy Changes Coming to Mail in iOS 15

Cale Mooth — Wed, 15 Sep 2021 10:24:12 -0000

Thanks, Josh! Staying nimble is certainly a requirement in the marketing space.

Re: Cable Modem and Router on Solar Power

Cale Mooth — Fri, 07 May 2021 20:25:33 -0000

That would absolutely work! At the time, I had no interest in making that cut. It was all an experiment. But if I were starting over today for a permanent install, I'd remove the inverter.

Re: How to Turn a Google Mini into a Home Server

Cale Mooth — Tue, 16 Jun 2020 09:19:35 -0000

That's a great approach regarding the sticker. If I still had that unit I'd load it up with Raspberry Pis and set it out as a fun display piece.

Re: Super Simple APRS Position Beacon

Cale Mooth — Sat, 05 Jan 2019 10:47:26 -0000

Hi Liam, I'll need to sit down with the code for a while and figure out the best method. You're welcome to take a shot at it, otherwise I'll post an update here once it's done. Unfortunately, I have a number of items on my list with higher priority.

Re: Super Simple APRS Position Beacon

Cale Mooth — Fri, 12 Oct 2018 14:56:03 -0000

That's certainly possible. It means a few extra setup steps (PyAudio) but might be more efficient in the end.

Re: Super Simple APRS Position Beacon

Cale Mooth — Mon, 01 Oct 2018 10:37:18 -0000

Wow, that's awesome. If you like the results, I'd like to see what you come up with for that custom case. I have my Pi and radio haphazardly stuffed in the console.

Re: Super Simple APRS Position Beacon

Cale Mooth — Mon, 24 Sep 2018 13:32:34 -0000

Glad you got something running! The gpsd service can be queried continuously if you so choose. I set it up this way because the older generation Pis were so much slower, it took time (several seconds) to encode the audio packet. I also didn't want to continuously transmit packets out to the network. But feel free to play with the timing.

I believe I keep my VOX setting on the most sensitive value. I can't remember off-hand if that's 1 or 9.

Re: Super Simple APRS Position Beacon

Cale Mooth — Sat, 25 Aug 2018 16:24:18 -0000

Nice! Glad you got it working. Looks great!

Re: Super Simple APRS Position Beacon

Cale Mooth — Thu, 23 Aug 2018 13:06:13 -0000

I believe you can add a -d parameter to the aprs command:

-d WIDE1*,WIDE2-2

If i'm reading the source code correctly for the AFSK library.

Re: Super Simple APRS Position Beacon

Cale Mooth — Wed, 15 Aug 2018 14:39:35 -0000

Removing the number 5 from that command should allow those items to install. sudo apt-get install php libapache2-mod-php -y

Re: Super Simple APRS Position Beacon

Cale Mooth — Wed, 09 May 2018 17:36:11 -0000

Nice! Glad to hear you got it working! Yes, you can modify the symbol by changing line 84 of the main PHP script. The character after the W is what defines the symbol. For example, > is car. Here's a list of symbols and their corresponding character: http://blog.thelifeofkennet... Try swapping out a few different characters and see what happens.

Re: Super Simple APRS Position Beacon

Cale Mooth — Tue, 26 Dec 2017 12:34:45 -0000

You can skip pyaudio. For this project we're not outputting audio to the sound card. Only to a wav file. You can read more about AFSK and pyaudio, here: https://pypi.python.org/pyp...

Re: Super Simple APRS Position Beacon

Cale Mooth — Mon, 27 Nov 2017 17:21:26 -0000

I've actually had the same issue occur but I haven't had a chance to poke around and figure out why those longer beacon periods prevent data from coming in. Might be worth trying to run a cron job in that case. It would require modifying the PHP script to prevent it from looping. That would be my first experiment.

Re: Super Simple APRS Position Beacon

Cale Mooth — Tue, 21 Nov 2017 10:55:08 -0000

Hi Steve, you can change the interval by modifying line 111 of the aprs-position-beacon.php script. The number in parenthesis specifies the number of seconds between beacons.

Re: Super Simple APRS Position Beacon

Cale Mooth — Mon, 06 Nov 2017 17:43:54 -0000

Yes, that's a great observation. The script isn't aware of East and South. Those changes should make it work properly. Global support is a longer term goal for that script.

Re: Super Simple APRS Position Beacon

Cale Mooth — Sun, 05 Nov 2017 16:05:33 -0000

All you need is a 3.5mm audio cable. https://www.monoprice.com/p...

Re: Super Simple APRS Position Beacon

Cale Mooth — Tue, 12 Sep 2017 17:00:51 -0000

I'd double-check to see if gpsd is working properly. If you install some of the gpsd clients (sudo apt-get install gpsd-clients) and then type in cgps or xgps, do you see GPS info loading in on screen?

Re: Super Simple APRS Position Beacon

Cale Mooth — Tue, 01 Aug 2017 14:16:19 -0000

I was accidentally pointing to a forked version of GPSD in that linked file. I've updated the link to point to the source repo. That updated file should work as expected. Give it another try.

Re: Super Simple APRS Position Beacon

Cale Mooth — Tue, 25 Apr 2017 10:26:54 -0000

Hey Matt, I have not run into that error, but it sounds like that script is unable to grab GPS data from gpsd, which makes me think maybe gpsd isn't running properly. Can you confirm gpsd is running by grabbing data from a command like gpspipe?

Re: Super Simple APRS Position Beacon

Cale Mooth — Tue, 31 Jan 2017 10:58:45 -0000

Absolutely! A weather station could be a lot of fun.