Episode 779 transcript

FLOSS-779

Jonathan: This is Floss Weekly, Episode 779, recorded April 17th. Errata Prevention Specialists.

Hey, this week Dan joins me and we talk with Andy Stewart, the creator of Andy's Ham Radio Linux. That is the Linux distro made by a ham radio enthusiast, for ham radio enthusiasts. We talk about all kinds of things, including why you might want to connect a computer to your ham radio, what you can do with it, and also what the current state is of the ham radio world, why the raspberry pi is so interesting, and my beef with the ham.

You don't want to miss it, so stay tuned. Hey, it is time for Floss Weekly. That's the show about free, libre, and open source software. I'm your host, Jonathan Bennett, and I've got Dan, Dan the man, Method Dan. Welcome, sir.

Dan: Hey, good, good to be back, Jonathan. How are you?

Jonathan: I'm, I'm great. It is good to have you once again.

Always enjoy having having Dan in the co pilot seat is always fun. And we're talking, we're talking about something interesting. We're talking about Linux, which of course we are, we are both aficionados of, but we're also talking about ham radio and it's, it's Andy's, Andy's ham radio Linux distribution.

And It's going to be kind of an interesting mashup between the two of us because I'm a ham and I don't think, I don't think you are, are you Dan?

Dan: I'm afraid I'm not, no. I know the original plan was to have Doc here, who's a real, a bit of a ham expert, but unfortunately you're stuck with me today, so never mind, but we'll manage.

Yeah, so I'm here to learn, because I do know a little bit, I've done some research, I don't have a license, I've never passed any tests. Courses or anything, or any classes, unfortunately but I am keen to learn more about, I've been reading up about the distribution today and watching some videos and so on as well.

So hopefully fully researched.

Jonathan: Yeah, so we're, it's going to be interesting. I'm going to pretend to be the ham radio expert and you could be the Linux expert, which is sometimes sounds good, different from how things go, but that's all right. So let's go ahead and bring Andy on. Our guest today is Andy Stewart and he is the creator of a Linux distro.

Decided to roll his own. Hey Andy, welcome to the show.

Andy: Well, thanks very much. I'm glad that you invited me here and I'm looking forward to it. This will be a great fun.

Jonathan: Yeah, so there is, there is quite the overlap between Ham geeks and Linux geeks. In fact, we've got David in our, in our in our chat just says KN4AON representing.

So we've got quite a few hams that are into the show. That's great. So let's start there, maybe. Why, why is it that there is an overlap? What is the, what is the juice that is shared between Linux and HAM?

Andy: I'm not sure, really. What's, what it seems to be is, you know, people that participate in HAM radio have a lot of independence.

Same. Build a lot of their own projects. You know, they're talking on the air to each other without any other existing infrastructure. They help each other out. And the Linux community has a lot of those similarities. We all try to help each other out. We guide each other toward, you know, well, here's the documentation, here's some examples and so forth.

And, you know, we're, we're all in favor of you know, free software. And so there, there, there's a lot of synergy there, I think.

Jonathan: Yeah, it, it makes sense. So you've got a, you've got a Linux distro and I'm curious, like what What was the background that made you say, this set of problems that I have, it just, it just needs its own distro.

Andy: Well, it frustrated me that most of the software out there was for an operating system from Redmond and I, I don't use that operating system and I wanted to do things on Linux. So I started to look around it, Probably about the third year that I was in the ham radio hobby. And I saw that there was quite a bit of software that people had already created free software, GPL license, mostly.

And I said, well, let's, let's start running some of this stuff. And I did, and I built it onto my laptop. What was I using at the time? Was it Ubuntu or something earlier? I forget. But then I said, well, you know. I know how to compile these things and build them and install them and all that, but not everyone knows how to do that.

And really, do we want yet another computer to babysit or do we want a tool that assists our enjoyment of the ham radio hobby? And I'm aiming a little toward the latter. So I said, well, I wonder if I can package this up in a way that other people could use it. and benefit from it. And that's kind of how I started with Andy's ham radio.

Linux is taking all kinds of software that's out there already and putting it into one place and making it easy for people to access.

Jonathan: Yeah, it makes sense. So like, what are the things that we do with ham radio on a computer though? So, you know, we, we normally think of ham radio as being, you've got, you've got your hands set for For some of us, it's a Balfang handset, and you know, that's, that's become a bit of a dirty word in the ham radio community.

Although I think, I think people are getting over that these days. Yeah, they are. But, what what do you, what do you do, what's the point of connecting a computer up to, to the ham radio frequencies?

Andy: Well, there's quite a few things you can do. Some computer programs will directly control the radio.

So you might choose to click buttons in your GUI to change frequencies, to change from, you know, a Morse code mode to a sideband voice mode or something like that. Sure, you can touch the buttons on the radio too, but some folks will do this because the radio might be at a remote site. It might not be.

You know, in, in that person's room. Another application would be to log your contacts and there are many different programs for logging. So I'd say, you know, I, I talked to you know, KG five IAR at such and such date and time on this frequency. And I'd add it to my log. We might use that to we might upload that log to a server and say, Oh yeah, you guys made contact and check a box that says I, I got your state or something.

There are other applications that are on the web. So of course, bring up your web browser and you could go to a website where it will predict you know, what's the likelihood of me contacting somebody in South Africa on this date and time and on what frequency might I be able to do that. So that's a web based program.

Not strictly Linux, but you know, you'd use your computer and your browser to get there. And there's a there's also a whole host of what we call digital modes. So not all communications are voice and they don't have to be Morse code either. But if you think back to the days of the telephone modem where, you know, digital bits were converted to audio sounds and then transmitted over the telephone system, we can do things like that.

But Admittedly more sophisticated. And so digital stuff would come out of my radio. You'd receive it with your antenna and your software would decode it into either voice or possibly text that I typed on my laptop.

Jonathan: Yeah, some, some neat definitely some neat possibilities there. And so speaking specifically of, of your distro.

Is it, there's a lot of distros that are based on Ubuntu, and there's some that are based on Fedora, and there's some that are based on Gentoo and Slackware. Did you start with one of these as sort of the base?

Andy: I started with Ubuntu as the base because that's the one I was using at the time, and it's the one that I know the best.

So I started with that just a base install and then said, all right, let's install these programs one by one on top of that. And I created an add on to the existing menu system so people could get at these programs and things just kind of evolved from there.

Jonathan: And how many, how many of these programs are.

One of the, one of the things that humors me is when you have people that it's like, I'm going to roll my own distro and it, it just consists of installing packages that aren't installed, installed by default. Right. I kind of, I'm kind of getting the idea that you're doing a little bit more than that.

Andy: Well, so I started with Ubuntu because I don't, I've never used Gen 2, but I don't want to start from, you know, bare bones and build my, my way up. I want to stand on the shoulders of giants and build from there. So I picked Ubuntu, not for any religious reason, just because it's what I was using. And I installed a bunch of things from the Ubuntu repository.

Great. But there's probably, oh, 20 or 30 different programs that are not in the repository that have to be built from source code. And not everybody knows how to do that. And some of them are quite frankly, a pain in the neck to build from source code. So I said, well, rather than make people go through that pain, I'll do it for them.

And then I will package up the resulting image and send it out there for people to use. And right now that resulting image is around five gigabytes. It's getting kind of big. But that's, that's what I've been doing for how long have I been doing this now? 12, 13 years, I think. The first six or seven versions I created were not worthy of leaving my home.

Version eight was the first one that went and you can tell I'm an engineer, not a marketing guy because I number things, you know, incrementally. Yeah. That, that is awesome. It's, it's really interesting to see people making their own distributions and I completely understand why you would use like Ubuntu as a base.

Dan: Makes sense. One of the things I was interested in was some of the like Jonathan's already kind of touched on it there about the, why you would connect a computer to do your ham radio and so on. Now I would imagine that connecting the hardware, your radio hardware and stuff, you're going to need drivers.

You're going to need stuff like that. What's hardware support like on. On Linux for these kind of things. It's,

Andy: it's all built in. So modern radios simply need a USB cable from the computer to the radio, and you're done. Older radios have RS 2 32 interfaces and you might be able to get them to work with a u SB to RS 2 32 cable.

Mm-Hmm. I don't have any. older radios like that, but some people do and they have mixed success with getting them to work. But I have never had to install a driver or do anything like that to make anything work on Linux with ham radio. That's what we like to hear. It's all just there. Excellent. So you mentioned that the distro itself is now nearly five Gig the ISO image is nearly five gigabytes.

Dan: I was reading today that a lot of people who are into ham radio want something that will run on a relatively low powered machine. It's something that a lot of people are looking for. And I know that's partly the reason why you probably use Ubuntu because that will run on an older machine. Why do you think that is?

Do people want that? Well, what I, when I've talked to people many times, you know, they, they might not be familiar with Linux. They they're familiar with some other operating system and they get frustrated with it for one reason or another and want to try Linux for that reason. So they'll take a machine that's, you know, in the garage, maybe it's ready for electronic recycling or something.

Andy: And they'll, they'll dust it off and try out Linux. And sometimes they like it and they'll keep going with it. And this way I tell them you can have a laptop or a computer in your ham radio shack just for that purpose and you can keep your other computer for your checkbook or whatever you use it for and you can keep things separate that way.

And you know, a machine that's a few years old will certainly run Linux quite well. And I haven't found a ham radio program yet that doesn't run well on, you know, a four or five year old machine.

Dan: That makes sense. And you probably run it on a smaller form factor and all those sorts of things as well, because you could, you know where I'm going with this because I can see you.

Yeah,

Andy: I know where you're going. So in fact, this morning I just announced on SourceForge. So SourceForge is where Andy's Ham Radio Linux can be downloaded and there's a chat form there for help and all of that. Just this morning I announced the release of. Version 0. 1 alpha for the Raspberry Pi 5 of Andy's ham radio Linux.

And I got it down to 150 megabytes. And I took an entirely different approach to doing this. So rather than taking the Raspberry Pi OS image and installing stuff on it, and then trying to G zip that and release it, which was about six and a half gigabytes. I said, that's much, much too much. What I instructed people to do is get a clean copy of the Raspberry Pi OS.

5. 1 and 5. 2, I've tested put it on your SD card. If you've got about six and a half gigabytes free, you probably have enough space. And I wrote a bash script to do all of the installations of both the software on the repository and the source tarballs. So. I also supplied people with the source tarballs.

Now, the script could have just done wget, and maybe I'll do that in the future to make it even smaller to distribute. But right now, the source tarballs for about 20 or 30 applications are in there, so that way I know exactly what somebody's got. I know precisely how it works, because an upgrade to that might change a build procedure or something, and that would cause somebody some grief.

So I've constrained it a bit for the first release. I also have scripts in there that check to make sure you're on exactly a Raspberry Pi 5 and that you have enough memory and that you're running a 64 bit OS and it's 5. mumble. Most probably it will work on other flavors of Raspberry Pi, but since they're not tested, I didn't want to promise that yet.

So I'm hoping someone will comment two lines out of that script that make those checks and run it and tell me it works and then I'll, I'll relax the restriction.

Dan: Yeah, you, you want to over deliver, under, under promise over deliver or whatever you're saying. Yes. I

Andy: fully expect it should run on a Raspberry Pi 4, but I don't have one here to test it, so I can't promise that.

But if someone has that, or possibly even a Pi 3, let's try those. And if they work, then sure, I'm happy to release that restriction. Are you

Jonathan: accepting donations? If somebody wants to send you a Pi 4, 400, or a Pi 3, something like that?

Andy: I have a gentleman here who claims to have a Pi 4 that he's gonna loan to me, so I'd be happy to do that.

I have one friend who I think has a Pi 3 but that's a very generous offer. I appreciate that, thank you. And if I can't get those locally we'll talk again. Maybe somebody can send me one that I could borrow and do some testing. Donation's accepted. I just, I just don't want to get 10 of them on my front porch tomorrow.

Dan: I'm sure you find something to do with them.

Andy: I'm

Dan: sure I

Andy: would.

Dan: Yeah. So a lot of this stuff is compiled, isn't it? A lot of this, I mean, some of it will be in the, in the repositories and so on, but a lot of the specific ham radio software seems to be. Need to be compiled. So you're compiling it on the Pi, you're scripting that, is that what you were saying?

Yes,

Andy: it's all scripted and compiles on the Pi, and my Raspberry Pi has the SuperDuper fan on it, and it cranks full tilt with a load average of 5. 0. So if your cooling system isn't up to it, please be careful. Toward that end, in the script, I do a make j, and then the number of CPUs is a variable. Change it to something lower, and you won't beat in your machine quite as hard, and you'll probably be okay.

Okay.

Dan: Ah, cool. I was gonna that's why I was going to ask because i'm I've done a little bit of compiling stuff on the pie and to be fair. It was an older version of the pie but It can be it can be quite a process to try and compile stuff directly on the pie I found anyway Yeah, well,

Andy: the standard answer is it works for me, and when I released it today, now we'll find out if it works for anybody else.

I hope it does, and I don't see why it shouldn't. The toughest problem I have, actually, is I created a document called Getting Started, and I had this odd expectation that people would read it. And, and follow the directions. And sadly that doesn't always happen. And 99 percent of the time when somebody asks for tech support, it's because they didn't follow those directions.

So please take a look at that. I wouldn't, I wouldn't waste your time by asking you to read it if it wasn't important.

Dan: Yeah. And Have you considered hosting repository, you know, building the packages and then just like I've thought about it.

Andy: Like, you mean like creating a PPA or something like that.

Yeah, I've thought about it. I would have to look up how to do that. I've never done it before, but that could be a fun learning exercise.

Dan: Yeah, I was just thinking a PPA might be perfect for that kind of thing. That's a Personal Package Archive, I think it, I think. Yes, I think that's what that

Andy: stands for.

There was one out there, or maybe it's still there and not maintained. I believe it was called Ubuntu Ham or Ubuntu Hams, something like that. But I don't know if that one's maintained anymore. It was actively maintained for a while.

Dan: Yeah, that makes sense. So I noticed that all of the software on there is completely pre software.

There's nothing else you know, free and open source software.

Andy: Everything on there is free or open source or licensed compatibly. I, I do not want proprietary software on there and I don't think I have the legal right to distribute somebody else's proprietary software. I try like heck to stay away from proprietary software and just go straight, you know, free and open source.

Dan: Excellent. Well, I was going to ask if that was a philosophical thing as well as a practical thing, and it sounds like it definitely

Andy: is. It is for me, but I don't do anything to stop anybody from doing whatever they wish on their own computer. That's their choice. But I, I, I won't do it on mine if I can help it.

Dan: So, you've been going for almost, what was it, 12 years did you say now? I think it's, I think

Andy: 2011 was the first time I released a version. And so every four to six months, whenever I feel like it, and my workload allows it, I will update it and come up with another version. And I try to stick to Ubuntu long term support.

Versions, because I'm trying to get the latest ham radio software into people's hands. And you know, I'm still based on Ubuntu 22. 04, for example, and some people shudder in horror and say, Oh, that's two years old. I'm like, no guys, they keep putting updates out there for it. It's okay. And 20, 24. 04 should be coming out shortly, but who knows if it's quite solid enough.

I'll, I'll wait a couple of months before I update to that. That's what LTS means. Transcribed I was just going

Dan: to say, in Ubuntu LTS, long term support. So you've got five years anyway.

Andy: Right. And I'm, I'm opting for stability, number one, and number two, the latest ham radio programs that I can find to get out into people's hands.

So that, that's what I'm focused on. Now, this time around, of course, I took Ubuntu, installed things on it, zipped it up, made an ISO file out of it and distributed it, and it's pretty big. When I do the 24. 04 version, which won't be the next release, but the one after that, so probably six months from now, I think I'm going to shift to this scripted idea the way I've done it for the raspberry pi.

It may just be copy that script over and, and Tweak a couple of package names and go. It may not have to be that much different. And that could potentially save me an awful lot of time. I've, I've been into the, you know, new England, you know, handcrafted, you know, distro kind of thing. And it's, it's a lot of work and I tend to forget what I did to get each thing to work well now it's documented, it's in the script and anybody can do it.

Dan: Yeah, and is it just yourself that works on this, or do you take contributions from the community and do people patch things? It's

Andy: just me. I haven't received, I don't wish to get monetary donations. This is my contribution to the community, or one of them anyway. And you know, sometimes I get people with, you know, legitimate bug reports and such, and I'll fix them if I can.

And then I just put it out there. So. You know, that's how, you know, the ham radio and the Linux community share this idea of helping each other out and scratching each other's backs and so forth. And this is a way that I've, I've chosen to do that with, with the skills that I have.

Jonathan: How often do you have somebody come along and not only send you a bug report, but also send you the fix for whatever they found?

Andy: It's, it's uncommon. Most of the bug reports are please go reread this paragraph. And when you do it, you'll be okay. And then they are and it's occasionally somebody will say, well, this program has a bug and I will politely forward them to the the authors of said program. They can help them much better than I can.

And You know, usually it's not a unique bug. Either the authors know about it, or there's some work around they could implement. Yeah.

Jonathan: So it sounds like most of your users are ham radio enthusiasts as opposed to Linux enthusiasts.

Andy: Mostly, but they tend to be both also you know, occasionally I get somebody who's brand new to Linux that wants to try this out for whatever reason, but by and large they're people who have interests in, in both ham radio and in in Linux.

Jonathan: Yeah interesting. So I, I'm kind of, I'm kind of torn whether I want to do the pitch. But if you are, if you're doing, if you're doing cam radio on Raspberry Pis, then have you heard about Meshtastic?

Andy: Meshtastic. No, I have not heard of that one. Talk to me.

Jonathan: Okay. So full disclosure, this is a project that I'm involved in.

I do some of the code. In fact, running it on the Raspberry Pi has kind of been my baby for the past few months. Meshtastic takes LoRa radios. And so one of the other things I was going to ask you is whether you do anything with SPI. as opposed to USB. And SPI is one of the protocols that's built into the Raspberry Pi.

What MeshTastic does is it takes the lower radios, talks to them over SPI, and it builds a mesh. And so you can, you can go in and plug in your ham radio credentials. You know, this is my call sign and it changes the way the program works to, to, you know, to work with, with the losses that you have to do. Otherwise it does it encrypted, but the, the beauty is that, you know, one radio on the same channel, even if it doesn't know the password or whatever packet it sees, it pulls something out of the air.

It'll then retransmit it. And so you can build like a city wide mesh on less than a watt of a transmit power. And so there, there, there may be some, some juice here to find, to squeeze out the idea of making the mesh testic D binary work on Andy's ham radio. That that sounds like that could be fun.

Andy: That's interesting. I'm going to look that up. Cause I had not heard about that before.

Jonathan: Yeah, it's, it is reasonably new. We've, we've talked with the guys here on Floss Weekly a couple of times now. And after the first time we talked to them and I understood what they were doing, it's like, Oh, I've got to be part of this.

And so I've, I've been slinging code over there for quite a while now.

Andy: Nice. Yeah. Occasionally somebody will come along and tell me about a project like this, and they'll say, you know, can you include this in Andy Sam Radio Linux? And as long as it's free or open source software, and as long as it you know, looks like something that's reasonably useful to people, I'm happy to put it in there.

And so, but this is something I definitely want to look at. In fact, I did this recently for the M17 project. I don't know if you're familiar with this A relatively new project in ham radio, where people have taken a, a voice encoder decoder piece of software. Now that that's not easy to do, but there's a free software implementation out there that was invented by a ham in Australia.

And there are people that are taking this and doing digital voice. Over the air with high quality voice. And this is not an easy thing to do. And most of the algorithms are a proprietary and patented and, and, and secret and all of that sort of thing. This is wide open and it's called codec two. And it's been out there for about 10 years, but the M 17 project is taking it and doing all sorts of things with it.

On the two meter band, which is 144 megahertz ish. And they're, they're, Creating all sorts of different devices to allow people to use this. And it's, it's really cool. And if you search for M17, you'll have a hard time finding it because there's a military weapon of a similar name, but it is out there.

And if you, if you find it you might, you might find some interest there.

Jonathan: Yeah. That's, that's neat. Now, do you do much with say SDRs, the software defined radio dongles? And, and the, the background to this is somebody discovered a few years ago that TV tuners. So they were selling USB TV tuners and somebody discovered, wait a second, this, this is not locked to the TV bands.

This is not magic. This is just essentially it's a software defined radio plugged in over USB and the, the ham community in the Linux community kind of found it and went, Oh my goodness, this allows us to do so many things. Is, is there some of the SDR goodness in Andy's, Andy's ham radio linux

Andy: there is indeed i have not delved very far into that but i have one of those usb dongles that cost me a whopping 25 bucks i plugged it in and fired up a couple of pieces of software hooked my antenna up to it And the earlier devices wouldn't work below a hundred megahertz.

And so I built myself an upconverter to take ham radio frequencies around three megahertz and make them look like 103 megahertz. And then the dongle could, could decode them. And that was a fun and, and project to do. And so I've, I've, the more modern ones will go down much lower in frequency. And I have had some experience with that.

There is some software defined radio software available, and there's the GNU radio companion is also on there, which is not just software defined radio, but any signal processing application that you want to describe. GNU radio

Jonathan: is

Andy: sort of a Swiss

Jonathan: army chainsaw.

Andy: It is. It is. I, I built something with it once following a tutorial and got an FM radio as a result, which was kind of cool, but I, I haven't gone into it deeply enough to, to be able to invent things from scratch.

Jonathan: Yes. It's kind of like when you, it's kind of like when you buy the, my first radio kit, you know, they used to be Heath kits and then you could get them from Radio Shack and they had the little spring loaded. That's, that's how I feel going through one of those ham radio tutorials or excuse me, one of the GNU radio tutorials.

I know there's so much more to this. But following this tutorial, I'm just bending the spring back and putting the wire in. Alright, where does the next one go? And you put it there, and again, magic happens, and you get FM out of it.

Andy: Right, right. Now, it was kind of fun, but I figured just because I don't know how to use it, doesn't mean I shouldn't put it out there for other people who might be well versed in its use.

Jonathan: Yeah, absolutely. Alright so There is, there is something that I wanted to kind of pick your brain about while, while we had you here. And this is one of my sort of long standing beefs with HAM. And it's just because, you know, I come at this from a very Linux and even security centric background. And the HAM radio rules, there's some things that they don't allow you to do.

And, and one of those that really kind of ruffles my feathers the wrong way is you can't do encryption over HAM.

Andy: No, you're not supposed to do any sort of encryption over him. The idea is that anybody can listen to it you know, and, and know what that people are saying, and you just wouldn't say things that you, you don't want other people to hear.

Jonathan: And, and so the, well, the place that that really, that really, I think causes a problem is It can also prevent doing decent authentication. So, like, one of the things that always seemed interesting to me is if you had a remote device, let's say a repeater running on maybe a Raspberry Pi, something that would be really useful to be able to do is to use the SSH protocol to get in and make a change to the repeater.

But you can't, from what I understand, you cannot do SSH over over ham because again, it uses encryption.

Andy: That's also my understanding and I know people have talked about it and complained about it and what not, but yeah, my understanding is you're, you're not supposed to do that.

Jonathan: I, and I don't have a big enough voice to make a difference about this, but for the longest time I've wished that you know, the FCC and whoever else it is that governs the ham world would kind of go in and make an allowance for Encryption for the purpose of authentication.

And I think that, I think that would sort of revolutionize at least my corner of the ham world, it would sort of revolutionize it because it would allow suddenly more things that you can't do at the moment.

Andy: So along the lines of, of rules that some people might find silly is the limitation on certain frequencies of only up to 300 baud.

And that's based on, you know, things from the 1980s and say, well, guys, wait a minute. Why can't we have, if you want to put a restriction in there, why not have it be based on the bandwidth of the signal, not the data that it carries. And I, there may be something in the works now to, to modify that language because it's pretty dated.

But I mean, you know, some people would say Morse code is encryption because I don't understand it. Well, that's not really true. Somebody understands it and it's well documented just like all the digital modes that are out there. there. If you have the right software, you can decode it and see exactly what it is.

But you, you can't call it encryption just because you don't have the right software.

Jonathan: There's probably quite a few, because ham radio has been around for a long time, there's probably quite a few little weird wrinkles that maybe not everybody knows about. How quickly do things change? Is it a pretty slow process to get anything revised in the ham radio rules? It, it feels like to me, my own perspective the FCC seems to move at a glacial pace in, in my personal opinion.

Andy: It's, it's tough to get them to change and there's all sorts of there appears to be all sorts of bureaucracy and whatnot, you know, getting anything in government changed and that, that organization is no different. But you know, there are people who are working on it, there are people who make, you know, reasonable technical arguments for these things and, and little by little, you things do get changed, but there's also an awful lot of tradition in the hobby.

Things have just been done a particular way for a long time. And that's that's part of joining the club is is learning those protocols and traditions and kind of going with it.

Jonathan: Speaking of traditions, there are some other things that get done a lot in ham radio. And I'm thinking of like the civilian air patrol and then also and those guys are involved with this sometimes.

But things like disaster response. Just curious. Is there a tie in to to your work with either of those? Are there any, you know, cap specific applications that we can run on Linux? Or is there anything that's kind of geared towards disaster response?

Andy: Well, there, there is a branch of ham radio that refers to emergency management and in some parts of the country ham radio operators are well tied in with police fire emergency response and so forth and other parts of the country.

There's there's no such connection. And there is software that, that ham radio operators will often use in a so called, you know, emergency communications or, or MCOM setting. It tends to be based on that other operating system, it's called Winlink and it, it only, as far as I know. It only runs on a Windows system, which feels rather exclusionary to me, even if it were with a free or open source license, which I think it is not.

But there is a suite of free software that does a very similar task and it's called the narrow band emergency messaging system. And that. is a suite of software largely written by a gentleman down in, is he in Alabama or Georgia? I forget. It's a Dave Freese, W1HKJ. And it encompasses FL Digi, a couple of companion programs.

And an email tool, I believe it's Sylfeed. And those together allow ham radio operators to use the airwaves to send, you know, short text messages and, and, and other ham radio formatted messages to each other without any infrastructure in existence. I have a radio, you have a radio, we can talk, we can send things back and forth that way.

And in an MCOM situation, that's, that's important. Beyond that, I don't know, cause I haven't actually participated in such an exercise because they don't, they don't seem to be too, too big around here. But I have friends that have been doing that for quite some time and they, they use this this sort of software for that purpose.

Jonathan: Yeah, it's it's an interesting thing about ham is because it's for most people and most of the time, it's just a hobby. But there are, there are a few instances where like certain things fall into place and all of a sudden, you know, no, it's, it's a big deal and there are important things riding on it.

I, I had some friends that were in CAP, the Civilian Air Patrol, and one of the things that they would do occasionally is if there was like an airplane incident, I think. I think one time somebody was flying a small airplane and it went down and so their transponder started going, basically saying there's a problem, and the CAP guys got called and they went up and were part of the effort to, like, triangulate exactly where this plane had gone down.

And that was, that was like, that was official, but it was, it was ham radio. It was, it was kind of neat. Well, I participate in what we call fox hunting. Now, no, we're not shooting little animals. The fox is, is a transmitter, a very, very low power transmitter that somebody will hide typically in public conservation land.

Andy: And they'll send out an email and they'll say, Hey, Here's the frequency here's the piece of public conservation land where it is. It might be, you know, 50, a hundred acres of land go find it. And people have, you know, radio receivers and antennas that are made out of PVC pipe and properly cut lengths of of the, of the metal tape measure.

And they'll go out in the woods and they will track the thing down. And it's a great way to learn how to, well, not triangulate, cause you don't strictly have three, but to go out and track a signal find it. And now, of course, out in the woods, the signal might bounce off of trees or hills or other such things as, as radio waves are likely to do, and that adds to the challenge, but it's a great excuse to get out and go for a walk to

Jonathan: get some fresh air.

Absolutely. Okay, so you just said something really interesting. And this is, this is definitely more of a ham question than anything else. But public, public use lands, what, what is the Let's, let's just say that I wanted to put a little repeater, and, and so we're talking about something a little underpowered but ideally that's going to stay out for a while.

What is the, what is the rules and what are like the best practices about trying to do that on public use lands?

Andy: Well, when I put my Fox out there, I'll, I'll use that example. Cause it's one, I know the Fox identifies itself every 10 minutes, you know, when it's transmitting, I have it shut off at night.

And I always put a slash B after my call sign to indicate that, that typically means beacon or, you know, unoperated station, but, but I'm the one responsible for its transmissions. Now around here, our repeaters do slash R, you know, to let you know that it's a repeater. Now, as far as, you know, I put something out, it might stay there for 24 to 48 hours, and then I bring it in it's housed in a, one of those metal military.

Ammo cans that that used to have ammunition. It's, it's it's grown man's Tupperware really. And, and you can buy them dirt cheap at any ham flea market and they're durable as anything. And, and I've got a big sticker on it to let people know that there's nothing bad inside. Cause they see something like that.

Yeah. They see something like that and panic cause it's green. But. But it, it helps hide it in the, in the woods so people can find it. And you know, put a couple of those you know, gel cell batteries in there, let it run and bring it back, recharge it and deploy it the next weekend. And we've got a pretty good group of folks around here that like to go chase those in the various conservation areas.

But as far as something like what you were talking about, that, that feels a little bit more permanent? Or are you thinking like a temporary repeater for, you know, perhaps a week or so?

Jonathan: Well, I suppose either way, we would, we would love to be able to put something permanent up in the and, and where I'm at, it would actually be probably a, like a wildlife refuge.

Andy: Okay, so around here, the, the two meter repeaters that I'm familiar with have coordination of their frequency, so they don't all step on each other. And I don't know if, if you're talking two meters or some other frequency range, but if, if you're talking in the range of normal ham radio repeaters, you'd want to coordinate that frequency with others so that nobody steps on each other.

Sure. And some, some areas of high population density, there's an awful lot of competition for those frequencies.

Jonathan: Indeed. Well, that's something we find in the in the Laura bands as well, which is in, in the U S that's like the 915 megahertz band. Because well, so the, the reason that Laura is so popular is because so long as you're operating up to a watt it, it'll run on licensed.

And you can actually run whatever traffic over you, over it you want to, because that's, that's one of the other quirks about ham radio is you can't do commercial traffic, right? You cannot do business over ham radio. And the reason, the reason that is a thing is because if you could do business over ham radio, then some business would set up on it and sell it to everybody.

And suddenly the ham radio bands would just be entirely used for business instead of the experimentation.

Andy: There are frequencies for businesses already. So, okay, before cell phones were popular, you know, people might've had car radios and, and the pizza delivery guy might've communicated back to his employer that way.

So there's frequencies intended for that sort of use. Whereas ham radio is, is designed for, you know, people to, to talk to each other, either one on one or in a round table. But we, we don't we don't so called broadcast. We have, you know, AM, FM, you know, stations for, for one to many kind of, of transmissions.

We don't do that. It's, it's like I say, one, one and one or a round table.

Jonathan: Yeah. And, and the, the, the pizza guy example that would essentially be what we consider citizens band, right? CD.

Andy: That would be a way to do it. Sure. And then, yeah, so for example, sorry, for example, I can't I can't push any products of my employer, for example, on the air, because that, that would be considered business, but Andy's ham radio Linux is okay because I don't make a dime off of it and I don't wish to.

Jonathan: Yeah. Yeah. Oh, I was going to ask something and it's just gone. Dan, do you want to take it for a minute while I try to remember what I was going to go with that?

Dan: Yeah, no problem. Actually, Andy, you guessed one of my questions. I was going to ask you what fox hunting was in the ham. Yeah, it was when it came up on one of your slides.

I watched one of your talks earlier and it said Fox hunting was a big thing. And I was like, Whoa, that's interesting. Yeah. So I wanted to ask a bit about what it's like to run a Linux distribution. I mean, is it a big challenge to keep up with? Because one of the things that, you I was really impressed with when I had a look at your distro is the documentation, which is a lot of work.

I mean, keeping on top of all of that, but it's the actual compiling the documentation from the individual different little apps and, and, and things that you've done into, because what people may not know if they haven't tried Andy's your distribution yet, is you've got your own little interface there that you've added, where you've got the documentation and all that sort of stuff in there.

It's not a big challenge to keep on top of that as the it's, it's some work

Andy: you know, every time I update the versions of software, I go through and check all of those menu options every single one of them. There's, I don't know, 40, 50 of them to make sure that at least the program comes up. If the program dies after that, that's not likely.

An issue that I can help solve that might be something for those developers, but I wanted to put some of the documentation in there to, to give people a starting point and especially for the few programs that are command line driven, how would folks even know they were there? If I didn't expose them through the menu, so the menu, you know, brings up a terminal and then runs that program and also has the documentation typically it's pulling up a man page, which, you know, most of us Linux folks would know how to do that.

But somebody knew wouldn't necessarily have stumbled upon that. Now they don't have to. They can just go through the menu and, you know, don't find it have it, have it done for them. So I tried to help that way and I try not to give, you know, read the friendly manual type of answers to folks because that's, that's not really entirely helpful.

Which I say, okay, in the manual on this page and this section describes the solution to your problem. But I don't find. That there's an awful lot of tech support requests of me which is helpful because being just one person, if there were lots of them, that would be hard to manage. And it might suggest to me that I put out something of a quality of the level lower than what I would like to do.

Dan: Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, one of the things that I was going to ask you is how, if say I wanted to start a Linux distribution, is there something that you've learned in these years of running Linux? running your distro that you would, is there a nugget of wisdom you can give me that maybe I need to know?

Andy: Yeah, people don't always read docs. And so, yeah try to create ways to, to debug it when someone does have a problem. So for example, the script that I wrote, that does all the installations for the Raspberry Pi, every single function says, yes, I got here. Yes, I left. So in the blather of messages in between, at least I'll have a clue.

Okay. What was it trying to install? And that will give me some, some ideas as to where to go. Look is it something I can fix or not? All of the, the fine details of, of those menu files and making sure the menus come up. That's just more. tdm than it is difficult. But in each of those menu files, it says, list this program under, you know, ham radio under Andy's ham radio Linux under, you know, maybe two or three other things.

So some of those programs will show up in three or four different menus in a way that I don't necessarily think is the right way to organize it. But I don't want to get in there and start Rearranging everything that Ubuntu did. Cause as soon as you do an upgrade, you'll, you'll lose it. So I created a separate menu that says Andy Sam radio Linux, and then a sub sub menus of that are all the programs that that I put in organized in a way that I think is reasonable, but of course people can go in there and change that as they wish,

Dan: but at least it's

Andy: a starting point.

Dan: Yeah, and and of course you get to be the benevolent dictator there as well So you can decide what you know how you think they should be arranged and then people can customize it. That's the beauty of linux

Andy: Yeah, I, I don't do anything to stop anybody from doing whatever they want on their own computer.

I, people often ask me, why do I use Linux? Why do I do this, that, the other thing? And I, I used to be a little more heavy handed with that and say, well, you should do this because. And, and that doesn't work. People, people don't want to be preached to. I'll say, well, here's what I do and here's why I choose to do it.

And if you choose to go that route, let me know. I'd be happy to help you if you'd like. And that seems to be a much more positive thing. People don't feel threatened by that. They feel, Oh, here, here's a resource that I could use if I want to go this way.

Dan: Yeah, that makes sense. I was looking at some of the other Things that you're working on and some of the other things that you have worked on I should say and I looked at XLOG and you've become the maintainer of XLOG.

So it's an obvious question. Yeah. So what how did that come about?

Andy: Well many years ago. I forget how many now ten or more the author of XLOG put out an email that said effectively it said, I, I don't have time or, or, or perhaps desire to maintain this anymore. I don't want the bits to rot. If somebody out there has the requisite skillset to take this over send me an email, describe, you know, why you want to do this, what your credentials are, and I'll consider among the incoming emails and decide who the next maintainer will be.

So I said, well, what the heck? I use the program and. And you know, I know how to write code, so I could dive in and probably figure it out. And so I sent the gentleman an email and didn't hear anything for about a month and figured, well, maybe he's found somebody else to do it. Well, a month or so later, he sends me an email and says, Andy, you have the right qualifications and no one else sent me email.

So I wasn't quite sure how I felt about that, but he transferred, you know, ownership or maintenance rather to me. And mostly all I've had to do is update that program. To match the the ADIF specification, which is a, a file format by which we describe our contacts so that we can upload them to various servers and have the, the data properly interpreted.

That spec undergoes a change from time to time. And I just want to make sure that X log outputs a file with the with the correct format.

Jonathan: So we, we did actually have a question come in from the live audience. This is David Ruggles, one of, a friend of the show and also one of our, one of our fellow hams.

Wants to know, are you familiar, when it comes to fox hunting, are you familiar with anyone using drones for doing fox hunting or triangulation? And, he goes on to say obviously the default would be multiple points on the ground, but we are, we actually exist in 3D space. And, drones could be used to make a point vertically above whatever you're looking for.

Is someone out there doing that?

Andy: That's interesting. I had not heard of that before. We're not doing it here, but I, I took notes while you were saying that, and I want to look that up, because that sounds really quite interesting. We have a couple of people in the Ham Radio Club that are drone enthusiasts, and maybe this is a way to merge their, their drone interest with their Ham Radio interests.

Jonathan: One of the, one of the real fun things that people do with Meshtastic, which again is in kind of the same, the same space, is to take one of the smaller Meshtastic nodes and duct tape it onto a drone and send it up. And then you essentially have a repeater 500 feet in the air or whatever. And that's, that's fun.

It's, it's not going to be a permanent install up there, but for a little while. Nope. All right. So I saw in your bio that by day you are a digital logic verification engineer and I'm curious, does that background come into play at times with your ham radio work?

Andy: Once in a while it does. So my, my college degree says electrical engineering, but when I got my college degree, they didn't have a degree called computer engineering.

Today they do. And that's, that's what my, my focus really is. And so digital logic, of course, is the circuitry by which we, we build computer circuits and microprocessors and all of that. So. When I started my career, I was one of the guys that would design those circuits, and we actually drew them on paper and converted them to computer formats and ran simulations and, and got databases for etch boards and so forth.

And nowadays, everything that we do is all code that is. Is, is processed and, and, you know, various layers of software run and convert it to transistors and we we send it in and get fabricated. But what I do by day now is I, I run a computer simulations of very large digital logic circuits, and my job is to attempt to break them.

So, for my non computer friends, I say I get paid to break things before the customer ever sees it. In fact, before we ever fabricate it. It's a computerized representation of a big circuit. And I, you know, between the specifications and the circuit, I run my test and if something fails, we figure out what's wrong, fix it, and then and then move on to the next issue.

And so that's what I mean when I say I live in simulated reality. I'm, I'm playing with simulators all day. And I can change one line of code and change my reality.

Jonathan: You are an errata prevention specialist.

Andy: I, I try, you know, we want to put the best quality product out that, that we can. And ideally the first rev of whatever chip I'm working on would, would pass muster and be able to be shipped to customers.

Cause it's doing additional revs gets very expensive, very quickly. And worse, you might miss a marketing window.

Jonathan: Yeah. Or you ship it and don't realize there's a problem until somebody discovers it in the wild and then you have a security issue.

Andy: Right. So, so some of that knowledge helped me when I was hacking around with a a radio that was invented in India called micro bid X and it's the, the micro symbol and then B I T X a ham radio operator from India has been coming up with these kit based radios for quite some time aimed at the ham radio market.

In India, so his part selections and things would be parts that are obtainium in India and of relatively low cost for that population, but they've been hugely popular and they came here and there's an Arduino inside there and he released his software as free software. So I built that kit and you know, did some Arduino programming.

For probably six or eight months, I took his software and just totally refactored it and practice my, you know, C plus plus skills a little bit. And I put a, a voice synthesis chip inside there intending it to be used by visually impaired hams. And I got something that worked, but as a prototype, it was prohibitively expensive to build.

And then the voice synthesis chip which is the emic two went to EOL. So can't build that one anymore, but it was fun for a while. And I had gotten some interest from the Blind Ham Radio community because it might have been able to be cost effective for them. But unfortunately I wasn't able to take it any further, but the digital skills and the programming certainly helped me while I was hacking away on that project.

Jonathan: Yeah, interesting. So one other, one other question that I wanted to get in before I hand it back to Dan to ask about your future plans. We briefly mentioned the Belfang, and I happen to know that if you get the right cable to connect to them, there is actually a programmer. Where you can go in and set up your, your pre programmed frequencies and you can also, you can fiddle with it in some ways that you can't just by pushing the buttons.

And so is, is that sort of the, the thing, one of the things that ships with your Linux distro is these various programmers and specifically the one for the Baofeng?

Andy: The programmer that I'm aware of that talks to lots of handheld radios is called Chirp.

Jonathan: Yes, that's the one. I couldn't remember the name of it.

Andy: It, it is on there and lots of people use it and they really like it. Of course, you'd have to look on their website to see specifically which, which models are supported, but I've used it for my 10 and 15 year old handhelds and it works quite well.

Jonathan: Yeah. Chirp is kind of a gateway drug in a way to playing with your ham radio equipment connected to your, in this case, Linux computer, because it's one of the simple things to do.

But I feel for a lot of people, maybe they, they make that connection and go, Ooh, this is cool. I wonder what else I could do.

Andy: No, once, once I figured out how the program worked, it was pretty straightforward. Put all your data there once and loaded into the radio and go. And if something happens and the radio is damaged or forgets or whatever, you've, you've got it on your computer as a backup.

Dan: Yeah. Awesome. So, Andy, you talked a little bit there about about Arduino and I was listening to some of the stuff that you talked about today where you were talking about hardware hacking on the talk that I saw and building. Like kits almost for people to use to get into ham radio. Is that something that you do a lot?

Or is that something that is more of a side thing? So

Andy: when I say I build the kit, I purchase it from whomever provides it. I solder it together. I do all of that load the program if that's appropriate and then go off and use it. So one. Kit that's out there that seems to be pretty popular is called Morse Arino and its software is also freely available.

And it's for people who want to practice and do things with Morse code. So with that, I created on my Linux computer, I created some text files that I loaded into that for Morse code practice.

Dan: That's awesome. Because I was thinking about appliances, maybe, you know, with obviously you're now that you've You've got the alpha out for the Raspberry Pi, that will probably, obviously that will develop.

There might be a market for putting together The boards, you know the pies with the Into little appliances almost that people could use I suppose that i've just reinvented the radio there. No, that's a bit Now that I think about it You could put a screen on it so people could read what the frequency no,

Andy: sure Yeah, I don't I don't see myself starting a business in a garage or anything like that.

I'm going to stick with the things that I know how to do. And that's, you know, tickle the keyboard and, and hopefully make good things come out of it. But for example, people have said to me, well, how come Andy's ham radio Linux. Only works on Ubuntu. I have Linux Mint and I like that. Why can't I put your stuff here?

Mm-Hmm. . And the answer was, I'm, I'm sorry. I built it on Ubuntu and, and that's what I distribute. And I, I didn't mean that badly. I, but, so now that I think about this script that I wrote to install it on a raspberry pie, if I port that script over to, you know, you know, regular, you know, laptops and things, why couldn't somebody take that and run it on their favorite distribution?

Doesn't have to be a BU two. And. Would it work? Well, if you know, if it's based on on apt, then if the package names are the same, they could do that. If it's an RPM based distribution maybe the script could say if red hat do RPM, if Ubuntu do APT or whatever, I mean, some modification of the script could be done to support other.

flavors of Linux. And so I see some potential there for this to grow into a wider audience. The other thing that could happen is I believe there are one or two other ham radio Linux folks out there that have created things. And Maybe somebody takes this and make something out of it. That's much bigger and better than I ever imagined.

And I say, go for it. Yeah, I've, I've done the best that I know how to do, but maybe somebody knows how to do better and that would only benefit the community. So why not?

Dan: Yeah. Ironically, Linux Mint is itself built on Ubuntu, so they've done the same thing.

Andy: But that was one example that I often hear, but there's no, I have no philosophical reason for not running this on any flavor of Linux that's out there.

Just, you know, I didn't have the technology to do it, or the time to, you know, configure, you know, different flavors. But this this script that I will soon well soon, three to six months, modify for, you know, everybody else's laptops and other non Raspberry Pi hardware that has some potential to, to work on things other than Ubuntu.

Dan: So you've kind of answered it there, but I was going to say, what, what's the future, you know, if you've got a future, not what's the future, that's a bit generic, but you know, what's, what's the future roadmap? What's the, have you got plans in the pipeline? Obviously, the Raspberry Pi thing is going to be exciting.

I

Andy: don't have any plans yet. I want to see how this alpha release goes. I want to see how well the community accepts it. The community has been wildly accepting over the last dozen years of Andy's Ham Radio Linux. In fact, I was quite pleasantly surprised about two years ago when SourceForge sent me an email with a little PDF plaque and said, congratulations on your 100, 000th download.

And I was just blown away. Now there's probably five people out there with bad internet connections that are persistent. But to be that as it may, I want to thank the community for for their interest in this. You know, there are many, many different versions that I've released over the years and.

Some people have probably downloaded all of them. But to me, that's, that's a, that's an incredible response on the part of the community. And I'm very thankful for that.

Dan: Yeah, so you actually get a plaque? Did you get an actual physical plaque? No, it

Andy: was, it was a little, it looked like a plaque, but it was a PDF file.

But it was, it was nice of SourceForge to send that and I, I really had no idea that, you know, over 10 years there had been that many downloads. That's not the main motivation for doing it, that it's popular. The main motivation for me is I want to configure my laptop that way and I want to share it with folks.

And if, if 12 people were happy, I'd be happy. Well, it seems like maybe there's a lot more than that. And so that makes me even happier.

Dan: Yeah, that's awesome. I mean, I was going to ask how many, not exactly how many users you've got, but did you now have a rough idea? And obviously you've got, you know, a hundred thousand people downloading it over that time.

So somebody out there. Somebody out there is getting it. It must be really rewarding to know that what you're working on is being appreciated.

Andy: Yes. I really do like that aspect of it. And SourceForge has a section of their, their webpage that looks at the IP addresses and tries to figure out the countries of origin.

And there are people, if that information is correct, there are people from all over the world downloading this, you know, mostly USA and Europe, but many other countries as well. And Ubuntu of course supports many different languages. So that makes perfect sense.

Dan: So Jonathan's just asking me if I've got any more questions.

And to be honest, I'm starting to run out of questions other than I was going to ask other than I was, I was going to ask where I should start if I wanted to get into ham radio. But I think is, that might be too big an answer to give right now,

Andy: that that is too big of an answer. Yeah. Mm-Hmm. . Mm-Hmm. . There's a couple of services online that you can buy that will help you study for your ham radio exam.

Good. And I, I used those in the past and they were much more helpful than just reading a, a book that can be rather dry for some people. Mm-Hmm. . But the software that I know about online that runs through a web browser would. Ask questions, watch you answer. It had some AI built in to help you with weak areas and, and not worry so much about areas where, where you've got it.

And that's one of many possible ways to, to go about getting your license and then join a ham radio club.

Jonathan: And then run

Andy: ham radio Linux.

Jonathan: I was going to say, look for a local ham radio club. Absolutely. The ham radio equivalent of a Linux user group. And those guys are usually very welcoming to new people because they know that the new people is the lifeblood of their hobby.

Andy: Absolutely. And I've founded and run two Linux users groups in the last 20 years or so. One of them is still going quite strongly. It's been around since 1997. And the other group, unfortunately, folded when COVID started. But But again, this is joining those, those clubs and learning from people both Linux and ham radio is a great way to get going.

And I learned so much from those people in, in both the Linux and ham radio communities. And this is a way that I can give back and I like doing it.

Jonathan: Yep. So I've got a couple of questions that I like to ask folks when we, when we have them on. And one of them is. What is the, what is the most unusual or most surprising thing that someone has done with your, with your software?

So in this case, the distro, what, what has someone done with it that is, that has surprised you the most?

Andy: In terms of novel use, do you mean, or just. Something that I was perplexed why a user would even do that

Jonathan: either either way is acceptable.

Andy: Okay, so one time a gentleman sent me email Claiming that I somehow ruined his entire computer because he tried to install this and botched it quite quite a bit and His, the tone of his emails was rather hostile and, and this, that, the other thing.

And despite that, I did my best to help him bring his computer back into shape. And I think this gentleman was one of those people that should have just put the computer back in the box and mailed it to the, the manufacturer, but I did the best I could to help him with that. And, and sadly didn't even get a thank you, but I felt like I did the right thing, even though I have no idea how he got in that state.

Yeah, that was. By far the most ridiculous thing that I've heard. Other things are, are quite valid. You know, there's nothing that's perfect about any operating system and people will trip on things and ask. And I think that's valid. If, if I know how to help them, I will. Or if I don't know the answer, I will try to point them to a place where they can get the answer.

Jonathan: Yeah, that's fair. Is there anything that you wanted to talk about today that we neglected to ask about?

Andy: No, I think we covered an awful lot of ground here. I hope the folks listening enjoyed what we've done today. And if anybody would like to get ahold of me you can send me email. My call sign is a K B one O I Q or phonetically it's kilo Bravo one.

OscarIndiaQuebec at ARRL. net and you know, or you can find me on SourceForge and send email that way. But any questions anything like that, I'm happy to help people.

Jonathan: So you brought it up and I've been thinking this whole time, you're on SourceForge still. Any plans to move to GitHub or GitLab or any of the other solutions out there?

Andy: I have not thought about that yet. SourceForge is working for me, but I know people have reservations about the use of SourceForge. I don't see a reason to move yet. I mean, technologically it's doing what I need it to do.

Jonathan: There were, this is totally an aside, but there were a couple of years there where SourceForge was owned by someone else that was making some rather questionable decisions, but I think it's now, I think it's now actually owned by the same people that own Slashdot, and so seems to be moving in a healthy direction once again.

So maybe it's the place to be.

Andy: Yeah, I've, I've heard similar things. I didn't really track them down. I had heard allegations about things being inserted in people's software before it was distributed. I, I don't know if those allegations are true, but I tell people, check the MD5SUM. of the thing that I'm posting, because when I post it, I check it and make sure it's been not modified.

And if they download it and that's good, they should be okay.

Jonathan: Yeah, makes sense. All right, so last two questions I have for you, and then we'll let you go. So what is your favorite text editor and scripting language?

Andy: My favorite text editor is emacs, because I do a lot of programming. And I have bounced off the learning curve.

So half the time I don't know how I'm doing things. It just flows out my fingers and scripting languages. I've I've used so many different ones. It's it's hard to say. I, I briefly touched Python during my last project at work and knew just enough about it to get it going. Perl looks like modem line noise, but it can often make, you know, wonderful things happen.

Most of my programming lately has been in, in a C or or, you know, Arduino's flavor of C slash C plus plus. That's mostly what I'm doing. I, but then again, this the install script that I did is a bash script.

Jonathan: I guess

Andy: I don't, I guess I don't have a favorite. I picked the one that kind of suits me for the day.

Jonathan: Yep. I get that. I get that. I think, I think that's probably the answer I would give too. All right. Andy, thank you so much for being here. It was wonderful getting to chat with you for about an hour and sure. Appreciate your time and really enjoyed getting to meet you.

Andy: Jonathan. Thanks. This was fantastic.

I enjoyed it and I hope the the listenership did as well.

Jonathan: Yeah, I think so. All right, Dan, what do you think? Have we convinced you to go start working on your ham license?

Dan: to be a ham. Yeah, it's, well, it's something I've considered in the past, but I, I think it feels like it's one of those things that I've always told myself I would do like learning Spanish.

I've always told myself I'm going to learn Spanish one day, but so far it hasn't quite happened, but maybe I'll get there. The other thing is all this talk of ham with the time difference here. It's like, it's. dinner time here and you keep saying ham and i'm like oh ham in a homo simpson style way i'm kind of thinking ham which is good but it got worse before when you said you had a beef with ham and i was like oh beef with ham that's quite anyway we'll see The beef with ham.

Yeah, great stuff. Great to talk to Andy. And it's great to to hear somebody so enthusiastic about the project that he's working on. And, and it looks really great. I mean, I wasn't just blowing smoke there when I said I did look earlier on and short of actually firing up the live dish, you know, the live install thing.

I did go through all the, a lot of the stuff that he's done there and it looks great. And I hope it continues for a long time. So I will say it is refreshing to see someone that has been working on an open source project for over a decade that is still enjoying it and still enthusiastic about it.

Jonathan: True. We've had some distros or some maintainers on various things that it's like, yeah, I'm still working on it. It's like, oh man. So it was nice. It was nice to see that Andy was still in the saddle and excited about it. Definitely. All right. So. Let's see Dan, do you have anything that you want to plug before we wrap?

Dan: Yeah, very quickly. So every year I mention it, but Liverpool Makefest is coming up in the UK. It's the largest celebration of technology and arts and crafts and making of things in the UK. We, we usually get about four or 5, 000 people come through during the day. So it's quite big, not all at once because it's, it's in a library and they tend to kind of funnel through.

But if you want to find out more, if you've got a project and you think you're in the, you can get here and you'd like to exhibit your project, we're currently looking for, we're currently accepting applications. So if you just search Liverpool make fast you will find it there and go and have a look at that.

Jonathan: Very good. All right next week our show is going to be live on Tuesday instead of Wednesday. I've got some traveling I've got to do on Wednesday, so we will be back on Tuesday, I believe. That's the 23rd, if my math there is working. The only thing that I have that I want to plug, of course, is you can follow my work on Hackaday.

com, which Hackaday is now the home of Floss Weekly. I'm sure everyone knows that, but we do sure appreciate them doing that for us. And then also, there is still the Untitled Linux Show back over on Twit, and make sure to follow that. We have a lot of fun there. I think that is it. We will see you next week on Floss Weekly.