[Today’s run: Watson Road]
We had a good Memorial Day today. Had the relatives over to our house and had a great time. There were 10 of us in the house and everyone got along ok. That’s a nice thing.
I spent some time yesterday and again today on my ham radio laptop. This thing is an old IBM Thinkpad from 1999-2000. It has less than 200K of memory. I’m running a light version of Debian Linux on it called antiX. It doesn’t have enough memory to run a browser, but it will run an X-window desktop without too much trouble.
I’ve been getting more into VHF CW/SSB and I wanted to have a means to see if the band is open to longer distance conversations. So I decided to install APRS software so that I could receive APRS location packets and map them on my screen. That would show me what directions are open from this location.
I am using the internal sound card and a program called soundmodem to do the TNC/demodulating chores. Then I am using the xastir program to do the mapping.
I’ve done all of this before. I couldn’t remember how I had done it. But I did remember that I made note of it in a posting to a usenet bulletin board. Today I found that posting with google groups. Followed the info there, and sure enough, it works.
I really like having the internet around.