transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:03] Today on the Workbench, all about the World Radio League with Andy N0APX. Stay tuned. Welcome to the Workbench. I'm your host, George KJ6VU. This episode of the Ham Radio Workbench is brought to you by Flex Radio, the leaders in high-performance software-defined radios, offering HF transceivers, amplifiers and other radio accessories. Check them out at flexradio.com. And by DX Engineering, a leading manufacturer and worldwide retailer of everything for amateur radio. Find what you need for your station at dxengineering.com.

Speaker 2:
[00:54] This is Ham Radio Workbench, helping people spend their money on stuff that they didn't know they needed since 2016.

Speaker 1:
[01:02] Welcome to the Ham Radio Workbench Podcast, your bi-weekly deep dive on technical topics of interest to the radio amateur. On today's show, we have a very special guest. That's Andy Perryman, N0APX. And Andy is very much involved with the World Radio League, and we'll learn all about that software and the organization behind it. If this is the first time you've joined us, we're really happy that you're here. We have over 259 episodes in our back catalog. You can find them all on the Workbench website at hamradioworkbench.com. You can also follow us on our Facebook group, Ham Radio Workbench, and also on our Discord. You can get the Never Expires link from our website. And on the Discord, you'll find all kinds of folks building projects and asking technical questions and even brewing the odd beer from now from time to time.

Speaker 3:
[01:49] You mean the other kind of homebrew.

Speaker 1:
[01:51] The other kind of, exactly, the real homebrew.

Speaker 4:
[01:54] Nicely done.

Speaker 1:
[01:55] You can also join us on the Brandmeister Talk Group 31075 and the All-Star Node 55915, which is getting all kinds of traction, I'm happy to say. So with that, we're going to be talking with Andy about the World Radio League. A little bit of background about Andy before we get rolling. Andy became interested in Ham Radio back in 2023. He first got into GMRS and then found out radio is pretty cool and decided to go after his Ham ticket. He passed his technician exam in April of 23, upgraded to general in 24, and then on to extra in March of this year. So he's just been on a roll. So that's awesome. He is an avid CW operator. He loves doing POTA, recently achieving his first kilo, which is quite an accomplishment. And professionally, he is in the IT world. He's a product manager for World Radio League software and a contributor to the Ham Radio Prep organization. So Andy is also a husband and father. I don't know where you find the time for all this stuff. But that, in addition to Ham Radio, he's also interested in a bunch of other stuff that are, the rest of us nerds are interested in too. Things like fountain pens, mechanical keyboards, 3D printing, and you name it. So clearly Andy is one of us. So Andy, thank you so much for joining us.

Speaker 5:
[03:13] George, thank you so much for having me on. Thank you all. It's very much an honor to be here. You guys have been an inspiration in my Ham journey, all of you. So I really appreciate you bringing me on.

Speaker 1:
[03:25] Oh, that's so nice of you. You know, I gotta tell you, I really get a kick out of your bio because getting your ticket just like a couple years ago, going from zero to a hundred in no time flat, contributing to the community through the software development effort and everything else you're doing is just incredible. Well, thank you for being part of all this.

Speaker 5:
[03:43] Absolutely. Yeah, it's been a lot of fun and a real joy to be a part of it.

Speaker 1:
[03:49] Well, we'll find out what's on your workbench shortly, but let me welcome everybody else in the group here. Hey Vince, VE6LK, how are you?

Speaker 4:
[03:57] Good, after evening noon, I am well, George, and you?

Speaker 1:
[04:00] I'm just fine. We've gone from rainy weather to sunny weather out here. How about Alberta?

Speaker 4:
[04:05] We went from icy, slushy snow to, oh, I don't know, about 55 degrees today in 24 hours. So yeah, it's still springtime in Alberta. I think we're on third spring and second wintery this month.

Speaker 1:
[04:20] Oh, you're not on fall summer yet?

Speaker 4:
[04:23] I'm not on fall summer yet. No, that's coming Friday.

Speaker 1:
[04:27] Okay, very good. We also have Mark N6MTS. Hello, Mark.

Speaker 3:
[04:30] Hello, how y'all doing?

Speaker 1:
[04:32] Excellent, excellent. How are things in the central coast of California?

Speaker 3:
[04:36] Weather is beautiful here as always. We had the threat of another sprinkle, and by threat, I mean promise that did not come true. That would have extended green season by another few weeks, but we never actually got the sprinkles here. So the hills are finally starting to turn from their beautiful green into the brownish gray of summer and fall.

Speaker 1:
[05:00] Ah, yes.

Speaker 3:
[05:01] Yeah, but you know, it's still comfortable temperatures and beautiful skies and whatever else. It's the Central Coast of California. It doesn't get bad here.

Speaker 1:
[05:10] It's pretty brutal.

Speaker 3:
[05:11] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[05:12] Also, we have Thomas K4SWL. Hello, Thomas.

Speaker 6:
[05:15] Hello, chaps. How's everybody doing?

Speaker 1:
[05:18] Excellent. How are things in North Carolina?

Speaker 6:
[05:21] So since we're talking about the weather, actually, there's nothing to complain about. It's been gorgeous. We've been having these mornings around, I don't know, close to freezing, not quite, and then it's up into really warm temperatures during the day. The only problem is, it's very arid here at the moment, and we're used to having quite a lot of rain and stuff this time of year, and we're not getting it at all, which is bad because we've got a lot of trees on the ground and stuff from Helene. So there's always a lot of fuel there, but it actually is kind of nice for doing poda and stuff. I mean, it's always great weather to go outside. It feels like California, Mark. So yeah, we're getting a little bit of your weather for once.

Speaker 3:
[06:03] Well, can you send some of your rain over toward us?

Speaker 6:
[06:05] We don't have any at the moment. It's a problem. But we would normally during the year. Yeah, we would. Because I did hear about that cloud that was off the West Coast there that was coming your way that never materialized, that one cloud.

Speaker 1:
[06:18] Yeah. Did the cloud go your way? No.

Speaker 6:
[06:22] No.

Speaker 1:
[06:23] Oh, man. Well, on today's show, we also have Paul WD9GCO. Hello, Paul.

Speaker 2:
[06:28] Hello.

Speaker 1:
[06:29] How's things in the central part of the country?

Speaker 2:
[06:32] I've come up with a new saying, Cajeto ergo ham.

Speaker 1:
[06:36] Okay. What does that translate?

Speaker 2:
[06:38] I think, therefore, I operate. And I've been trying. I've been really busy with other stuff, but planning to get out and do some POTA this weekend. I'll talk a little bit more about it.

Speaker 1:
[06:52] Funny thing, my slogan is more like, I operate without thinking.

Speaker 2:
[06:58] There's those days too.

Speaker 5:
[06:59] Ham, like, is, you know, I think the initial reaction is, you think?

Speaker 1:
[07:06] Oh, not operato incognito. No, that's something else.

Speaker 2:
[07:10] Yeah. Just to keep with the theme, our weather here in the Chicagoland area has been wonderful with 40 degree swings from one day to the next. So, don't have a clue how to dress. My sinuses have just given up. So, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[07:26] Well, things are turning to POTA season.

Speaker 3:
[07:28] Hang on, your sinuses are in charge of dressing?

Speaker 2:
[07:31] No, no, no. They're in charge of me.

Speaker 3:
[07:34] Okay.

Speaker 2:
[07:35] And they have actively hated me most of my life, and right now they're winning.

Speaker 3:
[07:39] Okay. Just the, I don't know how to dress, my sinuses have given up. And like, just that chunk right there.

Speaker 2:
[07:46] Yeah, sorry.

Speaker 6:
[07:47] Has never been said on the show yet, but you did it to me, so thank you.

Speaker 2:
[07:51] You're welcome.

Speaker 1:
[07:51] You know, this is such a Ham Radio crowd. All you talk about is weather and your ailments.

Speaker 4:
[07:57] I mean, we're not even on 75 meters.

Speaker 2:
[08:00] Welcome to 75 meters.

Speaker 1:
[08:03] All right. Well, anyway, nice for everybody to be here.

Speaker 2:
[08:06] George, how are you doing?

Speaker 1:
[08:07] Oh, I'm doing just great. So we're getting to POTA season. I already have the first calendar event of the year with one of the clubs I belong to, the Portland Amateur Radio Club. We have POTA weekend coming up in two Saturdays from now. So I'm looking forward to that. Yeah. The last one I went to cost me a ton of money because that's where I saw the ICOM 905 and realized I couldn't live without one. So I have no idea what I'm going to be buying in three weeks based on our upcoming POTA event.

Speaker 6:
[08:34] I got to call one of my friends there and have them bring a Hilberling.

Speaker 1:
[08:38] Yeah.

Speaker 5:
[08:39] So I got way behind on listen to the shows and I just heard the one where you got the 905. Well, I heard it a while back. I've heard several since then, but how are you liking the 905?

Speaker 1:
[08:51] It's amazing. I love it. It's great. The only downside is I don't have it set up at home because I'm kind of in a bowl, so it's pointless on most of the bands. So I really only have it for portable.

Speaker 5:
[09:01] Did you do any Artemis II listening with it or does it cover those bands?

Speaker 1:
[09:05] You know, I don't even know where... No, I have not. Do you know what bands they're on?

Speaker 5:
[09:09] I think it was maybe... Is it five gig? I think it's five gig.

Speaker 1:
[09:14] Yeah, I mean, it does cover.

Speaker 3:
[09:15] Yeah, but I assume it's all encrypted.

Speaker 5:
[09:17] No, they actually brought a bunch of Ham Radio operators in and to help receive some of those non-voice signals and track them, and they were compiling a bunch of data events. You can increment the rabbit hole counter to number one here.

Speaker 4:
[09:37] I'm glad to see you fit right in, Andy.

Speaker 3:
[09:42] Like we said, one of us.

Speaker 1:
[09:43] Yeah, exactly. All right. Now, by the way, before we get into the Workbench roundtable part, I did want to mention to the listeners, this is a video show also, so you can go to Loot Tube, you can go to YouTube and find it over there.

Speaker 3:
[09:59] Don't go to Loot Tube, that's just run by some chucklehead named Lou.

Speaker 1:
[10:02] Something different entirely.

Speaker 3:
[10:04] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[10:05] If you want to see the things that we're going to be showing and we're just going to try to describe them, you might enjoy seeing them on the screen instead of by our description. But we will try to do our best to actually describe what these things look like.

Speaker 2:
[10:18] As far as I know, we're all wearing pants. As far as you know.

Speaker 1:
[10:22] Nobody knows that because we're all sitting down.

Speaker 4:
[10:24] Sure.

Speaker 6:
[10:25] Sure, Paul.

Speaker 4:
[10:26] Can we go back to the 905 for a minute?

Speaker 1:
[10:27] You bet. Sure.

Speaker 4:
[10:28] Radmole counter number two. So George, I sense a microwave repeater in your future. You can use that from the geographic bowl of the QTH.

Speaker 3:
[10:41] Wait for my what's on your workbench.

Speaker 4:
[10:43] No, I don't know. I'm just going to put that idea in your head because we are enablers after all.

Speaker 1:
[10:48] Yeah. That's far down the path. Seriously, we've got guys here who are very interested in putting up a 1.2 video repeater.

Speaker 4:
[10:58] That's what I mean.

Speaker 1:
[10:59] There's a lot of ATV activity in the Willamette Valley, and so there's a lot of interest. By a lot, I mean at least three people who would like to put up such a thing.

Speaker 4:
[11:09] Right.

Speaker 1:
[11:10] I would probably be able to get into it. That may actually happen.

Speaker 2:
[11:16] If I remember correctly, 905 displays ATV on the screen on the control head, so it's a no-brainer as far as I'm concerned. Go for it.

Speaker 1:
[11:25] See, the reason why I love the 905 is because I could care less about ATV until I saw the 905, and since everything was built into the control head of the radio, and it has the video display as well as being able to plug in the camera to do a video call, it's like this is like so cool, it's really beautifully executed.

Speaker 3:
[11:45] Ham Radio FaceTime, it's gotten to that point.

Speaker 1:
[11:47] It's kind of, yeah. So with that, what we're going to do is do a roundtable about what's on your workbench, and of course, Andy is our guest of honor here. You get to go first. So you can talk about anything you want except World Radio League.

Speaker 5:
[12:02] All right. Sounds good. Anything? Okay. All right. Let's go ahead and, well, first of all, I just went to a ham fest recently, and violation number one, I was representing World Radio League. But while I was there, I ended up picking up my first external tuner. Every thing I've done so far has been with internal tuners. I just had radios that have like insanely good internal tuners, namely the G90, the Kenwood 570D, currently the ICOM 756 Pro 3. All have awesome internal tuners. But I want to try to play around, and I followed the Hamfest Buyers Guide rules and waited until everybody was packing up, walked over, offered him a stupidly cheap price, and he took it. So I am now the owner of an MFJ Deluxe Versatuner 2. So if anybody has knowledge on using an external tuner, I'm very dumb on external tuners because I've never used one before, so I would appreciate any...

Speaker 3:
[13:04] Specifically, the important challenge on this one is that it is a manual tuner.

Speaker 5:
[13:10] Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[13:11] That's actually a really good tuner. I give MFJ a lot of stick, and deservedly so. However, I do own several MFJ products and their tuners are really good, especially for the price. You kind of can't beat them. And their manual tuners, many of them, they had many different models, were quite good. And the cool thing about those tuners is that they're a fairly wide range tuner. So most of the tuners built into most of the radios are three to one tuners, which is okay if your antenna is pretty close. But if you, let's say you're operating on field day and you want to tune some random piece of wire, that tuner will probably do a very fine job of it. So that's a really good tuner.

Speaker 5:
[13:52] Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, good to know. I'm going to be experimenting with it soon.

Speaker 6:
[13:57] So does it have a roller inductor?

Speaker 5:
[14:00] I'm assuming so. I, like I said, I'm very usually on the right side.

Speaker 6:
[14:04] It's yeah.

Speaker 5:
[14:06] Yeah, it does. Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 6:
[14:07] Yep.

Speaker 1:
[14:08] Which model is that?

Speaker 5:
[14:09] Let's, let's make the first attuner too.

Speaker 1:
[14:12] I think that's a tapped inductor. Does that have a roller inductor?

Speaker 5:
[14:15] It has, it has an inductor on it. I honestly don't know the difference.

Speaker 1:
[14:19] Okay. So basically the in the circuit, you need a, an inductor. No, it's stepped. Yeah. You need an inductor. So you're mixing inductance and capacitance values to the antenna. And the classic kind of fancy way to do it is you have a coil that is on an axis and you turn the knob and it rotates the coil and there's a little wheel that's the top of the coil. And as you rotate the inductor, you have essentially infinite resolution on that.

Speaker 5:
[14:47] No, no, no, no, that's unstepped.

Speaker 1:
[14:49] But those are expensive. And so the kind of mainstream tuner approach is, well, let's just replace that roller inductor with a switch and a bunch of fixed inductors and it'll be like inductor 1 through 12, whatever it is.

Speaker 5:
[15:03] A through L.

Speaker 1:
[15:03] So it's a lot cheaper and also more compact. But the capacitors are variable and they will compensate for the fact that the inductor isn't at the perfect value. So it's perfectly fine. So what you do when you plug it together, you go to the band you want and then you set the capacitors usually for about mid-scale, take the inductor knob and you rotate it for maximum noise and then you tweak the capacitors for maximum noise and you're pretty close. At that point, you can transmit into it and then fine tune it to get at the right value.

Speaker 2:
[15:38] Very cool. My experience so far is that manual tuners have a much bigger range than the average automatic tuners. So, I mean, if you got something that's really whacked...

Speaker 1:
[15:49] Not true. Not, yeah.

Speaker 3:
[15:51] No, that shouldn't be true.

Speaker 1:
[15:52] Statistically true, but not necessarily because when the...

Speaker 2:
[15:55] Okay.

Speaker 1:
[15:56] So, when the tuner manufacturer makes a tuner, they decide how wide the range is. So, you can make a narrow or broad man tuner, either electronic, switched or manual. So, it just depends on the tuner. So, like, if you look in the automatic tuners, for instance, the LDG tuners are very wide range. The Elecraft tuners are very wide range. Those are, you know, for the most part, just as good as any manual wide range tuner. So... Go ahead, Mark.

Speaker 3:
[16:28] I was gonna say, the width has more to do, like, the 3 to 1 versus 10 to 1 or whatever, has more to do with cost, because you need to have a wider range on your variable capacitor, or in the case of a switch capacitor, you need to add more relays and more capacitors on the outside edge to be able to put a larger total capacitance into the circuit.

Speaker 2:
[16:50] Okay, I sit corrected.

Speaker 3:
[16:52] Yeah. Yeah, you do.

Speaker 1:
[16:56] So if nothing else, we have a lot of opinions. And an odd fact will get in the mix at some point too. Yeah, so very cool. So yeah, I mean, the punchline is that that's actually a really decent tuner. And I think you're very happy with that.

Speaker 5:
[17:09] Yeah, I'm really excited to start playing with. I just picked it up. I have not got it plugged in yet. So I'm really excited to start playing with it. And it has, of course, the really cool backlit SWR meter on it. And I just love having those running in the shack.

Speaker 3:
[17:22] The two different needles.

Speaker 5:
[17:23] Extra points.

Speaker 6:
[17:23] The two needles.

Speaker 5:
[17:24] Yep, exactly. Extra points for that.

Speaker 1:
[17:27] That was a really nice feature. There's a lot of tuners that have meters. There's often a switch, show me forward, show me reflected, and you're flipping back and forth. The dual meter is very cool because you'll see them move at the same time to get exactly what you want.

Speaker 5:
[17:44] Yeah, I've used the dual needle. I've got one of the dual needle, just the actual meters over there on the shelf behind me. That's just the meter, the MFJ meter with nothing else. But having it built into the tuner is really, really handy.

Speaker 6:
[18:02] Yeah, as you tune, you'll really appreciate that because visually, you'll just get really good at saying, when you watch the meter do a certain thing, you're like, yep, I've got it now, you'll nail it.

Speaker 1:
[18:11] And when you get old and lazy, you'll buy an automatic tuner. So that'll be in your future.

Speaker 5:
[18:18] Yeah, I do a lot of field operations, and almost a year ago, I passed up an insanely good deal on one of the little Ellicraft field tuners. Man, I can't even get myself over that one. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[18:33] You know, the other thing about that tuner for portable use, even though it's kind of biggish, the cool thing is it takes no power. It's completely passive. So you don't need to power it, or bring a cable or whatever, unlike an electronic autotuner where you have to make sure you get a 12-volt cable and a battery.

Speaker 3:
[18:52] It has a 12-volt port on it, but it's literally just the light on the meter.

Speaker 5:
[18:56] Yep, yep, that's right. Yep, that's right.

Speaker 1:
[18:59] Very good.

Speaker 5:
[18:59] Absolutely.

Speaker 1:
[19:00] What else you got on the bench?

Speaker 5:
[19:01] We have, I recently, I was enabled by Thomas and a couple of one or two Californian hams.

Speaker 2:
[19:11] You're welcome.

Speaker 5:
[19:11] And purchased a KH1. I know, I know.

Speaker 2:
[19:15] Yes.

Speaker 5:
[19:16] You know, I listened to George hate on it a little bit, but it did not deter me. So I am now the very, very excited owner of a KH1. And Ham, who sold it on the forums, actually threw in several extra accessories. So I've got the capacitive touch paddle with it. So that's really cool.

Speaker 6:
[19:37] 26 ARKs probably, yeah.

Speaker 5:
[19:39] I believe so, yes. And he also threw in the 40 meter coil and yeah, just some really cool pieces of kit. So I'm extraordinarily excited. This is my favorite radio. This is my favorite radio. I even had a Ham loan me a KX2 and I cannot put this thing down. This KH1 is awesome.

Speaker 2:
[20:01] George doesn't hate on it as much now, since he got his dollars per QSO factor under the limit.

Speaker 5:
[20:08] Yeah. Okay.

Speaker 1:
[20:09] I broke a hundred bucks of contact. So we're now down about $84 a contact.

Speaker 5:
[20:13] Oh nice. Wow.

Speaker 2:
[20:15] Yeah.

Speaker 5:
[20:15] Wow.

Speaker 2:
[20:16] Yeah.

Speaker 5:
[20:16] Now just wait till you start paying for Pota Platinum. No, I'm kidding.

Speaker 3:
[20:23] This is the first post-April 1st episode.

Speaker 5:
[20:26] There were way too many people who took that seriously.

Speaker 2:
[20:29] I can't believe how many people took that seriously.

Speaker 1:
[20:32] Okay.

Speaker 3:
[20:32] That's hilarious.

Speaker 1:
[20:33] So, so before we go any further, since you brought it up Andy, describe what that was.

Speaker 5:
[20:38] Okay. So Pota Platinum on, on, on April 1st, of course there's the general round of, of videos going around of all the April Fools pranks. Pota actually posted, I believe it was, it was from them, it was a source from them, wasn't it? I believe so. They posted on Facebook, a Pota Platinum service, where they were going to start including crowdsourced parks, and you could use local parks, whatever park you want to, you just submit your park and you know, and then you start paying per QSO. So they announced this whole service and had a whole website built around, like a fully functioning website, except whenever you click on the subscribe button, it sends you to an April Fool's page that told you donations are always welcome. So I was like laughing about this, then K8MRD posted a video on it, which you know, his last year, his video was that he learned CW. That one was hilarious when you watched the bottom quarter and his cat's tail was like jerking in the same motion every few seconds because he was using the same dit and da clips and just pasted them together. So that was hilarious. But he posted this POTA Platinum video just like, you know, he was in on the joke, obviously, but he was pushing this new platform. And a bunch of people saw the post from POTA and the video from K8MRD. And I mean, it was hilarious. There were so many people who were like, there was a ton of people who were like, what on earth is POTA doing? There were some haters, but really just a very, very confused bunch of Ham Radio operators as a whole.

Speaker 3:
[22:22] They've got a full domain for it, potaplotnum.com. It's there, it's its own little stand-alone web page. My favorite of the things was for $50 a year, you could convert your property into a park. Take my money. And it's called the backyard park, take my money.

Speaker 5:
[22:38] Yes. Well, well, I will, I'm going to.

Speaker 3:
[22:42] Oh, excuse me. And there was a $99.99 two-fer upgrade. So for $150, you could turn your backyard into a two-fer.

Speaker 2:
[22:50] Into a two-fer.

Speaker 5:
[22:51] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[22:51] I'm totally into that.

Speaker 5:
[22:53] Thomas, remind me when we get in the main part of the show, we do have some local parks things in the works at World Radio League. So just remind me when we get to the show, it could be really awesome. So I will. Yeah. But anyway, yes.

Speaker 6:
[23:07] Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[23:08] Back to the one more thing about parks on their podo platinum, the web page, they have it spelled P-A-R-K dollar sign on the air.

Speaker 6:
[23:18] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[23:19] This should have been hilarious. Like this.

Speaker 5:
[23:23] It was so obvious. It was hilarious.

Speaker 3:
[23:25] But about April Fools, I call it asshole's Christmas because it is the day of the year where people feel that it's okay to just lie. And just lying is not cool.

Speaker 5:
[23:40] Not cool.

Speaker 3:
[23:41] You've got to do something clever. And more importantly, obviously not true. Right? Because there are otherwise, you're going to be too many people who look at a thing and think that it's real. And then you're just pissing in the truth stream. And it's, that is not cool. So you've got to do something that is clever, like Parks on the Air Platinum. And obviously not true. And that's where you stick your tongue in your cheek and things like P-A-R-K dollar sign.

Speaker 5:
[24:11] It was brilliant. It was a brilliant joke that it was funny because there were so many jokes. And this was like the most obvious one of the day. And there were so many people who fell for it.

Speaker 6:
[24:21] I want to say two other mentions. Our friend Aura, N6ARA, you've got to look at his April 1st one. He had a retro rig, which is absolutely freaking hilarious.

Speaker 5:
[24:31] I didn't see the one here. That's incredible.

Speaker 6:
[24:33] Oh my goodness. It is so funny. And and also Tim in 7KOM.

Speaker 4:
[24:39] In 7KOM had the big knob for the KX2.

Speaker 6:
[24:43] He had the mega knob for the KX2.

Speaker 5:
[24:45] It was so funny. I remember the the Soda phone last year from was it Aura that did that one? I believe Aura did that one.

Speaker 6:
[24:54] He did it.

Speaker 5:
[24:55] That was that was incredible. That was brilliant.

Speaker 3:
[24:57] And then two years ago was the Mega Paddle. His little tiny paddles were 3D printed and they're this big. Yeah, did a huge one. And then he actually went to a summit and operated on it. Yeah, for the video. Yeah, that one was good.

Speaker 5:
[25:14] I'll hold it up really close to the microphone for the listeners too here. But yeah, here's one of his tiny paddles.

Speaker 6:
[25:20] The tiny paddle, yeah.

Speaker 5:
[25:21] They're pretty cool. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[25:22] I gotta tell you, I fell for the Pota thing. I was watching Mike's video. I always watch Mike's videos. And I'm about 10 minutes into it thinking, that's about time that they're broadening this thing out to more parks. And then I realized, wait a minute, this is not, I think he got into like the pricing or something like that. And it's like, I think this is April Fools. So he had me for like 10 minutes.

Speaker 3:
[25:43] Yeah.

Speaker 5:
[25:46] George is over there going, something is a myth.

Speaker 1:
[25:48] Yeah, it's like, dog gone, the old man rant. Because it's like, if you're in a place where there's no Pota park convenient, then it's like a pain, right? And so there's been a lot of chatter amongst people about like, well, maybe there should be like some other thing where it's more relaxed. And then here comes this thing. And I thought, oh, well, the Pota guys got it. You know, and like, well, no, actually.

Speaker 5:
[26:09] Yeah, absolutely. But anyway, so let's see here. We've got the Pota Platinum because we were talking about dollars per QSO because we were talking about the KH1. So back to the KH1. OK. It is absolutely my my go-to radio for for Pota Activations. Now, I absolutely love it. Thank you. Thank you, Thomas, for for enabling me. Yes, thank you.

Speaker 3:
[26:33] It's CW.

Speaker 5:
[26:34] Yes, it is CW only. You can listen to to other signals, but you know, you can only, you know, it's it's only CW for sending.

Speaker 6:
[26:42] It is a glorious machine.

Speaker 5:
[26:44] It is absolutely. Now, oddly enough, I had a really weird issue with the paddle. Almost I don't know if you've experienced this. I'm thinking about buying one of KM4CF, KM4CF, yes, KM4CFT's paddles for the KH1. I would love to hear your feedback on that. But the paddle, the original paddle, for some reason, one of the switches, there's like a little gray switch and a little black switch. One of them broke apparently.

Speaker 6:
[27:09] Yeah.

Speaker 5:
[27:10] Inside.

Speaker 6:
[27:11] I wonder if it was when they had an issue with the first batch of those because of some kind of coding on the board that went on after they had the microswitches on and Ellicraft replaced all of those for the people that, you know, wrote in or whatever. They just automatically replaced them. You may want to touch base with them and ask them about that. How many set screws does that paddle have in it? Is it two, four or six?

Speaker 5:
[27:37] Let's see here. This one has.

Speaker 6:
[27:39] Because that will indicate how young it is.

Speaker 5:
[27:42] I've seen six set screws, I believe.

Speaker 6:
[27:45] Okay. So it's a later one. It's a later one. So it could just be just a microswitch failure there. But there are a lot, I mean, besides, I mean, I told, I remember telling Wayne early on, I said, you realize, right, that the moment this thing's released, there are going to be like a whole bunch of other paddles that people are making for this radio. And there was one, K6ARK made his before he even touched one. He actually had me send some of the like measurements to confirm things. And he made that pressure paddle. The pressure paddle works really well. It can be, because it's a pressure paddle, can be a little flaky sometimes.

Speaker 5:
[28:21] Yeah. I've experienced, it's really good moments and a couple really bad moments with it. So yeah.

Speaker 6:
[28:26] And I haven't used it. I'm trying to remember if I've ever used it in like super cold temperatures. And I don't think I have. I think I've used it in warmer weather. Because you can't use gloves with it, obviously. The KM4CFT made a KH1 paddle very early on. It's good. I think it's a really good one, too, if you have the radio in desktop mode, where it's just sitting on a like on a table. It sits up a little bit more. It's a little more prominent, which means that when you're holding it, it's a little further out from the radio, which some people may like or some people may not like. There's a fellow, and his call sign is Cape Smear, and I'm sorry if you're listening, who made a 3D printed block that you can print, and you can get one of Aura's tiny paddles, and the block makes it fit in there really nicely in the KH1. So you can use one of your tiny paddles in the KH1.

Speaker 5:
[29:20] Oh, very nice.

Speaker 6:
[29:21] There are like two other models of, just recently people have reached out with other designs. In fact, I'm frantically now trying to look to see if I can find a couple of these here in my pack, but there are other designs that people have made that are really cool. Actually, I'll hold it up to the microphone. This is the little block, the block one with the tiny paddle.

Speaker 5:
[29:46] Yeah, yeah, that's really cool.

Speaker 6:
[29:49] So that's easy. You can print it yourself and you just put your tiny paddle in there.

Speaker 5:
[29:52] Yeah. Another guy, and again, I love having the tiny paddle in a pinch because it's just, it can go anywhere, but I wouldn't want to dedicate it necessarily to my KH1, but for in a pinch, absolutely, that's really cool.

Speaker 6:
[30:06] And this is the KM4CFT paddle for the KH1. I'm holding it up to the microphone.

Speaker 5:
[30:13] Yeah, it looks basically like a, the paddles are like basically miniature versions of the KM4CFT paddle, the big one, the really nice, which has great action, by the way. I love that paddle, but it's got, it's got the conversion for the KH1.

Speaker 6:
[30:29] That's correct. Yeah. And this is one that someone's designed, I don't think they're going to sell it. I think they're going to have the designs out. And it actually is kind of inspired by the BamaTech TP3, which is a really nice design. And so they made a 3D printed paddle and it works really, really well. I've yet to produce a video. I've used this in the field, but haven't produced a video. I didn't have my camera with me the day I did that.

Speaker 5:
[30:52] That's awesome. I want to, I want to, I want to, yeah. If it's, is that, is that like public information, who that is or is that?

Speaker 6:
[30:58] I'll try to find it and put it in the show notes.

Speaker 5:
[31:01] Okay.

Speaker 6:
[31:01] Awesome. I'll try to put all these in the show notes.

Speaker 5:
[31:03] Awesome. I'm also, I'm also good, becoming good friends with a ham by the name of Zeus, K8CES, Thomas, I think you're a great guy. He is actually, from what I can, from what I've heard, he's considering maybe trying to design one. He designs an awesome paddle. I'm going to talk about that in just a few minutes, but he designs an awesome paddle and I, he's, he's thinking about designing one for the KH1. So I would love to see that come out because he, he designs a great paddle.

Speaker 6:
[31:30] I will love his little paddle.

Speaker 5:
[31:32] Yes, I will share pictures shortly. So yeah, that's what's up with the KH1. I've also been putting together all sorts of go kits lately. So I went on a trip and I'm like, you know what? I want to take my KH1. So I throw the KH1 and you know, well, I mean, you know, it's going to be a trip. So I might as well take the X6100 and oh yeah, I've also got the, the, the mountain topper MTR4B. So yeah, I, I, I threw a bunch of them in the car.

Speaker 4:
[32:04] Did you hide them like in the spare tire holder in the trunk like Thomas does?

Speaker 5:
[32:09] My wife is a wonderful and beautiful blessing and she is just perfectly fine with me bringing radios along.

Speaker 6:
[32:16] So yeah, mine is too, but I'm supposed to limit the number and I just found that that space underneath the floor of the trunk where the spare tire is. So if you ever have to use the spare tire, you're like going to be pulling out a bunch of radios and stuff, aren't you?

Speaker 5:
[32:31] That's right, that's the extra key.

Speaker 4:
[32:32] I'm incrementing the rat hole counter. Thomas, you just said a magic word, radio and number. What is that number?

Speaker 6:
[32:41] Radio number? Oh, radio number. Thomas, radio number, question.

Speaker 2:
[32:47] Question.

Speaker 6:
[32:48] Let's see. Sorry, we're going to have Project Hail Mary references all in the show. It is going to be required viewing and reading for everyone.

Speaker 2:
[32:57] We apologize ahead of time.

Speaker 5:
[32:59] Yes, not viewed or read yet. So my apologies if a blank look crosses my face each time you all laugh at some obscure reference.

Speaker 6:
[33:08] OK, well, the so Vince is somewhere north of five or six, I'm pretty sure. And south of south of a hundred, maybe maybe keyword. Maybe let me count for a second.

Speaker 5:
[33:22] Yeah. So anyway, I've got the I've got the hard case here with the X6100. I don't know if you can see that.

Speaker 6:
[33:29] Very nice.

Speaker 5:
[33:30] Just just a little hard case. Most of my gear lives in. I just took it out to show you, but this is my favorite pack. This is a it came from a store called Shields. It's an it's a really, really nice store. This is a RedRock outdoor gear bag, and it is an awesome sling bag for Pota gear. It is just it's awesome. I really like it. It's not it's not like it's like really good and premium, but it's not like Thomas premium. I mean, you know, it's not like we're not. We're all like crossing through. I don't think we're crossing three digits.

Speaker 2:
[34:11] So it's between Tom bin and Ziploc.

Speaker 5:
[34:15] Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[34:17] Welcome to Bag Talk, a wholly on subsidiary.

Speaker 5:
[34:22] And then I keep my I keep my mountain topper in in this this little pouch here with with a key and some very nice. I've been learning slowly how to assemble a bag. And, you know, I always like to keep my eye out for some really nice bags. We've got the more overlanding expo coming up. And that's sometimes a pretty cool place to find some find some really cool go kit bags.

Speaker 6:
[34:50] So, yeah, when when you're there, look up Blue Ridge Outdoor Gear.

Speaker 5:
[34:54] I hope they're there this year. They were not there last year, but I hope they make it this year. I think they were there maybe the year before, but they didn't make it last year for some reason. But anyway, yeah, I've been working on those lately and, you know, tidying them up and getting them, you know, coming home and making sure I stick that one cable I forgot in the pouch where I'll remember it next time. And, you know, all that good stuff. So I'm in that phase of... I've been iterating through what radios I use, but I think I'm going to be sitting with the KH1 for a while now. So it was the Mountaintopper until... The Mountaintopper is an awesome radio. Nothing wrong with Mountaintopper, but the KH1 is just... Just, oh, it's incredible. So...

Speaker 2:
[35:38] I have never forgotten the cable at home ever.

Speaker 5:
[35:41] Yeah, of course not.

Speaker 3:
[35:41] Yeah, of course not.

Speaker 5:
[35:43] Never. But yeah, so I've been, yeah, very, very excited about my Go Kits because I love going and doing poda activations. Like George read there in the intro, I just crossed my first kilo. That was really, really fun.

Speaker 6:
[35:59] Congratulations.

Speaker 5:
[36:00] And thank you.

Speaker 3:
[36:01] For us noobs who don't know what that is, what does the kilo mean?

Speaker 5:
[36:05] A kilo means you made 1000 contacts from any single park.

Speaker 3:
[36:10] Any single park?

Speaker 5:
[36:11] Not in a day. This is over time. Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[36:14] Okay. Wow.

Speaker 4:
[36:17] I mean, it could be in a day. It could be in a day, but it doesn't have to be.

Speaker 2:
[36:19] If you have a really good propagation or you're Thomas.

Speaker 4:
[36:22] Oh, you know what? No, there was a time a few years ago on World Radio Day that I went out and I activated his V6 RAC and I was doing that to improve my CW skills. And I was down the road at a place and I was there for, oh, I don't know, 11 hours out of the 24, because you know, a guy's got to sleep and work. And I logged 400 contacts in that time. Oh, you know, if conditions are good and you can go the 24 hours, there's no reason why you can't knock off a thousand in a day. Oh, yeah, you know, it wouldn't be simple, but it can be done.

Speaker 5:
[37:02] Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, getting the kilo, it took me a while, but it was so fun. There was a mix of CW and voice, but lately I've been doing almost all CW. I did put a portable radio in my car for a while and made a few contacts with that recently. Then I sold that car or traded it in and I don't have a new HF radio installed mobile yet. So I'm back to CW only, but I love that. So because I am just absolutely loving the CW mode. So yeah, anyway, like Ham attempted to enable me to buy the KX2, but I tried it for a while. Absolutely love it. It's a brilliant radio. If I had the money, I would probably buy one. But there was no way I was going to just pick that over the KH1. The KH1 is just too fun of a radio.

Speaker 2:
[38:01] So why one or the other?

Speaker 5:
[38:03] Well, like I said, I started with the fact that if I had the money, I would buy one. But yeah, not worth trading.

Speaker 3:
[38:12] Because he's not making big Ham Radio Workbench money yet.

Speaker 5:
[38:16] Oh, by the way, how much are you guys paying me to do this? No, I'm kidding. I hope it's twice what you paid the last guest.

Speaker 4:
[38:23] You have that business relationship inverted, I'm afraid.

Speaker 5:
[38:27] Yeah. I was going to say, I hope you pay me twice what you paid the last guest. I'm sure that'll be the case.

Speaker 4:
[38:32] I know. We'll send you an invoice. Don't worry.

Speaker 1:
[38:35] Yeah. All right. Well, Andy, it sounds like you have a thing or two. Anything else left on the bench?

Speaker 5:
[38:41] Yes, absolutely. What would that be? Ten minutes, huh? Not to bore you.

Speaker 4:
[38:48] Except for the guest.

Speaker 5:
[38:49] This is one of the really fun things I've been working on. So I didn't want to put this down in the rest of the show because it's kind of an in-development, in-progress thing, but we're reaching out to get some feedback on it. It's a new tool called morrisemastery.com. It's pre-beta. It's probably pre-alpha at this point. We're just literally developing and iterating through on it. I'm kind of point man on that right now. It is a Morse code teaching app. I learned a lot from the guys over at Long Island CW Club, awesome people. And I was kind of pulled a lot of inspiration from them on this. And so morrisemastery.com, I'm literally in the process of integrating, where is it? Here we go. Right now you can use your keyboard or a touchscreen to send Morse code or an audio input. And I'm currently in the process, I was working on this before we hopped on the call here, the V-Band adapter, it's just a little adapter where you can send Morse code from a paddle or a straight key into your computer. I was working on the CW Morse MX key serial adapter as well, similar thing. And I'm wanting, and maybe Mark, maybe you can throw a little bit of insight at me on this one. I grabbed the Hallekey serial, should I have gone with the MIDI?

Speaker 3:
[40:23] Well, it depends. What are you hooking it up to, your phone?

Speaker 5:
[40:27] It'll be to a computer or a phone, either one.

Speaker 3:
[40:30] Okay. And you're writing the software on the other, on the computer side, then go with MIDI.

Speaker 5:
[40:36] With MIDI? Okay.

Speaker 3:
[40:37] Yeah. Because MIDI will work in mobile phones. If you're an iOS developer, iOS does not give you API access to a serial port connected to a USB port.

Speaker 5:
[40:49] Sounds good. Well, sounds like maybe I need to trade or just place a new order or something with you. So let me know.

Speaker 3:
[40:57] We can make it happen. We'll cover Halla Key when we get to my, what's on your workbench.

Speaker 5:
[41:01] Cool. Okay. So yeah, that's the, that's the next adapter in the lineup is the, is the Halla Key. So really excited about that one. And so yeah, Morse Mastery has been a ton of fun. I've been trying, you know, I've, I've, I've got tons of keys just sitting around me. I love this particular Puedekeeg paddle here. It's the, they don't, they don't really put models on them, but this is just a brilliant key. This is an awesome key for nuts.

Speaker 6:
[41:34] Like a heavy base.

Speaker 5:
[41:35] Expensive. Yeah. It's, it's not as heavy as, you know, probably a lot of more premium options, but it is, it is a very solid key and I love it. It's, it's better than the round Pudekeeg paddle, like the round bodied Pudekeeg paddle. It's a bigger, more square paddle and has, has magnetic opposing magnets as the action on it. And you can adjust it's adjustable magnets because it's threaded. And so it's, it's, it's really, really, really cool. And so you like thread one magnet either closer or farther away from the other one, kind of like a nut on a bolt. And it's, it's just really awesome. There's a whole bunch of different adjustments you can make on it. And it's a really fun paddle to use. So I've been using that one primarily. I also, of course, have a straight key on the desk and I've been wanting to get a bug soon, but I don't have that. But in the process of developing this Morse Mastery app, my boss, James N0WRL, fantastic guy, and just the greatest boss, because he said, Hey, Andy, I want the whole team to do a CW challenge. Not all of our team members, mind you, or even Ham Radio Operators. We've got some professional developers on the team. We've got some professional video editors, a graphic designer, people who aren't even Ham Radio Operators, or Ham Radio Operators from other countries, or he said, I want the whole team to do a CW challenge. So just pick a key, any key, and just order it for everybody. So yeah, absolutely. Let's go with one I don't have yet. So I reached out to my friend, Zeus, K-A-C-E-S, and I'm going to share this picture with you right quick. If I can pull it up here. So Zeus kindly put together, can you see that okay? Yeah, so Zeus kindly put together 13 CW keys for us. There is that image and then the other image. This is them all assembled. And he was running out of the green. I was going to have him do them all in the tan and green, but he was running out of the green. So he just did mine in that color. But yeah, it's really awesome guy, really incredible and helped us out and just put him together extraordinarily fast. So, Zeus is awesome. Yeah, he's a great guy. He's just a great guy. But yeah, I've played with one of those keys, a ham, one of my, one of my EllaCraft enablers from California sent me one to try and it is just a brilliant key. So Thomas, I don't know if you're part of the of Forrest's CW Order Discord, CWO Discord. No, he offers that to members of his, of his YouTube channel. But yeah, they, he hang, Zeus hangs out in there a lot and some other great ham enablers in that community. So that's, that's where I, that's where I found out about Zeus. So and I forgot to show, I was going to share the screen here. George, do you mind if I share the Morse Mastery screen?

Speaker 1:
[44:46] No, go right ahead.

Speaker 5:
[44:47] Yeah, so. Let me. Pull it up here. Oh, where is it?

Speaker 4:
[45:01] No pressure, but to to to do.

Speaker 6:
[45:03] Yeah, I was going to say, Vince, Vince will describe the screen when it comes up to do. He's our describer.

Speaker 5:
[45:10] I have it pulled up. It's not wanting to hear. Oh, let me let me hit this button again.

Speaker 1:
[45:15] Do just hit them all.

Speaker 6:
[45:16] Do do do do do do.

Speaker 5:
[45:18] Yes, indeed.

Speaker 6:
[45:21] Um, yeah, here we go.

Speaker 5:
[45:23] OK, share. Boom. OK, can you see that? All right.

Speaker 6:
[45:27] Yeah.

Speaker 5:
[45:28] So this is Morris Mastery. I've been told that some more. How should we say more experienced Ham Radio operators like dark mode a little bit better. So maybe that will maybe that will help for.

Speaker 6:
[45:41] I must be experienced. Seasoned.

Speaker 5:
[45:45] Seasoned. There we go.

Speaker 4:
[45:46] Well, seasoned with the Easter eggs hidden in this website, where if you change between light mode and dark mode at a rate of more than two times per second, it invokes rave mode.

Speaker 5:
[46:00] That was very specific, but no, not yet. All right. That was very specific. I want to know more. But yeah, so let me pull it over here so I can see it in front of me while I'm looking at the camera and describing it. So this is our Morse Mastery website. It's just a web app right now. We are going to be working on a mobile app, but this works in mobile. It's designed to work in mobile mode as a website as well. So you've got just your course elements, modules, we call them, and you walk through, you learn your first characters, you know, R, E, A, and you hear them. You just hear them all out in step one. You just hear them all out. That's all you do. You hear, it's literally my voice saying R, didodit, and then the CW tone didodit, and then E, dit, and then the CW tone dit, and it just walked through every one of those characters. And then you hear those characters as the CW, and you try to copy them down. Then you go on to the next step, which is sending. We jump right straight into sending right off. So you hear me saying R, didodit. Then you have to send that didodit back with your key. So that's the first set of letters. Then we do some more like tightening up the Farnsworth, sending and all that as we go here. By the time you're done with all eight steps in objective one, you should have mastered the letters R, E and A. Then you move on to your next letters, T, I and N. Then PSG and all of them follow the same method, LCD, then HOF. Then we pause, we review all the letters you've learned up to that point and we have you copy them and send them all. What is it? I think it's like a five-minute sequence of copying and sending all those letters. Then you move on to the rest of your letters, some symbols. We have a couple more review steps. Then that's all of module one, is just learning all those and getting to know them and familiarizing yourself with them. Module two, that's when you start learning some character groups. This is where we're working on the course basics right now, is on this module two. I think the first three objectives are pretty solid, and we need to do some more work on the rest of them here. But this is where we're open for feedback. I want to hear, if any of y'all have any feedback, if y'all want to go try it and just let me know, I would love to hear feedback from you. We have a couple of practice modes, or you can just practice receiving, sending, head copy, that type of thing here. Then we're introducing some CW games as well, some challenges that are going to be really cool. Like we have a daily challenge for everybody, and then we have some group challenges. The idea is where you'll be able to get on and send Morse code back and forth through this app eventually, practice that way.

Speaker 6:
[49:25] Sudden Death ProSigns.

Speaker 5:
[49:27] Yes.

Speaker 6:
[49:28] I like the sound of that one. I like the sound of that. I was waiting to see if you had something like the Geocache challenge, where they send you the geographic coordinates in CW, and then you got to go find the thing.

Speaker 5:
[49:43] That's a cool idea. Anyway, we're adding more, we're adding these challenges, and we're definitely open to adding more. So if you have any suggestions, Thomas.

Speaker 1:
[49:53] So is this a project that's independent of WRL, or is it sponsored by WRL?

Speaker 5:
[49:58] No, this is part of the, so WRL and Ham Radio Prep are both under the same, they're under the same company. This is our next project, is Morris Mastery. But the idea is, and right now it's totally free, of course you log on, the idea is to leave this free and start building some videos around it, some more explanatory videos, some tips and helpful videos to walk through how to use it and to be a companion to it. And we might turn that into a paid course eventually, which is what we do over at Ham Radio Prep. But the app is just for people to go and learn CW. You can really, my personal belief is that you could walk through module one and know how to go hunt podestations and maybe even activate in a very short amount of time. But I want to hear some people actually prove that for me. So, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so that's kind of what I've been, it's kind of part work, but also workbench because the other like Ham Radio Prep and World Radio League are very much, you know, we've got roadmaps and software teams on this stuff and they're hammering it out. This one, James basically threw it at me and said, hey, do whatever you want to with this for a while. We're busy with other stuff, build this. And so I've been having so much fun working on this. And I must say, some of the, in the past, probably four to six months, some of the AI development tools have gotten so good. So I know, you know, I know people always hate on them, but they have gotten really good. So that has been a huge boost in helping develop this fast.

Speaker 1:
[51:52] This is really, really, really cool. I get a kind of real kick out of how much interest there is in CW. And what really, what is really great is a guy like yourself. So, you know, under the age of retirement, good.

Speaker 5:
[52:08] People are shocked when I tell them how old I actually am. I just turned 23.

Speaker 1:
[52:13] Oh my God. You know, so it's, it's real. My point is, it's really cool that there's people who can bring technical skills to the hobby to reinforce doing stuff that like operating CW that is really amazing. So that's just so exciting to see that. So I love, I love seeing all this activity.

Speaker 5:
[52:32] Absolutely. And I mean, that's, that's the goal, right? I mean, CW is, I, my personal feeling is CW is becoming so widely accepted and, and people are having so much fun because it's not a requirement anymore. They don't have to, so they want to, you know, it's, it's, I think, I really think that's the way it is. And I am all for that. I mean, CW is, is an awesome mode. I tease some of my friends over on the Hamshack TV stream by telling them it's the only real Ham Radio mode, but you know, it is, it's really just an incredibly great mode. And I mean, as we're kind of heading back towards solar minimum, I think there's going to be even more people who are going to be getting on CW and, you know, wanting to, wanting to get on five watts and talk around the world, even in the worst of conditions, you know, and it's, it's just so cool.

Speaker 1:
[53:20] So I think that's really converged with the, the availability of incredibly good low-cost, not, well, take it back, not necessarily some low cost, but incredibly good.

Speaker 5:
[53:30] I did just buy a KJ1.

Speaker 1:
[53:31] Well, that's what pulled me back. But, but incredibly good HF radios that you could buy from 50 bucks to a couple grand, right? I mean, they're all over the price spectrum.

Speaker 5:
[53:41] Absolutely.

Speaker 1:
[53:42] But they're all, for their price points, they're all really amazing. And you know, when, when I was a young ham, like cheap or QRP radios were awful, but now they're really good. And so you've got like this desire for people to go out and operate out of doors. Cause you'd want to use it, you know, hey, I like to camp, I like to hike. I like to do whatever and cross that over with, with radio is really cool and there's really good radios. And then the mode that is sort of the most effective is CW. So it makes total sense that, you know, there'd be a desire there. But what, what amazes me is it's not just that people go, yeah, that'd be great. It's that they actually do it.

Speaker 5:
[54:19] And so there are so many people right now. It's crazy to see how many people are really getting into it. And speaking of, you know, keep radios, I'm really excited to see, you know what Mike and Becky are doing with the Pebble HF. That is so awesome. I want to get my hands on one of those really bad. It's such, such a cool, such a cool radio. And I, you know, I want to try one out.

Speaker 2:
[54:43] When George was a young ham, QRP just meant smaller sparks.

Speaker 3:
[54:50] You mentioned an HF radio that I've never heard of. So of course Thomas has one to hold up to the camera.

Speaker 5:
[54:56] Thomas, what do you think of it?

Speaker 6:
[54:57] Oh, it's wonderful. It's, you know, it's like a true SDX or something.

Speaker 1:
[55:01] What is it, Thomas?

Speaker 6:
[55:03] This is a sort of a, it was built on the USDX or micro SDX, is the way I want to say it. But it's based on that platform. And I guess you could say the true SDX in that it's like a little 8-bit processor that's doing a whole lot of work. And it's a 20 meter radio that is all mode that they, that Mike and Becky, the Ham Radio Duo, who will be speaking with at some point about this actually, they developed this with a software developer named Barb. And then it was based on some code by, I can't think of the other fellow's name. But anyway, it's a really amazing radio. And the cool thing about it is it's built around being cheap. So they wanted this to be $50 or less. And so it has a built-in microphone on it, and it has a built-in straight key. That is also the PTT switch. And the really cool thing about it is it's available as a kit. And it's only like 14 components to put together, a couple of toroids, wine, very easy ones. So you can put it together, there's no alignment. Boom, you're on the air. And I had this on the air with almost no time after really putting the thing together. So it's really cool.

Speaker 1:
[56:15] And what's it called?

Speaker 6:
[56:16] It's called the Pebble HF. And it's not available quite yet. They're trying to get together. It's the first big group buy of it. And early supporters pay basically double what the radio is going to cost. They're paying $100. I mean, $100 for a radio. And that's kind of to pay it forward a little bit so they can get the cost down to $50.

Speaker 5:
[56:38] Very cool. Very cool. Yeah. So that is basically all. Oh yeah. One more thing. So I just a few weeks ago, I ordered one of the modern Morris Nameless Paddles. I have not gotten that one in hand yet, but I was just listening to you guys talk to Aaron the other day. And I'm really excited to get one of those in hand. So it's cool. Yeah. Yeah. I'm very excited. So, and to all of the folks who will listen or watch this show, who also watch the World Radio League show. I know it sounds like I am a smoker and smoked all day. That is not what happened. I caught a cold over Easter Sunday. So we are recording this the week after Easter Sunday. So my apologies to everyone that my voice doesn't sound quite normal, but I just wanted to throw that clarification out there. George, thank you for letting me take up the first hour of the show, just talking about my workbench. And I will let you proceed with the rest of your workbenches as well.

Speaker 1:
[57:41] Thank you, Andy, you know, we appreciate that. I mean, you're working on lots of cool stuff. So it's, you know, it's great that you can share with us. So we're grateful for that. So, and because Andy went so long, everybody else has to go along too. I just want to lay that out. All right.

Speaker 3:
[57:56] Works for me.

Speaker 1:
[57:57] I was afraid of that. Okay. So with that in mind, Mark, why don't you go first?

Speaker 3:
[58:03] So ironically, I actually don't have a lot. So we'll do this quickly. Where is the thing? There we go. So it's been several episodes since I've been on the show. And some of that has been just business travel and kind of last episode, I was planning on being on the show, but when the day came, I just, I got hit upside the head with a don't wanna stick and ended up going back to bed for several hours and just sleeping. Not don't wanna do the show, don't wanna do anything. And so, yeah, anyway, I feel bad for not making it to the show more often. I really missed it. I missed you guys.

Speaker 2:
[58:43] So I was starting to get a complex that it was the shows that I was on.

Speaker 3:
[58:47] Yeah, no, well, you're on all of our shows now or most of our shows now.

Speaker 6:
[58:50] Just FYI, HR said that you've used up all your sick days now. So, okay.

Speaker 3:
[58:55] That's right. Yeah, that's true. So anyway, I've missed you guys. That was kind of the first thing I wanted to say. During this time, I have been working a lot. I've been very heads down, turning off notifications, trying to get stuff done. Some of which I can talk about, a lot of which I can't or I'm not going to. I've been doing a consulting gig, which is good because that brings in more dollars per hour than Halibut Electronics does at this point. And having a lot of good fun with that one. So I'm pretty sure the guy I'm working for is a listener. And if so, hello, you know who you are. And I've been doing a lot of Halibut Electronics product development work as well. And I have learned my lesson. I am not going to be talking about that on the air. So you'll hear about it when I get closer to being able to release some of that stuff. But I've got some cool stuff coming up. Yay. I've also been working on training a new employee. His name is Daniel, very cool kid. And he has been plowing through a bunch of assembly stuff. So I've got a few hundred kits of common mode current choke test rig kits in bags ready to ship out the door. We've also got some the pre-made assembled ones and various things like that. I have been going through and making several hundred Halleke middies. So we were talking about Halleke. Those on the video, this entire box is full of assembled and programmed Halleke middies. And this isn't even all of them.

Speaker 5:
[60:35] That's cool.

Speaker 3:
[60:36] So yeah, I've got a couple hundred of these here.

Speaker 4:
[60:40] I love my Halleke middy.

Speaker 5:
[60:42] I'm going to have to snag a middy.

Speaker 3:
[60:44] Yeah, you get the idea.

Speaker 5:
[60:48] So Mark, just real quick back to your first point there. I mean, it's new product development work. Mark, we want to know. I mean, you can trust us. Don't you want to tell us so we can create a bunch of scope creep for you?

Speaker 3:
[61:01] Well, scope creep is actually the least of my concerns. The lesson I learned is talking about a product before I was ready to start selling it and then not making it to market. That's still a sore subject. But I'm saying, hang on. So for those maybe new listeners, this was actually the first product that I developed for Halibut Electronics. It's called Satellite Optimized Amateur Radio. It was an appliance for operating FM satellites. And I got it to this stage. I mean, like the software was three quarters written. I never actually finished the software, but I ran into a problem with some of the hardware that I was using. A third party RF module that was not operating the way I needed it to operate in the use case that I was using it in. So I had to not go to market with this thing. So anyway, point being that from that, I did not learn any lessons, but several products since then, where I've made the same mistake, I have been trying to learn that lesson. So I have been very actively developing various different things, working with microcontrollers and displays, and all kinds of fun stuff. A lot of firmware work, that kind of thing too.

Speaker 2:
[62:25] So it's the HF Espresso machine, right?

Speaker 3:
[62:29] The HF Espresso machine.

Speaker 5:
[62:30] Oh, don't worry, I'll need that.

Speaker 3:
[62:33] So one of the things that is literally on my workbench, although it has not come out of the box yet, is Paul's QMX. So he'll be talking about this, I assume, but he was waiting for... He's one of the people who wants the product, not the project. And so he just wants to have a working QMX in his hands. And so he paid for assembly, but was on a very long wait list for the assembly. And eventually he just canceled that order, got the kit and sent it to me, and I'm going to go ship it to him, or assemble it and ship it to him. But while doing that, I also got my QMX out. And it has been fully assembled and everything, but I never actually ran it through its calibrations and tests and whatnot. And so I took it out and ran it through all of that. I have made a couple of modifications to this. I talked about it on an earlier show, where I added an extra transistor to the final. You can kind of see it there, maybe. And then there's another one on the other side, because it's a balanced circuit, push-pull circuit. And so I've given it 50% more capacity in its final output stage, which will let me run it on 13.8 volts or 14.2 volts, which is what comes directly out of my batteries. The other thing I did is that I modified mine for left-handed operation. Do you see those four wires right there? It drives me up the wall that the tune is on one side and the volume is on the other side. And the way I use it as a left-handed operator, I want to be tuning with the left knob and use the right knob as volume. But that is backwards from the way a right-handed person uses it.

Speaker 5:
[64:29] Is that a left-handed dummy load that you've installed there?

Speaker 3:
[64:32] Yes, it is for all the left-handed RF current as well.

Speaker 5:
[64:36] Okay, good.

Speaker 3:
[64:37] Yeah. And so I thought about contacting Hans to say, hey, can you just make a software option to switch this back and forth? And I never got around to it. So instead, I just cut the traces on the encoders and moved the left encoder to the right spot and the right encoder to the left spot. The buttons are still in the same position and the pushes on the encoders and the buttons as well are still in the same position. It's just that tuning knob. I wanted the tuning knob on the left.

Speaker 6:
[65:09] I'm disappointed you didn't make the LCD have a mirror display. So it's like the mirror of what it should be.

Speaker 3:
[65:15] No. I am left-handed, not...

Speaker 6:
[65:19] Left-eyed.

Speaker 3:
[65:20] Left-eyed, exactly.

Speaker 4:
[65:21] Wouldn't it have been easier, instead of soldering the wires, and I appreciate that creativity, to just take the radio and operate it upside down on the desk?

Speaker 3:
[65:31] Well, then I would have had to turn the display over like Thomas was talking about.

Speaker 4:
[65:35] No, just put a mirror in front of it or read it upside down. I mean, you spent enough time in sales, you can read upside down.

Speaker 3:
[65:43] I modified it with wires, thank you very much.

Speaker 5:
[65:49] I'm starting to develop this, I don't know if it's a complex or a syndrome or what, but I go out to my workbench and I pull two little tiny surface mount transistors off of my ID5100A and do the Mars mod on it. I'm like, yeah, it works. I just, man, I am a hardware operator now. And then I listen to Mark, so, you know, that's.

Speaker 3:
[66:14] Well, if we're doing that, then here is the dev platform on one of the new product things that I'm working on. Or the USB stuff that's left over from a previous project. But, you know, that was the prototyping hardware.

Speaker 5:
[66:31] Is that an LED I'm seeing there?

Speaker 3:
[66:34] There is an LED in there, yes. OK, so my product is something more than just a blinky light.

Speaker 5:
[66:39] Yeah, yeah. Oh, come on. OK, OK, it's beyond me already.

Speaker 2:
[66:44] If you had the hell of a blinky, I would have bought one.

Speaker 1:
[66:46] That's not me, too.

Speaker 5:
[66:48] Yeah, seriously, the hell of a blinky.

Speaker 2:
[66:49] That's when you do a hell of a blinky.

Speaker 3:
[66:51] I could.

Speaker 1:
[66:52] Sure.

Speaker 4:
[66:52] Can you MIDI enable it?

Speaker 3:
[66:54] MIDI enable it?

Speaker 4:
[66:55] Sure. Why not? Scope creep one.

Speaker 5:
[66:57] Well, if you do the hell of a blinky, then you need you need to have like a like a 15,000 lumen spotlight on it so that you can like send old fashioned Morse visual messages across, you know, like the flash lamps on.

Speaker 3:
[67:13] So how lucky MIDI does have an LED on there. So if you want me to MIDI enable an LED, Hallekey is already there.

Speaker 5:
[67:20] Very nice.

Speaker 3:
[67:21] So this is another dev platform that I'm working on. It's a Teensy with connection to something that takes an FPC 40 pin. So I'll let you guys speculate on what that might be as well. But anyway, those are the dev platforms at my desk. But on my workbench, I talked about the QMX. I also refurbed my MCHF. So the MCHF is an old open source, SDR based HF radio made by a guy named Chris out in the UK. I love that radio. I don't know what it is about that radio, but it's just a joy to use. He's really designed the UI in a way that makes sense to me. All the things that I actually care about are just a few button presses away. There is a menu, but you don't really set anything in the menu. It's all for configuration. When you're operating, everything is right there on the display. But mine had gotten banged up a bunch, although the rubber tops of the buttons underneath had fallen out and were rattling around inside the case, and the display got a little haywonky and whatever else. In preparation for a long drive that I've got coming up, I will be driving to Dayton, Dayton Hamvention. I wanted to get my radios in a working state so that I can just have them in the passenger seat of my car with the antenna mount on the back of the car, and I'll pull over somewhere, get out, put the antenna on the car, get back inside, operate inside from the comfort of the air conditioning. Then when I'm ready to leave again, I can take the antenna off and just pull out and start work and continue driving. I wanted my QMX and the MCHF to be available for that operating. And yeah, that MCHF, man, I really don't know what it was that I...

Speaker 6:
[69:14] It's a good radio.

Speaker 3:
[69:16] I love that radio.

Speaker 1:
[69:18] How much power does it put out?

Speaker 3:
[69:20] If you're giving it the full beans of 14 volts of a battery, it puts out about 10 watts.

Speaker 1:
[69:25] Okay, so it's a reasonable amount of power. Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[69:31] And then the last thing that I have on my list is that George has been pestering me, okay, very politely asking me...

Speaker 1:
[69:38] Which topic?

Speaker 3:
[69:39] What's that?

Speaker 4:
[69:41] How many are there, George?

Speaker 3:
[69:44] Which topic? I don't know. About All-Star Node 55915. He's been trying to get me on 55915. And I have a node and it works, but it has been putting out this horrible tone, about a kilohertz, maybe a little bit lower than a kilohertz. And I'm like, what in the hell is that tone? And it's anytime the radio is transmitting, I get this audio on the receive side. And I didn't know what was causing it. I went through looking through all of the settings, looking for a test tone option that maybe turned on or something like that. Couldn't find anything. And so George and I got on the air together and I keyed up and he mentioned like, oh yeah, you've got that same horrible tone on your transmit audio as well. And I'm like, oh, so it's not just something on the receive side or on my local transmitter side. Okay, so that means that this is probably power supply and it is a switching power supply that is in a rack of computer equipment. So it is very likely that this is power supply noise going through the Raspberry Pi that is hosting it and everything else. So I need to go take that apart and clean up that power supply and give it better, quieter power so that I can actually get on 55915 without it without blood dribbling out my ears.

Speaker 1:
[71:08] Well, that will be great. I'm looking forward to you being on there.

Speaker 3:
[71:12] I won't be able to monitor during the day because I just can't handle that kind of distraction, right? It's like I turn off all of my notifications in the middle of the day and stuff like that.

Speaker 6:
[71:20] It's not that busy, Mark. I've actually been monitoring it.

Speaker 3:
[71:22] That is not true because I've got it on my receiver here just with the volume turned down and that little SWR meter is constantly on.

Speaker 4:
[71:32] We seem to be a little touchy about this, Mark. I'm just saying.

Speaker 3:
[71:36] What was that, Vince?

Speaker 4:
[71:37] We just seem to be a little touchy about this, Mark.

Speaker 3:
[71:43] Anyway, I'm looking forward to being able to get on 55915. Did I keep it to my 10 minutes?

Speaker 1:
[71:52] You're fine.

Speaker 5:
[71:52] How many S units is that, Vince?

Speaker 4:
[71:54] How many? Two. Two.

Speaker 5:
[71:56] OK. All right. That's it.

Speaker 3:
[71:58] That's my workbench.

Speaker 1:
[71:59] Awesome. Very good. Vince, how about you? What's on the bench?

Speaker 4:
[72:04] I've had a fresh batch of more suitors and paddles, committed to stock, and you can find them on the store v6lk.com shop. That's been keeping me a little busy. Traveling a lot for work, trying to do some remote flex access. This past week, I had a heck of a time getting in. So in the past two days, I have been trading notes with Marcus Rokosch and with Mike Walker about why that might be, because my access used to work and all of a sudden, it didn't. Here's a quick story. I learned that sometimes you can't rely on all the public intranets, that we get free Wi-Fi at hotels and coffee shops and McDonald's and wherever else we might be. So there's this little thing called the MTU, the Maximum Transmission Unit in Ethernet. Mark knows all about that. And I had, I had disremembered MTU from my packet capture and packet scanning days. So turning down the MTU turns out to help an awful lot with low bandwidth connections. So that's well, so it opens up the TCP and then it wasn't opening up UDP for me. So it was hanging on the UDP connection.

Speaker 3:
[73:39] Probably because it was sending 15, 40 byte packets. My guess is that wherever your connectivity was, was getting tunneled somewhere else. And that is shrinking the packet size, the available packet size. And MTU just path discovery wasn't working for whatever reason.

Speaker 4:
[73:56] So I just, I got really mad and I just turned it down to 320. And it's terrible from an efficiency perspective, but it works.

Speaker 3:
[74:06] Just bring it down. Like 1536 is usually enough.

Speaker 4:
[74:10] I know.

Speaker 3:
[74:11] Four bytes is all it needs for those VPNs.

Speaker 4:
[74:13] I know. So I'm still, I'm not convinced I've solved it yet, but it's been an interesting thing. Now a friend loaned me their SmartLink credentials. And I know iShareRadio takes care of that problem. There's a shameless plug for George and Alan. And oh nuts, I can't remember the third person's name. Sorry, third person, Mike. But anyway, they loaned me that. And I tried getting into their radios. And guess what? I had the same problem. So I knew the issue wasn't with my firewalls configuration. So that pleased me and my ISP's configuration. So that pleased me greatly. So anyway, it's been-

Speaker 3:
[74:55] Where were you in your remote location when you were doing that?

Speaker 4:
[75:00] Physically?

Speaker 3:
[75:01] Yeah. Like in a coffee shop, in a hotel?

Speaker 4:
[75:03] Yes. Both of them? All of the above.

Speaker 3:
[75:07] Okay.

Speaker 4:
[75:07] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[75:09] Were you using a local VPN, either a NordVPN connection on the service or to your own hardware or anything like that?

Speaker 4:
[75:17] Negative.

Speaker 3:
[75:19] Interesting. Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[75:22] So anyway, that's been a little bit fun. That's been a little bit of learning for me. And then what else? Well, I am now a former, well, I'm soon to be a former repeater owner. I'm getting out of the repeater game. Mostly because I hate to say it. So I'm going to, I'm going to be, oh, I hate this phrase, sad ham for just a second.

Speaker 5:
[75:47] Not Vince.

Speaker 4:
[75:50] You know what? Have you ever put up a repeater and run it for eight years and nobody says thank you? I'm one of those guys.

Speaker 1:
[75:58] Vince, if you're expecting a thank you, and that was all that I was expecting. When I get up in the morning and I flush the toilet, I do not call my plumber and say, thank you for still working. So as a repeater owner, you are providing a public utility and nobody cares about you.

Speaker 4:
[76:19] Yes, that's true.

Speaker 1:
[76:20] Get that through your head.

Speaker 4:
[76:21] And you know, the other thing that is kind of aggravating is lately in this geography, we've got some people who are coming around and generating malicious interference. And frankly, I just don't want to deal with it anymore. So I had a portable repeater in a 2U rack case that I had built up and the repeater controller went away. And some guy named KJ6VU was developing a small controller and that project kind of blossomed into other things. And so I never did rebuild that portable repeater. And I had a permanent repeater located about 10 miles to the east. So I just recently unracked that repeater and brought it back to the shop. And then I had a Pelican case. And the Peli case had a handle on it with some wheels. And so I rebuilt it into the Peli case and did a nice build on it. And I was getting ready to market it as a fully portable repeater with a set of cans. And I plugged it in and nothing. The transmitter powered up, but the controller appeared to be defective. Okay, well, maybe when I moved the controller out of the rack mount 19 inch enclosure into the 3D printed box enclosure, I mucked up the wiring. So I took out the TS32 CT-CSS encoder board from the circuit. They put it in with an audio divider circuit to inject CT-CSS on the transmit side and I wired it directly to the radios. Now all the levels are set because this was a working repeater. And today I powered it up and nothing. So my Scom 5K repeater controller built of 74 HC chips. So for any of you who understand what HC means, it means static is a reality. And I handled this thing with a static strap on the entire time I was working on it. I probably zapped it.

Speaker 3:
[78:21] You don't want to just replace the chips with LFs or something?

Speaker 4:
[78:27] You know, cause the flea market is on Saturday and we're recording this on Thursday.

Speaker 3:
[78:30] Fair enough.

Speaker 4:
[78:31] That's why. So anyway, my vision to have a portable repeater in a drag along box is there. It just doesn't work. And I'm kind of, my backside is frosted about it, but you know what? I'm going to sell it off anyway. Somebody's going to get a project repeater, just add a controller, do the levels and go. So somebody else can go experience the joy of repeater ownership, but I'm out of it. And I'm happy. So the happiest days in a repeater owner's life, like a boat owner, is the first day and the last day.

Speaker 1:
[79:03] Amen, brother.

Speaker 5:
[79:08] You obviously didn't have the right boat. What frequency?

Speaker 3:
[79:13] The right boat is somebody else's boat.

Speaker 2:
[79:15] Somebody else's boat.

Speaker 4:
[79:16] Just like a 3D printer.

Speaker 5:
[79:19] So what frequencies does that repeater, did that repeater operate on?

Speaker 4:
[79:22] On VHF.

Speaker 5:
[79:24] VHF, okay. Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[79:25] Yeah. And it was two Motorola MaxTrac 300s back to back. Power derated. I went through and walked through all the levels. The audio was nice and clean. All the good, did all the right things. And it ran flawlessly for eight years without a single issue.

Speaker 5:
[79:44] This is going to be serious taboo to say this right here and in front of all these hams. But I've got a whole bunch of friends in the area. Thomas will get this. I got a whole bunch of friends in the area that are GMRS operators. And I'm positioned on top of a hill between everybody. And I've got some of them wanting me to really put up a GMRS repeater. And so, you know, I was curious what, you know, what, what frequency that was running on. But yeah, I would, I would love to put up a repeater here eventually, but I'm going to have to, you know, I haven't done enough research.

Speaker 3:
[80:20] It sounds like you just found a buyer for your controller there, Vince.

Speaker 4:
[80:23] Well, I know, yeah, the controller is the only part that isn't working and the cans are VHF. So no, it doesn't, it won't ship very easily. Anyway, so that's kind of, that's kind of a downer story, but we tell a lot of happy stories here, but the reality is sometimes shit just doesn't work, and we don't understand why, and we spend a lot of time to learn why. Like my experiences with Flex Remote Access this week, and thanks to Mike and thanks to Marcus for their guidance as I tried to go through it, and a few other people.

Speaker 5:
[80:56] Then our favorite Canadian ham becomes a self-described sad ham. It's just life goes south.

Speaker 4:
[81:04] I guess I could, you know, I think sad ham is probably too strong a word, but instead of, you know, sunshine and rainbows beaming out one of my orifices, my eyes, that, you know, sometimes it's okay to tell a story that isn't, that hasn't got a happy ending because the path to troubleshooting is still really the important part.

Speaker 5:
[81:27] I can make that joke because Vince is in absolutely zero danger of becoming a sad ham. Vince has always been a great friend and has, as always, responded to me very quickly if I have a question.

Speaker 4:
[81:39] Thank you. Sorry, George. That's it, man.

Speaker 1:
[81:41] Thanks so much. Thomas?

Speaker 2:
[81:45] Oh, goodness.

Speaker 1:
[81:45] What's on the Murphy bench?

Speaker 2:
[81:47] What's on the Thomas bench?

Speaker 4:
[81:48] Oh, to the Murphy bench dude.

Speaker 3:
[81:51] Oh, out of the gate. Shots fired too soon.

Speaker 4:
[81:54] Oh, ladies and gentlemen, you have to understand about three episodes ago, somebody talked about Murphy bench and then Thomas talked about the Murphy armoire. And then in our chat group, every time I say, so Thomas, how's your Murphy bench coming? I get ignored.

Speaker 2:
[82:11] Okay, we have to phrase it this way.

Speaker 6:
[82:13] By design.

Speaker 2:
[82:14] Thomas Murphy bench, question.

Speaker 6:
[82:18] Amaze, amaze, amaze. Yeah, so that's another Project Hail Mary reference for everyone. We warned you, we warned you, this is required viewing for Ham Radio Workbench Podcast listeners, I'm sorry. So really not a ton on my workbench right now. I have been actually, one of the things I've been working with this week is a non-radio thing, but it will be combined with radio. And that is my Brompton bike that so Brompton is a British bike manufacturer and they make the best designed. I actually would argue that I think their bike is like my favorite product design of all time. I think it is beautifully engineered and is just an amazing piece of work that they've made because this thing has 16-inch wheels. It folds down to just nothing. You can put it in the overhead compartment of a lot of airplanes and you can ride it around. They're great for a lot of city-type commuting and that sort of thing or greenways in my case. I really like them because you can throw them in the back of the car. We have two of them in the family, I bought them used. The one thing, I only got them used maybe two years ago or something and I've never had to replace the inner tubes in them, but it worries me because the back, the rear tire has a hub with the gearing inside the hub. I've never had a bike like that before. And I was afraid when I take this thing off, I'm going to really screw up the gearing. It has like three gears, that's all. So I went to this really cool bike shop in Raleigh called Oak City Cycling. Big shout out to them, a really awesome bike shop. I've been to tons of bike shops over the years, and this is the best. And they actually have a guy there that works on Brompton's because they've been like sort of a mini distributor of them at times. And he, I said, look, I need to know how to do this stuff myself. He's like, hey, come on over here to the bench and let's do this. And he showed me, I did a lot of the work myself, which was just fantastic. And then came back to the house and we did one bike. So I've got another one I can redo now on my own. And then I also did a modification on mine. Mine are a little older than your models, have this rear clip frame that holds the rear frame up. You'd have to look up a video of a Brompton bike to see what they look like and how they fold. Just do a YouTube search for that. And I promise you, you'll be like, wow, that is so freaking amazing. It is so freaking amazing how they do this. So I had a really fun time actually learning a lot more about my Bromptons. I love that. Now I've actually in my head, I'm already starting to make a little budget for a Brompton G-Line bike sometimes, which has 20 inch wheels, which are a little bit better equipped for gravel and things like that, that I'm actually often on more. They are not cheap. I'd probably end up selling one of my C-Line Bromptons to make that happen. Speaking of Project Hail Mary, one of my, I guess you'd say my Easter gift to myself, the wife and I both got some kind of cold like Easter day. So it's a Sunday just a few days ago. And sat around the house that day and she said, you ought to put together your Project Hail Mary Lego set. And that's exactly what I did.

Speaker 3:
[85:43] Your wife has never been more beautiful than she was.

Speaker 6:
[85:46] I told her she was gorgeous. She was radiant that day. Radiant. And it was so much fun doing that. I don't know, like the instructions are so easy to follow. You know, you can screw up stuff, but really Lego instructions are very good. It's like what IKEA should be.

Speaker 5:
[86:05] I am a massive, massive Lego fan.

Speaker 6:
[86:10] Yes.

Speaker 5:
[86:10] Absolutely.

Speaker 6:
[86:11] And what's amazing about this is if you've seen the movie or read the book, you understand the principle behind it. But the Lego set shows it's basically of... There is like a little Grace and a little Rocky in there, which is really cute. But it's the ship, the Hail Mary. And it spins on this axis. And when you turn a little crank, it spins clockwise on the axis. When you turn the crank the opposite direction, counterclockwise, it puts it in centrifugal force mode. So the lab part of it comes out the back, spins, and then the whole set spins. And when you build it, I know most of us, when we build something, and we know it's gonna do something mechanical in the end, in your head, you're like, oh, I see how it's gonna do it. I expected little rubber bands around things. I expected some more gearing than was there. There was actually a modest amount of gearing. That is so beautifully engineered, how they made that happen. When you finish it and you look at it, you're like, I feel like this won't work. I need to set something up or do something. And it just works. And it works really, really well. So it was a lot of fun. I really enjoyed that.

Speaker 5:
[87:24] So cool.

Speaker 6:
[87:26] I'm trying to go through these things really quickly here. We were just talking about the KH1. And this past week, well actually a few weeks ago, someone reached out, they're a Ham Radio Workbench listener as well. A fellow named Rolf, DB4REB. He reached out to me because he watches my channel and reads QRPR a lot. And he had made some KH1 accessories for himself, just 3D printed and made some little mechanical accessories. And he said, I've made an extra set I'd like to send you if you're interested. And I said, well, heck yeah, I'd love to see it. Because he kind of just told me what they were. And I received it. And his stuff is really well thought through. He made a... I took this out three, two days ago for an activation, but I'll show the... I'll put this in front of the microphone. He made like a little 3D... He made a 3D printed stand that...

Speaker 5:
[88:21] Oh, that is so cool.

Speaker 6:
[88:22] That is actually a really nice angle when it's sitting like on a table. And he put shock cords around it so it would hold it to the stand. And it angles, like I said, it angles it perfectly, but they're actually... the KH1 sits in it and it's bracketed in such a way that the KH1 does not move around when you operate it.

Speaker 5:
[88:39] Oh, that's incredible.

Speaker 6:
[88:40] On a picnic table. And I used it on like one of these like plastic sort of polymer, whatever picnic tables at our local park. And it didn't slide on that. And that thing slides on everything. And so this didn't slide. He also made a key...

Speaker 5:
[89:01] I might catch the first part of that. Is that is that something that that he like a file that you 3D printed? Or did you get it from him?

Speaker 6:
[89:09] He made it and he sent it to me. And on the on the part of the stand, he actually put a little metal plate in here, too. So you can set a key in front of it and you can connect it to it so you can operate. And it makes I'm just telling you, it is like very well thought through. It's such a simple thing, but it works so well. And he will have maybe by the time the show notes are out, he'll have some files or something. I can share this. You don't really need the shock cords that he has on there. That's mainly if you're using the stock KH1 key, but he decided to make his own key and it has magnetic returns on it. And it's really cool. It's a really cool little key and he'll have plans for this too. He's not going to sell these things. I don't think at all. He's just made them. But he did it because he prefers using that when he has it in sort of tabletop mode. And it works really, really well.

Speaker 5:
[90:01] I love this.

Speaker 6:
[90:02] And then that wasn't enough. He also made his own version of a pressure paddle for the KH1. And it's angled. And if you remember the KX1 when Wayne designed that, he made angled paddles on it. So when you're holding it, you can keep with it. And so this is like angled paddles and they protrude above the surface of the KH1, which actually works really well. And so it works really well. He really thought through this stuff really nicely. And I took this out for an activation two days ago and really enjoyed it. So I've been playing with all this stuff. And he also made an angled antenna bracket. And you put this in the KH1 when it's in the little stand or when it's in your hand, you just screw it in. And instead of needing legs or anything like that, it just is self-supporting and you can angle the antenna at any angle. You can make it a right angle, whatever you want to do.

Speaker 5:
[91:08] I'm glad nobody ever taught you that enabling is wrong.

Speaker 4:
[91:12] I have really good news for our listeners. I have found the model on MakerWorld, and I have posted it in the show notes.

Speaker 6:
[91:20] Excellent.

Speaker 5:
[91:21] I'm like ready to send it to my K1C already. Give me the link.

Speaker 6:
[91:27] You're so on advance. Thank you. And so the last thing I've been working on, which actually has been sort of a, taken up more time than I would have thought, is a little collaborative project I've done with my daughter. It's a little collaborative project I've done with my daughter, Geneva K4TLI. And by the way, her suffix was specifically chosen. She wanted her own vanity call for trans lunar injection. And she did that ages ago. It was so relevant to now.

Speaker 5:
[92:02] That's awesome. Oh, that's really good.

Speaker 4:
[92:04] And she went to space camp last year, didn't she?

Speaker 6:
[92:07] She went like two years ago to space camp. She's a huge NASA nerd. I mean, like, that's what she wants to do is work for NASA one day. And since she was eight, she's been wanting to work for NASA. So anyway, we lost our sweet, sweet, sweet dog, Hazel, last year in November. And we're all still kind of getting over that. Neva wanted to do a little something for me. And she made this design of a cup, a coffee mug. And she made a little cartoon version of Hazel on it. And she called it the QR Pup Cup. And she actually came up with the slogan on the other end, Ham's best friend. And it's just so cool. It's a little coffee mug. And I was like, you know what, girl, like she is, she's a scholar. She goes to university, she's a scholar. She works really hard and she really doesn't have time to even work a part-time job while she's there. And I said, hey, this needs to be your side hustle. Like I'm going to put this on qrpeer.com. And so we set it up. So the mugs, she gets like three or four dollars per mug or something when they're sold or whatever. So it just benefits her kind of college, travel, food, whatever money, just it's like it's replacing out her little side job. And so she made the one for Hazel. And I'm actually announcing this tomorrow. But in the time that this is released, of course, this will have been out for a couple of weeks. She made one for our really good friend of the show and previous guest of the show, Alan W2AEW, whose really sweet dog, Sophie, passed last year as well. And she knew Sophie, and of course, I did too. And so he made one for her. And then she made like probably five or six other just kind of generic dogs, like a German Shepherd, a Terrier, she hasn't made a Shibu Inu yet. Is that what it's called? Is that what it's called?

Speaker 4:
[94:03] Shiba Inu, yeah.

Speaker 5:
[94:04] He had to do a great Pyrenees, that's what I've got.

Speaker 6:
[94:07] Yeah, she's probably this summer going to take a few requests, but anyway, so you can find that on qrpier.com. I'll probably have a specific page for it, like up in the top where you can do like, I don't know, maybe I'll make a merch page or just QRPub page or something like that. So you'll be able to find links to it there. And I've hijacked the show notes and put some links in the show notes as well. And that's what's on my workbench.

Speaker 1:
[94:31] That's awesome. So I always loved saying Hazel. At first, when you're doing your videos, the first time I watch it, I heard you say, Hazel, where are you? Or something like that. I guess his wife's name is Hazel. Your Hazel. And I realized, no, it's the dog.

Speaker 3:
[94:49] Well, the love of his life is anyway.

Speaker 6:
[94:53] She is so amazing. She was such a great dog.

Speaker 1:
[94:55] And ever since, I always enjoyed watching what the dog was up to in the videos.

Speaker 6:
[95:00] Yeah, she was always great. Like I remember, there were several things with amateur radio activation. Specifically, I had to watch out for Hazel. Barrowella Mountain, when I go out for a soda activation, it is also a pasture. And she was one of those dogs that if there was a cow patting here, she had to get in it. So I had to keep her really close and really watch her. And sometimes when I would sit down and I'd try to find a place to sit to do my soda activation, I would have to tie her to my leg. And then there was no way she could make it over to cow patty. One time I went on an activation in Tennessee and she got away from me. I wasn't paying attention and she found the cow patty. And I had to wash her in a creek, which she hated. But I had to do something. She couldn't get in the car with me that way. She also was really bad when there were squirrels or something nearby. She would just lunge for squirrels at trees. And so if she was tied to... If I had her around my leg or to a picnic table, you hear, like, thunk, where she would try to get the squirrel. But I missed that sweet thing. She was such a wonderful, wonderful dog. And I think everybody... So many hams have dogs and cats that are just really special to them and often participate in their hobbies, like amateur radio. And so we really miss these guys when they're gone.

Speaker 1:
[96:19] Yeah. That's sweet. That's a really neat thing to do. And yeah, that's very cool. All right. Well, thank you. Great stuff on the bench. Lots of things I got to go back and listen to. A bunch of stuff you just said at high speed. So I got to decipher that and figure out what I need to do to add some stuff to my KH1 kit to try to make that 16th contact.

Speaker 6:
[96:42] You want these things. You want these things, George. And you know what? If I could work it out, I'll try to hand deliver you some in the Pacific Northwest this fall or something.

Speaker 5:
[96:51] I've already got to file an Orca Slicer. I'm sitting here working on it.

Speaker 1:
[96:56] You are a workbench guy. You are. Paul, what you got in the bench?

Speaker 2:
[97:01] Well, not a whole lot this time. The first thing I'm working on is, let me switch the camera. I had mentioned before that I got a nice free bag from work that is going to work out for a go bag for that QMX that Mark is working on. So inside this bag, our little compartments over here is just the right size to hold a Pac-10a and an extension. In the middle is where the QMX is going to go. I've already got the cover printed for it. Okay, the camera is working weird. Over here is a little slot where I can put a little HT. Then up front here, the talent cell battery will fit. Then in here, I've got two different microphones. I've got Vince, this is that Shure mic that you sent me, that I got it and I put an element in and put a push to talk, and then this is that printed K6ARK, the elongated version. Then you flip over the flap that covers this, and I'm going to switch up to this now because it's doing weird stuff. No, that's not what I wanted to do. Back to here. Inside the lid, there's a pouch for some coax, some 316 pieces, the cable, the audio cable for the little mic and also for the Shure mic and antenna for the HT. And then I've also got space in here for the obligatory stylus, which I don't necessarily need, but we'll need it for the selfie.

Speaker 6:
[99:05] For photos, yeah, that's the important part.

Speaker 2:
[99:08] So, but yeah, this is just a Targus bag that somebody left on the floor at work and was assigned said free, take it. I'm like, okay.

Speaker 3:
[99:17] It could disappear.

Speaker 1:
[99:19] So, Paul, I suggest you hang on to that sign because it'll come in very handy when you find other things you'd like to have.

Speaker 2:
[99:27] Just put it in front of it. It said it was free.

Speaker 6:
[99:33] Yeah, I want to say one thing, Paul.

Speaker 3:
[99:35] George, and also you're no longer allowed anywhere near my shop.

Speaker 5:
[99:41] Just turn him into a serial equipment snatcher.

Speaker 6:
[99:44] I throw a kleptomaniac there. One thing, Paul, that bag reminded me of, because I was out with a listener of the show, who actually had a poda activation with him, Jeff WJ3FF. Really, really nice guy. He had his Pentek TR35 in a case, looked very similar to that, but it wasn't as kind of professional looking. It was just a lunchbox. It was like a padded little lunchbox, like you'd take to work or kids would take to school or whatever. He brought up a really good point I hadn't thought about. He was like, if I leave this on my front seat of my car, it just looks like my lunch. It doesn't look like a radio. And I was like, whoa, I never thought about that. That's a really good argument for just getting a soft-sided lunchbox or something to put your radio in.

Speaker 2:
[100:32] Yeah. So we'll see how that works. All I need now is a QMX.

Speaker 3:
[100:37] Working on it.

Speaker 6:
[100:38] No pressure.

Speaker 3:
[100:38] I haven't started working on it yet, but I will.

Speaker 2:
[100:41] Yeah. A couple other quick things. I'm going to go do an activation up at the Dunes on Sunday because the weather's supposed to be nice. And my wife is actually going to come with me. She's going to sit and read while I play. It all depends on if the beach is packed, then I'll go to one of the picnic shelters in the area. But if the beach isn't packed, I might actually try to set up on the beach. I've never done that before. We're about 20 minutes south of the southern tip of Lake Michigan. And I've never tried activating on the sand. So if the beach is not packed with people who are going to trip on stuff, I may set up there just for fun to listen to the waves and operate. If not, I'll work on one of the picnic shelters and one of the other areas. I recently picked up this antenna quick release clamp because there is one, I want to start doing some longer activations where I have to hike in. And there's one place up in the Dunes National Park where there is no place, it's kind of like a walkway that goes over like a marsh area. So the only way to really set up an antenna is to clamp this thing onto a railing and put the antenna on it. So I just can add this to my toolbox of stuff. I was cleaning up some stuff and I found, and this is not Ham Radio, but Mark, you'll appreciate this too. This is an old, this is from the late 80s, early 90s, old standard commercial radio. But the special thing about this HT is that the TWR Jaguar sports car team used to be headquartered about a mile and a half from where I live. And I was friends with the guys. And when they shut the team down, I got a bunch of stuff, including the radios and headsets. And they don't work, but this one actually was Tom Wachenshaw's, the owners. This was his radio.

Speaker 6:
[102:40] Oh, wow.

Speaker 2:
[102:41] So, yeah, so I've got, it's old brown brick. This thing weighs like three and a half pounds, whatever. But so these were the radios that the crew wore during races.

Speaker 6:
[102:55] Something I have learned about Paul over the past couple of years is that you really need to wear steel toed shoes because that guy can, he can drop some names. Let me tell you, like some big names, dude.

Speaker 3:
[103:07] Oh, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[103:07] Yeah, sorry.

Speaker 6:
[103:10] I mean, that as a very much a compliment, you know.

Speaker 2:
[103:14] One other thing.

Speaker 3:
[103:16] Thomas, you know, you're also guilty of that, right? One day, Thomas and I were having a discussion. He just casually drops the name of a friend of his who's like this huge, big name in the Internet security realm. He's like, oh yeah. I'm blanking on who it is now.

Speaker 6:
[103:35] Matt Blaze.

Speaker 3:
[103:36] Matt Blaze, yeah. He's like, oh yeah, my good friend, Matt Blaze. I'm like, what?

Speaker 2:
[103:47] And I'm going to be replacing the 43 foot vertical out back in my condo with an in fed half wave. I'm finally getting all the parts together for that. So that'll be a project when it warms up a little bit more. Last time I mentioned how useful and how cool I was finding Thomas' website, I've also been digging into Vince's website.

Speaker 6:
[104:09] Oh yeah.

Speaker 2:
[104:09] Because he's got a lot of very useful tools in there that he put out. I used the POTA Rove planning spreadsheet when I did that big Rove last year. And there's a lot of good information and stuff there, Vince.

Speaker 6:
[104:24] So surprising, isn't it? Yeah. You have a great website, Vince. I have to say, I've used it as a reference too.

Speaker 2:
[104:35] And then one other thing is this is totally not, but we've talked books before. This is totally not radio. But a good personal friend of our family is an author who she writes historical fiction from the perspective of people who lived during this stuff. And it's amazing writing. She's the first two books. One was about World War I and things over in Europe and how it affected the people that lived there and all that. She is a serious student of history. And the second book was all about D-Day. And how it affected people around that. And the one I'm currently reading is called Hold On To Tomorrow, which is written about a woman, a fictional woman, but one who lived through the Kennedy assassination in Texas. Her name is Mel, but I mean, she goes by MB. Henry. So if you want to look her up, I got to promote her. Cause I mean, we've known the family forever. And these books are amazing. So if you like historical fiction, these are exceptionally captivating.

Speaker 6:
[105:57] Excellent.

Speaker 2:
[105:58] So, all right, here we go. George, time go.

Speaker 1:
[106:03] Well, we have negative time left. So unfortunately, I have a bunch of stuff. So I'll try to make it snappy. So on the workbench, the big thing is I'm going to pre-announce a product that we're going to show off at Hamvention. Applause, please. So there's a project that I've been working on with a friend of mine, and it's all coming together pretty quickly, and we're going to have it at Hamvention. So this all started when I was talking to a friend of mine, Garrett. Garrett is KD6KPC, and Garrett is the owner of the repeater book web page. And if anybody's looking for information about what repeaters are in an area, then you go to repeater book, and it's got all the data. And it's probably the best repository of repeater information you can find. Well, one of the things that Garrett has been running into with the repeater owners is they would like to be able to indicate how much activity is going on on the repeater. Because let's say you go into an area, you don't know which one of the, you know, 20 repeaters is going to be active. And he'd like to have some kind of activity indication on the repeater book website. So, anyway, so he was talking to some owners and the idea was, well, is there a way to actually measure the activity? And they kicked around a bunch of ideas. And eventually I talked to Garrett about this and I said, well, actually we could make a gadget that you attach to the repeater. And every time somebody keys up the repeater, we could log that event. And so that set us down a path to make a data logging gadget. So I've developed the hardware and Garrett has developed the back end for the repeater book website. So essentially, what this thing does is you take the COR or COS signal, the signal that comes out of the repeater that says, hey, there's someone on channel, the same thing you feed into your repeater controller. So you take that signal out and you run it into this little data logger. And every time the repeater gets keyed up, that's an event. And then when it gets unkeyed, that's another event. And this little hardware module is Wi-Fi connected to the Internet. And it will send the key up and unkey date timestamps to the repeater book website. So if you're the owner of the repeater, you can just get that information privately and digest it to see what kind of activity you have, or you can flip a switch and you can actually make that information available on the repeater book website. So we're going to have the hardware at Hamvention, we have the website running, it's already working right now. To make it even a little bit fancier, on the hardware side, in addition to seeing that there's a key up, we also can read a voltage, a DC voltage, and we can also read a temperature with the digital temperature probe. So every time there's an event, we actually log the event, the time of the event, and the temperature and voltage of something at the repeater. Because why not? So anyway, it's really cool. The project is now off in fabrication at the assembly house. I should have them in a week or two in time for Hamvention. It's a pretty cool project, so I'm quite jazzed about it.

Speaker 4:
[109:30] That is great. The amount of telemetry, you'll get off that. What were we doing for telemetry 10, 15 years ago and even today? We hook up a KPC-3 and a bunch of analog sensors, and we blurp that data out over APRS. We have a rough idea what's going on at our repeater site. But to have that live data in a cohesive form and that feeds a website is great.

Speaker 1:
[109:53] Yeah, exactly. In fact, I can show for those of you who are on video, let me share my screen. Let's see, what do we do here? Share windows, maybe?

Speaker 4:
[110:10] Share window. Share window.

Speaker 6:
[110:14] This is like our desktop support guy.

Speaker 1:
[110:17] All right. So do you see a web page, I hope?

Speaker 4:
[110:20] Yes. Yes.

Speaker 1:
[110:22] So this is it. So this is the backend. So this actually says Hamvention demo up at the top there. So live repeater activity from the remote booth, which is going to be booth 3012, the Sierra Radio Systems booth, right next to Halibut Electronics. So every time you key up on the input to the sensor, it will update this data. So you can see here, my test module has a unique ID that's this weird string. It's online. There's nothing happening at the moment. It shows how many key ups there have been, 15. It shows there's a heartbeat once every minute. There's a heartbeat, just so you know, if you have connectivity or not, tells you what the duration of the last key up was. It'll tell you the total duration of all the key ups, how many key ups, and then there's a log of all the key up events. It's not showing it here because it rolled off after 24 hours, but it'll show you a bar graph that shows you the distribution of key ups over time for 24-hour period. So I haven't keyed it up for a day, which so there's no bar graph. So anyway.

Speaker 5:
[111:28] Did you use any AI tools to write this?

Speaker 1:
[111:31] I'm not allowed to say. No, seriously. On the back end, so Garrett did all the web backend and I really don't know. I don't think he did. I think this is all done.

Speaker 5:
[111:44] It has a little bit of that look to it, and so I was just curious.

Speaker 1:
[111:47] It's possible. It might have.

Speaker 5:
[111:49] I was just curious as to which one you're using. I'm always open to checking the new ones.

Speaker 1:
[111:52] I'm always open to that, but just to close out on the web page, so you can see here like in the middle, the latest snapshot, the voltmeter is 14 volt, 14.78 volts, temperature 69, even the Wi-Fi, RSSI, the signal strength, total key ups, and heartbeat, what the last transaction was. So anyway, all this stuff is going to be available, so you can sign up for this service on the repeater book web page, and then I'll have the hardware there to show.

Speaker 6:
[112:21] That's so cool.

Speaker 1:
[112:22] Yeah. So I'm pretty jazzed. And one of the reasons that I wanted to do this, oh, let me bring this over here. So this is a picture of the board. I don't have the boards yet, so all I can show you is the layout.

Speaker 4:
[112:35] So this is a very nice layout, George.

Speaker 2:
[112:37] It is very nice.

Speaker 6:
[112:39] It's elegant.

Speaker 1:
[112:40] So it's about three and a half inches tall, three inches by about two and a quarter inches wide. So it's fairly small.

Speaker 2:
[112:48] It's got words and stuff.

Speaker 1:
[112:49] It does. So up at the top is the processor, and you'll see it says antenna. That's the Wi-Fi antenna that's built into the processor. There's a little digital display in the middle, so we can show a little tiny graphs and stuff. The connections are down at the bottom, so the digital input, the voltmeters, the temperature sensor, all that, screws into a terminal block at the bottom, and then there's some buttons and a whole bunch of LEDs and-

Speaker 6:
[113:14] Oh, good, it blinks.

Speaker 1:
[113:16] Oh, it blinks. Oh, like Christmas?

Speaker 6:
[113:19] Oh, nice.

Speaker 2:
[113:19] That's awesome.

Speaker 1:
[113:20] It blinks like all the holidays.

Speaker 3:
[113:21] I think George just had a slight sexual moment right there.

Speaker 1:
[113:27] Oh, it's very blinky. And there's a couple other things that is not really necessary for the basic use case, but I put them on there for future features. So there's one relay, so it's possible to do a dry contact relay closure, and there's also some RS-485 interfaces. So you can interface it to the station controller, DCN, the device control network. So you can make this another device on that if you want to do that, or just put on your repeater and forget the station controller. So it's got some expansion capabilities as well.

Speaker 2:
[114:03] Mark, the bar has been raised for blinky lights.

Speaker 1:
[114:07] Blinky light and display.

Speaker 4:
[114:09] Please let the record show I've incremented the rat hole counter because George had a moment.

Speaker 1:
[114:14] Yeah. Thank you. I'm getting the vapors here, Vince.

Speaker 4:
[114:19] I know. I can tell.

Speaker 1:
[114:20] The whole thing is powered off of USB-C. So you can run it off of whatever is handy with USB-C. The USB-C port is also a data port. So you can go into it and configure things or download new versions of firmware or whatever.

Speaker 4:
[114:34] So and why is it got an I2C interface on it?

Speaker 1:
[114:38] That's a good question. Why not? The main reason is expansion. So it's handy because let's say if you want a bigger LCD display, you can plug one in or if you want to talk to an I2C sensor for some future version of firmware, or frankly, if you want to just buy the hardware and write your own software from scratch, it's got that capability. You can just do that if you don't want to make the hardware.

Speaker 4:
[115:03] All right. That makes sense.

Speaker 1:
[115:05] Yeah. So it's kind of built for purpose specifically to support Garrett's repeater book, data gathering, but I made it sort of universal enough that it's actually useful for other stuff too.

Speaker 4:
[115:17] Nice.

Speaker 1:
[115:18] So yeah, I'm really excited. So that'll be there at Hamvention. Let me figure out how to unshare things.

Speaker 6:
[115:27] I think you've probably put a good couple of hours into this.

Speaker 1:
[115:30] A couple. Oh, by the way, so Andy said, what about AI? The first thing is I got to figure out how to unshare.

Speaker 2:
[115:38] How to turn off sharing?

Speaker 4:
[115:40] There's a red thing on your screen. You share button again. There you go.

Speaker 1:
[115:44] That one would work. How do you use this thing? So on the firmware side, I've written lots and lots of firmware just by hand for many, many years. And on this project, I wanted to see how easily it would be to do it with AI. So I used Claude to do some of the code generation.

Speaker 5:
[116:04] Cool.

Speaker 1:
[116:06] And it's pretty remarkable. I mean, what I've found with Claude is if you get into some esoteric question, it will lie to you straight to your face.

Speaker 5:
[116:16] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[116:16] Very convincingly.

Speaker 1:
[116:17] For example, I was trying to plug my KX3 and my PX3 and the amplifier together, and I forgot what plugs to what, and I could have looked it up in the manual, but I just typed into Claude, how do you configure this? Because I forgot also what menu picks to select, and it came back with a completely cogent explanation about the four-pin DIN connector that does not exist anywhere in the Ellicraft universe.

Speaker 3:
[116:44] A friend of mine asked Google for what flag do I give to RM to make it interactive so that it asks you for every delete whether you yes or no, and the answer it gave was RM minus F.

Speaker 1:
[117:00] Does that exist?

Speaker 3:
[117:01] Which is force. Oh, jeez. Which means don't ask me for anything.

Speaker 2:
[117:04] Just do it.

Speaker 3:
[117:05] Just do it. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[117:07] Wow.

Speaker 3:
[117:08] Very confidently gave him the exact opposite answer.

Speaker 1:
[117:12] Yeah. So my experience with using Claude for firmware was actually extremely positive. So as bad as those examples are on the flip side, for code generation, it's been remarkably good.

Speaker 5:
[117:24] And I must say, I must say the Codex app is extremely good. I use, lately I've been using GPT 5.4. That one's pretty good. 5.3 Codex is a good model too. And I've installed the open AI Atlas browser, ChatGPT Atlas browser. That's like my go-to browser now. And it's really incredible. It can help you get, for a while it was just, you know, basically 50-50 is either lying to you or it wasn't, and you never knew. It's lately, they have dialed it in really good. I mean, you know, it, it, I was, I'll talk about this a little bit later. I was working on some stuff with my Raspberry Pi for World Radio League, and it just walked me through these steps. I literally just gave it the file that I needed to install on the Pi. And, and I'd like had a completely different system install on the Pi that wasn't even, you know, the Raspberry Pi OS or anything. And it walked me through the entire, you know, the entire process and was, you know, I tossed it in there to see what it, you know, how accurate it, it walked me through every step perfectly. And I'm, you know, it was, it was really incredible.

Speaker 1:
[118:33] I think, I think things where there's a very large pile of referenceable material and it's not like an opinion, it's like factual data, then I think it's pretty good. So I think coding is a really good example of where it can be really good. I would say that, that to make it effective, you have to really know what you want and you have to really know how to tell it what you want. And then you have to really know how to test to see if you got what you want. Because if you just sort of blindly say, hey, give me this, unless it's trivial, it will just like, it'll generate stuff, but you won't know if it's good or not.

Speaker 5:
[119:07] But yeah, it doesn't always follow best coding practices, but they've got these things called skills now where you can like tell it to, basically, whenever you take one of my, in one of my prompts, apply this skill against it as well. So you always follow this process every time you follow a prompt. And so those things help with our team. We've been using it, we've been adopting it more and more over time. And those kinds of things help tremendously to match our coding structure so that when the developers go to review the code, it's like it's already familiar to them.

Speaker 1:
[119:47] Yeah, I think the most useful thing is that it shaves off a whole lot of waste in time. So if you do something like write code for a microcontroller as your job, then you get really good at it and you get some benefits from using this, but you kind of know what you're doing already, you already have your toolkit of stuff. But if you're like most of us hobbyists, where you don't necessarily do it as a full-time job, and maybe you knew exactly how to do a thing, but you haven't done it for two years, rather than hunting it down. You can connect the device to the server. But if you're looking at the internet, you can do that with Google. And then you can look at it and go, yep, that looks right, and plop it in there and it just works. The other thing that I found useful is, we're using an MQTT broker. So that is, it's a way to connect the device. We looked at various ways to connect the device to the server. So doing an HTTP put get kind of thing would work, but there's limitations to that, and so using an MQTT broker is better. For those of you interested, just- Look it up, but it's basically...

Speaker 2:
[120:51] MQTT is definitely the right tool for what you've been discussing.

Speaker 1:
[120:54] Yeah, and so to make that work, and I haven't done that very much, I just clawed, how do I do an MQTT? And it's like, boop, here's the code. And not only did I get the code, but I said, could you document exactly what the JSON data is gonna look like? So I can give that to Garrett. So he can write the receiving end of the MQTT JSON data.

Speaker 3:
[121:18] And one more skill with the AI agents is, or one more tool I would say to put in your tool belt is plan mode. Plan mode will, it's especially prevalent with, the Codex app that I use. I'm assuming Claude has something comparative to that. Plan mode is basically, it will not write any code when it's in plan mode. You tell it what you want. I always tell it to ask any questions that it needs to ask. It will literally give you a multiple choice question. Do you want to handle this problem this way, this way, or this way? Or another way that you want to describe, or will you handle this problem this way? It will go through, it will generate a complete markdown file as a plan. Then you can just tell it to implement the plan. That is, if it's like just can't get something right, I'll tell it, I'll put it in plan mode and make it really think about it, and it will usually come through that with the right answer.

Speaker 1:
[122:20] I learned with Claude, I'm sure there's a more formal way to do it, but what I tripped into was before I start anything, I don't ask it to do it. I say, how would you do this? It comes back and says, well, here's how I would do it, and then I'd say, okay, we'll go do it, or do it with these caveats. It often does come back with three or four questions about, what did you want this or that, or what about this? That's a good idea, too. Do all that. That's been very good, and the last thing I started to mention was, I wanted to give Garrett this document. I said, could you please document all the MQTT calls with examples and put it into a PDF? It created this five-page beautifully laid out document with all the calls and all the example data and everything, so I could just send it to Garrett. It looked like I would have taken a month to figure this out. That was in like five minutes. That stuff is super useful. The other thing, the last little thing, then I'll get off of it is, when I would iterate on it, sometimes I would have it tell me code changes to make or features to add, and I would just change it in the code base. And sometimes I would say, okay, take those features and just regenerate the code. And then it just goes off for five minutes, comes back with a whole new version of the software. So it's been really, really interesting to play around with that. And so for anybody who is afraid of coding something, this is kind of the ultimate crutch. So just ask it to do it. And for little Ham Radio projects, there's really no problem at all. So anyway, I'm very excited with this little piece of hardware and the whole coding experience has been quite interesting and integrating it with Garrett's website. So we'll see how that goes. And we'll have all that stuff in Hamvention.

Speaker 3:
[124:18] Maybe I should save this till later, but I'm going to be talking about product, not process mostly later. So I'll just throw a little process at you. One of the biggest areas that AI has helped us, these AI coding tools, is like, I'm product manager. So I'm not specifically on the dev team. So I'll hop on a call with one of the developers. They're not all of them are Ham Radio operators. So they've got our roadmap. We talk vision all the time. So they kind of know what we're after, but I'm a ham, so I'm kind of representing what the community is wanting. So we'll hop on a call, just me and a developer, we'll hop on a Google Meet call, and they'll use the AI tool. They'll implement the feature. I'll give them feedback. Yes, no, good, bad, change this, do this, whatever. They'll review the code to make sure that it follows their development processes. There's this instant feedback loop that is really fast rather than them developing, sending over to QA, QA saying, no, this is this instant feedback loop of, yeah, that's good, that's bad, on my end from the product design perspective, and on their end, yeah, this code structure is good, no, this code structure is bad. And it's really changed the way we're developing because it's not like we're just throwing everything at AI and saying, give us our platform. It's more literally just this, it just speeds up that loop so much faster. It's really cool.

Speaker 1:
[125:54] So it's one last thing. I guess I'm going to belabor this more. One last thought, then we'll take a break.

Speaker 2:
[126:01] But I would like to point out that my section kept to my 10 minutes.

Speaker 1:
[126:05] I would like to point out that I have the mute button. So I'm going to continue.

Speaker 2:
[126:09] And I believe as you were, George, go on.

Speaker 1:
[126:11] Thank you, Mark.

Speaker 4:
[126:12] George, please go ahead.

Speaker 1:
[126:13] Thank you. So now I remember what I was about to say. So the thing that really surprised me in this Claude experience was, one of the features I really wanted was, I have a little bitmap display, and I really wanted an analog voltmeter. And I have no idea how to do that. And I'm sure if I got, you know, Google that I'd figure it out after an hour. And then I'd find a lot of comments like, here's how you don't do it, you know, all that kind of stuff. So I said to Claude, I want an analog meter that takes this input channel and displays it. And not only did it create the code, but it created a prototype in the Claude application. So it actually drew a rectangle with an analog meter and some numbers. And it basically drew a cartoon of what I wanted the code to do. And I didn't ask it to do that. So it was not just generating the code, it actually generated an image of the way the thing would look dynamically with a built-in slider. And if you move the slider, it would move the needle around. And it was like, I don't even know how to do that. That is really interesting.

Speaker 4:
[127:26] Sounds neat.

Speaker 3:
[127:27] So cool.

Speaker 1:
[127:27] It's very cool. All right. With that, let me talk about what's on my workbench.

Speaker 4:
[127:32] So ladies and gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, we're about a quarter of the way through the show and we'll be right back, stay tuned.

Speaker 1:
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Speaker 3:
[129:46] World Radio League is the Ham Radio platform for the modern ham. So just kind of a bit of backstory, just kind of kind of lend a little bit more explanation to this. So James N0WRL, our CEO, started Ham Radio Prep, I believe it was around 2017. And he was getting, we still are getting many, many hundreds of, and probably even thousands of ham radio operators licensed every year. It's really cool to see, it's so cool to see. And at that point, that was before even some of the other modern loggers. So you're getting these hams licensed, throwing them out there in this pool of what? You've got all these, I don't want to offend here, but you've got all these softwares that look like they're written in the 90s, and have all this configuration that has to go into them, and all this setup. And that's enough to turn some people who would otherwise love the hobby, it's enough to turn some of them off, because they don't want to fool with that, they want to get on there and operate. So James was finally like, you know what, let's just, let's go ahead and solve this problem. So that's kind of the genesis of World Radio League. It's meant to be a... It's meant to be a, you know, first and foremost, there was a logging platform. We're adding many, many more tools into it besides that. But there's also this community element to it that is just growing and expanding and flourishing. And that's kind of the, that's kind of the, what's behind that World Radio League there. You've got, we've got a dedicated community page. We've got a Discord, a whole Discord group, which I can share the link, put that in the show notes. We've got, you know, we've got all kinds of content going on and we've got tons of people who are, you know, a growing group of people who just, you know, they're revolving around this, around the community in this piece of software. And so we've got all these people coming together, you know, and we have all kinds of cool, you know, we've got, well, we'll talk about, you know, what's in the platform later, but people have, you know, ways you can compete against each other and ways you can, you know, you can chat back and forth easily. And it's just an incredible thing to see a source where a community can actually grow together rather than, you know, being split up and arguing on forums and this and that and what have you. So it's actually a community that is growing and, and who are just helping each other. We're seeing just a lot of people helping each other in all kinds of ways. It's so cool to see. So.

Speaker 1:
[132:39] So the leak part is the thing that threw me at first, cause it, it sounded like, well, this is like an organization, but it was all about the software. So it's almost in reverse that, that the thing that's showed up was software and we're going to get into that. But that as that sort of grown, it sort of actually built its own community. So it is kind of a leak.

Speaker 3:
[132:56] Absolutely. There's always been a community vision behind it. It's always been there. But the software was what was needed to get that kicked off.

Speaker 1:
[133:05] Gotcha. So let's talk about, you mentioned it does a bunch of things. So maybe let's talk about what the WRL software environment does.

Speaker 3:
[133:15] Yeah, absolutely. So I'm going to go ahead and if you don't mind, I'm going to share my screen here. So we can kind of walk through some of these things as I talk about them. But we do, you know, we're branching out, we're growing, we're doing all kinds of stuff. Let me grab the right window here. There we go. Can we see that? Yes. All right. Can we still see that? Okay, brilliant. Okay. So, you know, we've got, we've got all these great tools. When you first pop on here, you'll notice this globe here on the homepage. That is a live feed of contacts that have happened in the past several hours, all around the world. And you'll also see the list of you here of those contacts as they come in. But this is a fully, this is a cloud-based service. All the cloud logging, all that is completely free. So, you know, we've got desktop app, web app, mobile app, all of them sync around your account and store your contacts in the cloud. So you can access them from anywhere, you go out and do a podo activation with your web app, or I mean with your desktop app or your mobile app, it syncs back to your web app, you can pull it up later. You know, if you're offline, out in the boonies, desktop app, mobile app, work offline, all that syncs back to this account. That allows us to do really cool things like our contesting page. So we have, there are none live right now, we're kind of mid-week, but we just completed a couple of weeks ago, the CQ Worldwide WPX Contest. This one was really cool. In World Radio League, we had 278 participants, 24,999 contacts logged, just in World Radio League. And you can see, we've got the top 10 leaderboard here, where folks are competing for top spot. And you know, all around the world, folks are competing here. We've got, I think the winner was from, yeah, Chile, and the second place, a nine alpha call, that's Croatia. And you know, it's just really cool. Some of my favorite pages to look at are like the statistics page. You can see what bands were active, what modes were active. The QSOS per hour graph is so cool, because you can see, you know, kind of over time, what, you know, when QSOS were being made over the duration of the contest and what times they kind of fell off and what times they were more active. And it's just really, really neat to be able to display all of this data in a new and fresh way. And I think that's, I think that's one of the ways we're really, really starting to shine even more. We're starting to put a lot more emphasis on our contesting engine. And as opposed to, we had been focusing on Poda and Soda activators, and we're going to be doing more features for them. And I'll show you some of that here in a few minutes, but we're really starting to lean more into some of the contesting side again.

Speaker 1:
[136:24] I think when I first started using your software, the thing that really struck me was how modern it looked. The interaction is very modern. It's clearly something done by people that know how to do software for today.

Speaker 3:
[136:38] Absolutely.

Speaker 1:
[136:39] And you know, like, for example, I use N3FJP because it's easy and people have been using it for years. And I really like it because it's very familiar and very easy to use. But switching over to the WRL for just general logging is like for field logging, I was really, there are some really cool things like in the UI, I forget what the links were, but there's things where, you know, you can make a contact and you can follow that link and see, you know, what that person does or whatever. So it's been really, really interesting.

Speaker 3:
[137:10] Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, you can open up their biography or, you know, if they're a member, it looks like this VE4SG isn't a member yet, but like if I pull up, you know, one of our, one of my coworkers, Brad K4AZE, he is one of our product engineers and, you know, you can go up, he's got his biography here. He is in the top, we have what's called logging streaks and you can see mine is 30 weeks long, but that's just that in order to hit that, you have to log a contact once per week. My daily streak is dead because I have not been logging a contact every day. Brad is in our top five, I think. He's logged a contact for 310 days straight since we launched this logging streaks feature. And if you go over to analytics, you can see here, here's our top, our top 10, you know, streak holders right now. And it's really, really, really neat to see this. And you can check, you know, your activity map, see how many contacts or you can hover over these different days, see how many contacts you made that day.

Speaker 5:
[138:18] And, you know, but do you have a, do you have like a little icon or like a little, a little thing on the screen that like yells at you when it's like, you haven't made a contact today. You'll lose your streak, sort of like Duolingo does.

Speaker 3:
[138:35] You know, that would be, that would be, that would be a really good approach. I mean, after we make a contact, we show your streak up here in the header so that it's kind of bouncing there, you know, a little bouncing animation. So you'll remember to, you know, to check that and you click into it. It'll say, you know, you're safe or you need to log a contact by the end of the day or whatever. But, you know, a pop up every now and then would be, or even a little message up here would be kind of cool. That's yeah.

Speaker 5:
[138:59] And so far, our listeners, I have to say that, you know, George was saying this is, it looks like a very modern website and page. The user interface looks very intuitive. Things are laid out very nicely. Lots of graphs, lots of ways to represent the data he's talking about. Along with photos of people who are users and mapping, it's got a lot. So it's a very, very visually rich, but not distracting page.

Speaker 3:
[139:32] One of the things that was almost a surprise at how well it took off was the leaderboard page. There are people who love competing in these state weekly leaderboards for their state. See if they can make the most contacts or the furthest distance contact in a single week. That was really cool. We've got so many people who love doing that. We ran into a little issue. There's one Ham who dominates the overall weekly leaderboard. He is from, I believe, Trinidad and Tobago, and he dominates it every week. He's running Automatic FT8, I believe. So like fully automated. And so I think one week he might have been dethroned by a Ham who figured out how to run fully automated FT2. It was literally 6,000 contacts in a single week. It was insane. Yeah, it was nuts. But, but, but yeah, no, there's, there's, there's a lot of, there's a lot of, a lot of Hams here. I recognize it looks like some new blood in here as well. Just compete for these leaderboards all the time. You can compete by mode in a given week or by band. Actually, I'm not sure if we've got the band one set up yet, but by mode and by longest distance, most DX contacts and most contacts overall. People love competing here. Like I said, you can go in and do this by a specific state or by a specific country. So I can go into my state of Missouri. I probably won't even be on the leaderboard because I have not logged much this week. But yeah, there's some friends around me that have been logging contacts this week.

Speaker 5:
[141:17] So one thing I want to ask you, I know right now you're just showing us sort of through the website. If you have the desktop or mobile apps or whatever, can they be just like fully offline? Like can you get data and then you can operate it fully offline?

Speaker 3:
[141:32] I'm going to show you some of our POTA features and I'll show you the desktop app and the web app both here in just a little bit.

Speaker 5:
[141:37] Okay, cool.

Speaker 3:
[141:38] They're fully offline capable. Absolutely. And when you come back online, it automatically syncs those contacts back to your account. So, yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 5:
[141:50] Very nice.

Speaker 3:
[141:51] Yeah. So, yeah, like I was checking out Brad's profile earlier, here on the profile page, you can add a little quick note about yourself up here. You can add a full-length bio down here in the lower section. Yes, we allow you to put an iframe in here so you can put your POTA stats iframe down in there, which I like to do. You know, we show, publicly, I think we show like your last, maybe 100 contacts or something like that. If you're on your own profile page, you can look back through here. We have many different awards we offer. Awards like, here, I'm waiting for mine to load here. There's a significant stress on my network and all the tabs I have open right now. But yeah, you get an award for working 10 states, for working 50 DX countries, for working 25 or 50 states, for working, and you get one for working them and one for confirming them. So, you know, it's kind of meant to just boost, some of these are kind of meant to just boost, you know, an operator's enthusiasm. You know, like, of course you're gonna be excited to get an award, hey, you just worked your 10th state, you know, even if you haven't confirmed them yet, we offer an award for that too. That's like a, you know, like you got both now. So it's, there's plenty more awards. I'll look at some of those here in just a moment, but we also introduced these followers and following feature. Right now, it's just to just kind of, you know, it's a way where you can just, you know, follow your favorite operators and give them a boost. But soon, we're getting ready to implement a call sign notifications feature similar to HamAlert, so that, you know, if you're out in the, if you're doing whatever, you get a notification on your phone or on your computer that says, hey, you know, Thomas K4SWL, you're following him, he just went live in a park, you know, go work him. So I'm really excited about that one because that one's going to be big. Or even, you know, this country just landed on the air or this, you know, this state that the crafters just spotted. So yeah, really looking forward to that.

Speaker 1:
[144:16] So let me ask you a kind of a high level question. So when I first see a logging program, the first thing that I try to figure out is, is this just like a general purpose log? Is it contest specific? Is it portable specific? Is it all those, you know, is it for the desktop? Is it really for like my phone? So how would you characterize WRL where it is today?

Speaker 3:
[144:40] All of the above and then some.

Speaker 1:
[144:42] Okay, all right. So the kind of things that pop to mind are like, okay, well, if you're talking about contests, a contesting logger, then you have to have all the various contest fields that need to get filled out and upload loadable in the right kind of format. So how far are you like ticking down through a lot of those popular contests?

Speaker 3:
[145:07] Yeah, so let me back up for just a second. We structure our logbook list, our logbooks differently than some of the older loggers. We have a logbook list. I tend to create one, some people just have one logbook for everything. I create one logbook every month and then we automatically create one for every contest you enroll in, for every pod activation you do, that keeps them separate so they're easy to just export into their own ADiff and upload. And it also helps with tracking some of those poda and contest metrics. So yeah, if I go into this CQ Worldwide SSB Contest Log, see we've got a serial number field here for you to send to the other operator. And this serial number field that you send, that automatically increments. So every time I log a contact, that's gonna increment up by one. You put your exchange in here, the contest has ended, so it's not gonna let me do all that. But you put your exchange in, I guess this was a serial number one, but this is just a field we pop in for all the contests. So for winter field day, I think it's your, what is it? That's one of the big ones we did this year. In fact, I'm gonna pull it up quick.

Speaker 5:
[146:21] Is that one so cool?

Speaker 3:
[146:22] Yeah.

Speaker 5:
[146:22] Let me ask you just really quickly while you have that page up there, because in different contests, so like George was mentioning earlier in 3JFJP, which I think, again, is a very basic-looking logging system, but it's really effective in the sense that you can get in there, you can actually change the order of the fields so that when you're tabbing through it, it's going to the right space according to your workflow and everything. Are you able to do that, like when you're tabbing through, if you're doing a contest and you have a certain way that you like to log? Can you change that tabbing order? Can you move things around? Or do you just have one to select?

Speaker 3:
[146:59] So if I, this is the one that I use, I created this Sport Logger template because it was so, it's so slick. This one, you got their call sign contest, exchange one, exchange two, abandon mode. Abandon mode, of course, persists. After you log it, once it stays there, so you don't have to do that, you can literally go call sign, tab, exchange one, tab, exchange two, enter. Log the contact, cursor pops back to their call sign field. You can configure these any way you want to configure them. You can reorder them. You can turn fields on and off. You can do whatever you want to do and get them in the order you want them in. And then you can, you know, we've got these options up in the header bar, these options, these secondary options down below that you can turn on or off or reorder as well. So, you know, you have all the primary logging information right here, some secondary fields down here in case you want like a notes field where you can just add a quick note while you're going, you know, you have all that handy. So, cool.

Speaker 1:
[148:00] With this notion of doing multiple logs, I think it's an interesting idea because you normally, you think of, well, you have one log book and everything gets thrown in there. I kind of like the idea of, well, I've got my POTA log for Saturday and then I've got my CQ, you know, CW contest log, different file. Is there a way then to say, I have the concept of a log with everything in it also, so I can import all those disparate logs in the one mega log?

Speaker 3:
[148:30] That's what we call QSO manager. So if you go to your QSO manager tab, this is our most underrated, most powerful feature on World Radio League. This is where you do every bulk operation that you can imagine right here. You know, I can select any amount of contacts I want to select. I can click bulk edit details. Now I've got this just looks just like a logger window. I can edit any of these fields and just apply that change to all the contacts that are selected. From here, you can filter down by band mode, logbook country, whether the contacts were imported or not, whether there's duplicates, whether they're confirmed. You can filter by, what else do we have? You can filter by date or date range or whatever. We've got, you can adjust your columns that you show in QSoManager, so you can show the ones you want to show. And so at a glance, you've got all the information in front of you, you want. You move them between individual logbooks from here. You can export these to QRZ. We have full bi-directional QRZ integration. You can import QSo's from LOTW. Their API is, what's the word? Ancient. And so we have not fully configured the export to LOTW at this point, but importing from LOTW, that's fully functional. You can export, of course, as ADIF. You can export just a select number or all of them here. You can import ADIFs. Recheck confirmations. This is a really cool one. So if there's like, we match contacts as they're logged and confirm them, you'll see these green check marks here. That means they're confirmed in World Radio League. Yellow star means they're confirmed in QRZ. We have another icon if they're confirmed in LOTW. I have not pushed any contacts to LOTW for a while, so I don't have any handy to show you, but you can see all those confirmations here. Three check confirmations literally says, okay, I'm going to do a double check on World Radio League. Make sure the system hasn't missed any confirmations matched there. Then I'm going to go to QRZ, and I'm going to pull any new confirmations that have shown up since the last time I checked. Then I'm going to go to LOTW and pull any confirmations since the last time I checked, and applies that across your whole log with just one click, basically. That's been a really awesome addition, and probably our most recent addition in this QSoManager area is request confirmations. If you've got contacts that are unconfirmed, you select them, click Request Confirmation. It will queue up an e-mail to the other operator.

Speaker 1:
[151:30] That's a great idea.

Speaker 3:
[151:31] Yeah. The way this works is we don't want to spam these guys. We queue up these e-mails and we send them once a month. They get an e-mail with a list of everyone who has requested a confirmation from them on World Radio League. They get that, and either they confirm or they don't. If they don't, one month later, they get another e-mail with the same request in it. If somebody else has requested a confirmation since then, it adds them to that list. That's been, and we've got this whole flow where they come in. If they don't have an account yet, they can create an account and then view all the confirmation requests they have pending and either upload their log or go through manually one at a time and log their details for it. That's been a really awesome addition and I've gotten a bunch of contacts confirmed that way already.

Speaker 2:
[152:20] So I think I just got one of those emails.

Speaker 3:
[152:23] Oh cool, yeah, yeah, you probably did. It was probably me trying to get you to confirm my contact.

Speaker 5:
[152:29] So Andy, you said you don't have like full Logbook of the World integration that way. So I'm guessing to export to Logbook of the World, you'd have to export an ADIF file within certain parameters and okay.

Speaker 3:
[152:43] You can do it two ways. You can either export the ADIF file, send it to LOTW through your normal channels, or you can export it to QRZ then on LOTW. We're going to be getting that LOTW integration set up. It's just, it kind of was a pain to deal with. And honestly, it wasn't that important right now for us. So it kind of hit back burner for a little bit, just to be blunt about it. We got the imports in, which is what we want. I mean, this is the new, if you're joining World Radio League, you realize really quick that this is a great spot for just a source of truth for your contacts, because we integrate directly with WSJTX. If you run WSJTX, it logs straight to your World Radio League account. N3FJP, N1MM, they all log straight to your World Radio League account if you set up the integration. So it's just the perfect source of truth for all your contacts.

Speaker 5:
[153:38] That's good. Yeah. Can I ask another kind of like, since George is asking these kind of macro questions?

Speaker 3:
[153:44] Yeah.

Speaker 5:
[153:45] Let me ask a micro question. So if I were to go out to the field and let's say that I logged on paper for a POTA or a SOTA activation and I come back and I want to enter it into WRL. So one of the things I find is that some loggers are a little bit of a pain in that, when you have to enter the time and the date, and of course it was like a previous day, it maybe was two weeks ago or something like that when you're entering it, that it can be kind of a pain when you're manually entering it later because you have to keep entering the time, keep entering the date. Can you get it to where it increments or it sets up the time so that that's less of a pain?

Speaker 3:
[154:27] That's something I've thought about, Thomas. And I honestly, I don't know the best way to do it. The best way I can think of is persist the date. So you don't have to change the date every time. But the time is a hard one to figure because I mean, you know what, increment it by everyone every minute or every five minutes.

Speaker 5:
[154:46] Actually, I don't think that I don't I don't think that it would have to be for me. Like it's almost always like a minute. But like, yeah, I'd say that for the really it's just making the hour stay persistent.

Speaker 3:
[154:59] Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

Speaker 5:
[155:00] And you know, when you get up to the last time and you just tweak the, you tweak the second or the minutes as opposed to the hour.

Speaker 3:
[155:08] That's a great idea. Yeah. Okay. I honestly, I'm gonna try something because I don't remember. I don't remember how we have that set up right now. So let's say I go, it's terrible to do this on a live stream. You know, so if I go 2348 on 409 and I add that date, honestly, I'm gonna do it this way. I'm gonna grab our all fields template because that's got literally every field we offer. So it'll show it here instead. So 2348 or 409, I'm gonna log K4SWL on 14.0.

Speaker 5:
[155:51] Well, thanks for the nice signal for it.

Speaker 3:
[155:53] Yeah, absolutely. Five, nine all the way. Yeah, it's that, yes, those glasses, I've got them too. They tend to really give you a good couple of units. So log the contact. Yeah, okay, so it doesn't persist. Okay, okay, that was an awesome suggestion, Thomas. So I need to make a note of that.

Speaker 5:
[156:16] So I appreciate that.

Speaker 3:
[156:17] Yeah, because that's something I would end up doing a lot if I were using that is the solution I have been looking for. And it's such a simple solution, but it's the one I've been looking for because I knew it needed something, but I didn't know what it needed. So thank you. So one of the things that we are really, really happy about, somebody say something there.

Speaker 2:
[156:41] Sorry, live product development.

Speaker 3:
[156:43] No, okay.

Speaker 1:
[156:45] Without AI, I might add.

Speaker 2:
[156:46] Yeah, I don't know how artificial is Thomas.

Speaker 5:
[156:50] That's a good question.

Speaker 3:
[156:54] Absolutely.

Speaker 2:
[156:55] So about your intelligence, just your artificialness.

Speaker 3:
[157:00] Thomas GPT. I'm going to go over here to the, to the Macuso map tab now. And this is, if any of you have used map APIs and tried Google Maps API, you'll know that it's outrageously expensive. So we just switched to Mapbox, and boy, Mapbox is cool. So we can do all kinds of cool things, but this basically, over here, this QSoMap tab is basically an extension of QSoManager. So you've got all the same filters or a lot of the same filters, pretty much all the same filters. Really here, you can filter by whatever you want to, set a max of a thousand contacts so you don't crash your browser. And then you've got them keyed by color is band and shape is mode. And you've got all those up here, you can turn on map labels, you can either use, you've got all these different map label options, or you can turn them off if you don't like to see them. Customization is huge. We've got so many customizations right now, and we just dropped a whole bunch of new themes and the theme library where you can create your own theme and share it with everybody here. And that just dropped like yesterday or the day before, so.

Speaker 5:
[158:25] Very nice. And can you even have it do how easy is it like for an event, like a contest or whatever, where you're only mapping that one thing?

Speaker 3:
[158:34] Yeah, I'll show you that here in just a second. One of our power users, Terry KQ4MDM, has already dropped a Go Vols theme. He's a big Vols fan from Tennessee there, so he's got a map theme out for that. But yeah, if I go over here to like a contest, where's my, I need to go find, or a pod activation even would be, let me do a pod activation. It works the same either way, contest or pod activation or whatever. I'll grab this one here. If I go to my map, you've got all these same map options, all of them except the filtering. And I want to turn off globe view cause this looks really cool. Where is my, where's my globe view option?

Speaker 5:
[159:28] Vince, can you help him?

Speaker 4:
[159:31] Yeah, no, I'm sorry.

Speaker 3:
[159:33] I need, I need IT support, Vince. Tell me how to use my software. But yeah.

Speaker 2:
[159:38] Hang on, it was, it was, it was go back a screen.

Speaker 3:
[159:42] Yeah. Can you still see that?

Speaker 5:
[159:44] Yeah, it's very nice.

Speaker 3:
[159:45] Yeah. So yeah, you can put a full screen. You can literally stick that full screen up on, you know, up on another monitor and, and run that during a contest or something, you know? So people can watch those contacts. We've got a pop out view right here where you can pop it out into its own window, put it up on the wall and let people, let people watch it during the, during the contest.

Speaker 1:
[160:05] So I have a contesting, this prompted me to think about field day. Do you have the ability to network multiple clients to a central logging server?

Speaker 3:
[160:15] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[160:16] Let us, tell us about that.

Speaker 3:
[160:17] This is awesome. This is the, if you have an internet connection, if you have an internet connection, this is the best multi-operating system ever, especially with the new desktop app. So all you have to do is create a club account and everybody logs into the club account. That's all you have to do. You're literally all there. You're all logging to the same logbook now. The issue we ran into is the web app is designed to work with a local cat control client. And so every time somebody would adjust their, adjust the frequency on the cat control client, it would change it on everybody's weblog. So that was the big outch. But with the advent of the desktop app, here in just a couple of weeks, we're going to be fully integrating cat control into the desktop app. So now everybody's got their own desktop app with cat control all packaged on their own device. They're all still logging to the same cloud account.

Speaker 1:
[161:16] So what happens if you don't have internet access, as is the case with a field deck?

Speaker 3:
[161:23] Yeah. So if you don't have internet access, then you're all going to be logging locally. So the issue here is that you're not going to see dupes and what everybody's doing all at the same time. As soon as you go back, honestly, we're in some research and design phases for how to solve this in a really efficient way. But we haven't got quite there yet with the offline thing. But currently, you can all still log locally. As soon as you get an internet connection, everybody's contact syncs back to the cloud account.

Speaker 1:
[162:00] So I'm sure there's like a thousand items on the to-do list, right? So we could all come up with a bunch of things.

Speaker 3:
[162:06] Maybe you should add a couple zeros to that number.

Speaker 1:
[162:10] But I think one of the use cases, if you want to focus on portable or contesting, the field day is the biggest contest, right? It's the biggest operating event. You can't bet on internet access. So it would be great if there's a way to have a multi-client LAN and have either a designated server or everybody could be a server. Like in the case of N3FJP, they got it all wired. So everybody on the network mirrors everything. You can also have a server if you want. One of the best things about that, by the way, and what got me thinking about it is looking at your maps, your beautiful graphics. Because one of the most popular things that we do with the software is we put a large monitor set up where the public can see it, and we put the map of North America. Every time we make a contact in a section, that section gets filled in on the map. So we've had like Forest Service Rangers come by like, what are you doing? We can stand at that map and explain what's going on, and they're like, oh, we get it. So when I see some of these really cool graphics you guys are doing, I would love to be able to use that stuff at Field Day, and you need this other back-end stuff to make it really useful.

Speaker 3:
[163:31] Yeah, absolutely. Honestly, I was going to talk about this a bit later, but I'll go ahead and talk about it now. We are the official software leaderboard host for WRTC 2026, World Radio Support Team Championship. And that's what I was testing on the Raspberry Pi earlier, is we are developing a system for everybody to stream, like they're teams of two, streaming into this Raspberry Pi, then sending it up to a public leaderboard. So, that honestly is a really good groundwork, if we decide to approach it that way, that's one way to do it, is to have just a central device that everybody streams to in that way. And I think that's, you know, I struggle because I'm not the best networker in the world and I'm trying to learn. It feels like there has to be an easier way to do this, but, you know, that is the groundwork and if we decide to go that route. And yeah, and that is, you know, that's coming up in July, so we're really excited about that. That's a big event.

Speaker 1:
[164:45] So maybe, I'm sort of beating on this field day thing.

Speaker 3:
[164:49] Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 1:
[164:50] Because it's a big space and I think it could use some improvement. And if you did what you're describing, where you had, let's say, a device, Raspberry Pi would be fine or whatever, that was on the land where everybody's logs are maybe locally stored plus sent to that database. And you could do real-time dupe checking, which is important. And then if you had the option, if you do have an internet connection, to then stream that somewhere, so there's a public leaderboard, even better. So like at our field days, more recently, we've had Starlink terminals at field day, but we really don't want like every client going over to Starlink to the cloud and back, and what if we lose the Starlink connection? So we have to be autonomous. But the option to be able to also stream to a leaderboard in the cloud for field day would be awesome.

Speaker 3:
[165:41] Oh yeah, absolutely. And you know, that's the goal here. And honestly, this should, once we take that step, this should directly integrate with our contesting leaderboards that I was showing you earlier, which will be really, really cool. And maybe one of the reasons we approached in this order is one, we wanted to get the concept testing system out there and let it work. And you know, people start giving us feedback so that we can improve. Two, so many people have an internet connection anymore, even remotely. Starlink has changed that. You got like these just cell services like T-Mobile are sending internet all over. It's changed the game and so many people have internet anyway that it's almost it's getting to the point where it's it's it's almost like, you know, you've got the internet, use it. But at the same time, there are still many, many, many people who do not have that in their in their in their tool kit. So this is this is the we did a lot of, you know, we did a lot of research through. We worked very closely with the winter field day team this year and had a huge turnout. It was an awesome winter field day event for us. And we worked really closely with them and got a lot of great feedback on, you know, on how some clubs used it and the things they liked and the things they wanted to see some improvements on and how we can make it better. So we're, you know, we're planning on implementing that. Some of it by field day, some of it by next winter field day. So, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[167:15] My opinion is that if you do not offer some method of operating offline as a group, yeah, that that's a showstopper for so many use cases.

Speaker 3:
[167:29] Yeah, yeah. And I did not mean to say that we're not going down. We absolutely are going to try to, we're trying to come up with the easiest way to do that with as little hardware as possible, a little extra hardware as possible. So, you know, it's kind of a, we're trying to balance the trade-offs, but we absolutely are pursuing that. It just, you know, I was just making the point, you know, that there's so many people have internet, but so many don't. So this is a great conversation for me to hear this feedback and be like, hey, here's some, you know, here's some great ideas for us.

Speaker 1:
[168:04] Well, I think in some of these activities, there's kind of a list of must haves. So like field day is really kind of a, maybe field day, winter field day kind of unique because it's, you can't guarantee internet connectivity. So there's some definite must haves, you know, multi-client, like Mark said, not connected to the internet, dupe checking. I mean, there's a very specific list of must haves, but it's not that much, you know?

Speaker 3:
[168:30] Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[168:32] So hopefully, I mean, I totally appreciate that, like there's a lot to do and you got to pick and choose your balance. So there's no criticism at all on that. I'm just saying that I think that'd be a very popular mode to double down on.

Speaker 3:
[168:45] Absolutely. And you can see here that we've really leaned hard into sharing maps on social media, like really hard. And so we've got some really cool views here with some stats along the side, that type of thing. So if you want to share, we've got a program even called Mugs for Map Shares where we send out, we pick five winners every month, send them a mug that's got World Radio League logo on one side and CW chart on the other. And people really love doing that.

Speaker 5:
[169:16] So that's really cool.

Speaker 3:
[169:17] Yeah, absolutely. And we also just introduced a new mug that has like the World Radio League like this. I think it's got this logo, the 73, our 73 logo with the World Radio League and Ham Radio Prep labels and logos on it. And it has cue codes and their definitions on the other side. So, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[169:39] So I'm going to ask you kind of an unfair question. You can choose to answer or not. So, if someone doesn't know everything about all the logging programs out there, what's the use case or what's the reason why someone would use this versus something else? Is there anything that this doesn't do that another thing is better at or the future who knows? But right at the moment, what is this really the sweet spot for what you guys are doing? And what might be a situation where they would be better off with something else for the time being?

Speaker 3:
[170:12] Well, you asked the right guy because right or wrong, I have answered this question many, many times. And so I would say number one, the modern interface as opposed to some of the other, there are great modern options out there. Don't get me wrong. We are in an era where there are many great options that are developed and are being developed. We're working on an API so that people can use those options and those developers can pop our API in and sync to your World Radio League account. So we are not opposed to there being other fantastic options on the market. That's incredible. This is this does have a a fully. What's the word? A fully accredited team of developers behind it. It's not just one guy in his basement with his AI tool, hammering out AI generated code only, which there is some of that. But it's not the main focus. We have four amazing, amazing developers, and they are just absolutely incredible, and they're working hard on it. This is their full-time job, is World Radio League. And so they are in Ham Radio prep, they are working all the time to make this better and better. Customer service, we have an incredible customer service team. You submit a bug report, you'll get a response probably within 24 hours, maybe 48 at the most, but usually one or two. We are on top of it, and we've got some great folks over there in the customer service department. We're constantly advancing, and talk about scope creep, man. I mean, not that it wasn't in the original scope, but we are broadening our horizons in so many different ways, and it's so awesome to be a part of it. We've got a great team of about, I think we've got 13 people on the team working on this thing, and it's just absolutely a blast to work with them. Like I said, these are people working full time to make this the best platform, and I don't want to say that... How do I put this? World Radio League is an awesome logger, but in the future, I can see it not primarily being a logging interface. It is a modern cloud storage and source of truth for all of your Ham Radio data, all of your Ham Radio tools, your spotting sources, which integrate great with your logging interface. And if you want to use our logging interface, awesome. It's just the best way to do it. But like I said, we're going to be working on an API where you can send your logs across from a different logger into World Radio League, into your source of truth so you can have all those. You can still operate on the contest leaderboards. You can still operate on so many of our great tools here. And if you want to go do a pod activation, you can grab your World Radio League app out and go do one. But yeah, it's really becoming that source of truth. Live contesting is such a huge thing. We're working on putting together a fully featured contest scoring engine. We haven't got full contest scoring. We did for Winterfield Day, but we haven't for all the contests. And we're working on that. And just those live scored contests is such a cool thing. It is so awesome to have those live scores on the leaderboard going up and down and it's really great.

Speaker 1:
[174:27] I was really impressed with the rate of development. And so when you're explaining how many people are working on it, I can see why. So you get a bunch of clever people that are really motivated and you could really do some great stuff.

Speaker 3:
[174:38] We literally pulled off, and I'm sure there are some of you who understand how momentous a task this is, because I mean, we're dealing with literally, I can't remember. We were, I think we're pumping in at least half a million contacts a week, people uploading, importing and logging. And you know, we back in, I think we started in July and wrapped in September, we did a full database switch. Our database service was becoming very constricted. The one we started with was very restrictive for what we were doing and was not helping us very much. So we switched to an entirely new SQL based database live, literally live. And I mean, it put us back by a couple months in our development timeline. But I mean, what an awesome team that I get to call my co-workers, that we're able to pull that off. It was so incredible.

Speaker 1:
[175:43] So I think we're going to head towards wrapping up here. My fear is that there's probably three more hours of stuff we could talk about.

Speaker 3:
[175:50] Absolutely. There are many more hours to talk about.

Speaker 1:
[175:54] Yes.

Speaker 4:
[175:56] But the SD card is only so big.

Speaker 1:
[175:59] Exactly. So before we wrap up, does anybody have any other questions before we-

Speaker 3:
[176:05] Can I throw one more thing out there? So let me pull up our- Let me pull up our. worldradioleague.com without the app at the beginning. There we go. This is our regular database. I think we have our pricing list here.

Speaker 5:
[176:29] That was going to be one of my questions.

Speaker 3:
[176:31] Yeah. Let me pull it up on the regular site. Just George, we may have to insert a brief cut when I scroll past my credit card information. So-

Speaker 1:
[176:41] No, we'll just leave it in.

Speaker 4:
[176:47] No, but Vince may have to do some video editing.

Speaker 3:
[176:52] There we go. Okay. So if we look here, this is our cost table. So free plan, you get unlimited logging, 20,000 imported contacts. This is the free plan. You get samples of some of our analytics. You get the logbook analytics, which is- I don't know if I showed you that or not. I'll look at that when we're done just real briefly. QRZ integration, that is with- let's see here. Yes, you get call sign lookup and imports. You get LOTW import and you get access to our community. The things that the basic plan gives you extra, you get bumped up to 50,000 imported. Now, remember, all logging is totally free. These are just import limits because of cloud processing and all that stuff. You get some of these analytics and dashboards. You get full access to some of those. QRZ import and export. And whenever we implement the LOTW export, you'll get that as well. Get some NAP icon awards and some coupons for some of our store merch. Premium, that import limit is bumped up to 300,000 contacts. Now, I forgot to mention basic is $36 a year. Premium, $60 a year, that equates to $5 a month. And VIP is $108 a year, which equates to $9 a month. And we have a lifetime VIP option that's $895. So, premium gets you bumped up to 300,000 contacts imported. And that's the primary addition, except that you do get QRZ and LOTW confirmation checks and imports. And then you get some PDF printable awards. And then on VIP, you're bumped up to unlimited imports and all of the above with some VIP community access. And lifetime VIP is just a permanent extension of that. So, yeah, where did it go? Here it is. The stats that I referenced are here. These are shareable on social media as well. But you get stats like your operating time, QSOS per hour, a graph that shows you how many QSOS you made in which hour. And you get your longest contact, average distance, top bands, top modes, number of DX works, states worked, all that good stuff. And you can share that.

Speaker 1:
[179:42] So it's pretty impressive. Any last questions before we wrap guys?

Speaker 2:
[179:50] Nothing for me.

Speaker 5:
[179:51] Thank you very thorough. Thank you.

Speaker 3:
[179:54] Thank you very much. I did not. I failed to show you the mobile app. If I have time, I'm just going to just pull it up real quickly so you can see what it looks like. And I won't go too deep on it.

Speaker 1:
[180:08] I'm just so I think we figured out why the show goes late. I thought it was me.

Speaker 3:
[180:16] You just need me out every week to make sure you go later.

Speaker 4:
[180:20] George, you did not say you thought it was you. You used to say you thought it was Mark.

Speaker 1:
[180:25] Oh, I still think it's Mark. But when he's not on the show and it still goes late, that blows my theory.

Speaker 4:
[180:30] Well, yeah, that's true.

Speaker 2:
[180:31] Imagine that.

Speaker 1:
[180:32] Imagine that.

Speaker 3:
[180:33] I'm running this on my M-series Mac, of course, so it looks a little funny. But you can see, this is our app. You can create a new POTA activation, find your park. It does a little location lookup on a phone. Of course, it's easier than trying to do it on a computer, but it does a little location lookup. You create your logbook based off of that, and it auto assigns a name, auto assigns the location so that your maps are all right. And yeah, we have POTA auto spot. You can send your spot to the POTA website.

Speaker 1:
[181:05] So I use this on...

Speaker 3:
[181:07] And we have a band conditions widget that's available on the mobile and web.

Speaker 1:
[181:10] I forget if it's on an iPad or an Android tablet, but it was really great to use it on the tablet because I wanted something kind of small and thin to take and not take a PC. And it was great. I really, really enjoyed the mobile tablet version of that.

Speaker 3:
[181:25] Yeah, absolutely. And like I said, we just launched our desktop app. So go give that a try. You know, if you want to like take your laptop out on a PODA activation or something and you don't have internet, it's a great option. And just to sneak peek on the new stuff we're working on, we're working on a kind of a ham clock style dashboard. So, you know, we're going to have all these widgets. This is a very early prototype. We're going to have all these cool widgets like the spot radar and the, you know, the beam head. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. This is really cool because you can click on these spots and it shows you who's there, you know, what it looks like from your location.

Speaker 5:
[182:07] And then you click on the country that you want to work and it like sets there. It makes their iPhones go off in the middle of the night and tells them to go to the radio.

Speaker 2:
[182:16] That's a useful feature.

Speaker 5:
[182:18] Yeah, that would be an awesome feature.

Speaker 3:
[182:19] Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah, no, we don't have that one yet, maybe next time you have me on, we'll have that.

Speaker 1:
[182:26] So I think we have to have you come back because there's more stuff we want to talk about.

Speaker 3:
[182:29] Yeah, I didn't even show you the desktop app yet.

Speaker 1:
[182:31] All right. So after Hamvention, come on back. We'll get you back on, show us the desktop version. By then you'll have all the rig control and all that jazz work.

Speaker 3:
[182:42] Yeah, I can even show you some of our Ham Radio prep stuff. We just launched a new podocore server there, it parks on the air.

Speaker 1:
[182:48] So I also want you to demonstrate the field day version of this when you come back. So just put that on your list.

Speaker 3:
[182:56] Absolutely. Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 1:
[182:57] Andy, thank you so much. Thank you so much. We could chat with you for a long time here, it'd be great. But thanks all very much, everybody for being on the show today. Andy, thank you so much for being our guest. We'd love to have you back. And so that'll do it for now. So from all of us at the Ham Radio Workbench, 73.

Speaker 3:
[183:14] Seventy two and seventy three, everybody. And thank you so much, guys.

Speaker 2:
[183:19] Be good humans.

Speaker 1:
[183:20] Good day.