W3GMS Monday Night Workbench Net

In this week’s 985 Workbench, hosted by Ron (WA3VEE) from West Chester, PA, the group dives deep into all things ham radio—from tower-raising tales to a lively discussion on Linux for the modern shack. Operators share updates from the New Holland Hamfest, progress on Joe’s massive tower project, and the challenges (and victories) of running Windows software on Linux Mint, Ubuntu, and even Raspberry Pi setups.

With great stories from familiar voices like CR, Chuck (NA3CW), Bill (KC3OOK), Jim (AF3Z), and Simon (KD3BPI), this episode covers everything from grounding rods to GUI interfaces—with a side of humor, tech tips, and camaraderie that makes 985 a Monday-night favorite.

📻 Highlights:

Tower base installation success and near-misses
Linux for ham radio: Mint, Ubuntu, Wine, and beyond
Hamfest finds and classic gear restoration
Real-world shack challenges and solutions
Community check-ins from Pennsylvania to Massachusetts

What is W3GMS Monday Night Workbench Net?

Every Monday Evening at 8pm Eastern Time, the W3GMS/R Crew get together on the repeater at 146.985Mhz and discuss technical questions and sometimes do lessons related to Ham Radio for newer Operators to learn from experienced Elmers. The Workbench was set up to be a safe place for any technical questions to get asked and good answers to be given.

Thank you.

Good evening. Welcome to the 985 Workbench.

My name is Ron. My call sign is WA3VEE, and I'll be your host for this edition of the 985 Workbench.

I'm located in Westchester, Pennsylvania. We meet every Monday night at 8 p.m. local time on the W3GMS Parksburg Repeater, 146-985. The PL tone to access the repeater is 100 hertz. For those who use tone squelch on receive, the repeater transmits a squelch tone of 94.8 hertz.

Newcomers are very welcome. We encourage all stations, though, to check in.

Take a look at the repeater website, located at www.w3gmsrepeater.com. It has lots of information, including technical articles, pictures of 985 users in action, and repeater etiquette and history.

Please be aware that on occasion, the repeater experiences intermod interference. Please run maximum power, or be prepared to check in digitally through Echolink or AllStar.

We want to hear you. To be able to use Echolink or AllStar on 985, you need to pre-register with us. Directions for doing so can be found on the website, w3gmsrepeater.com.

Also, when your mod is present before starting a transmission, give a short call. Am I getting in okay?

Once the host, who is me, confers that you are or are not, then you can share your longer comments if you're getting in okay.

Here on the workbench, we focus on answering general questions of radio theory and operation.

Additionally, we invite each station to briefly comment on your amateur radio activity or activities in the past week.

When checking in, please indicate if you have a question for the workbench.

If you don't have a question, please still check in.

After all stations have checked in, we will first share what we've done this past week using a roundtable format.

Please write down the call of the station that checks in right after you.

When you have finished your comments, turn the mic over to that station.

Once we have made our comments, we will start the question and answer portion of the workbench operating as a directed net.

I will call on a station that indicated having a question and then for stations who wish to respond to that question.

Wait to be recognized by net control before beginning a transmission.

This helps us handle the questions efficiently and keeps the net running smoothly.

At times, it helps for two stations to pass the mic back and forth to help clarify a situation or to ask additional questions.

Feel free to do that as needed and then pass it back to net control.

Some things to remember.

Don't be too quick to talk.

Take a couple seconds before hitting the press to talk switch.

This is good repeater etiquette and the pauses are especially helpful to those on All Star and Echo Inc.

When you do click the PTT button, wait a second or so before starting to talk.

We don't want to miss what you have to say first or your prefix on your call sign.

It takes a moment for the repeater to begin processing your PL tone.

Also, the repeater has a three-minute timer.

If you talk for more than three minutes without letting up on your mic button, the repeater completely shuts down until you release your PTT.

So, every two to three minutes, especially on RF, release the mic button for just a moment like this.

You can continue.

It's not necessary to let the repeater carrier drop.

Before we begin, I want to say thanks to all of my fellow Workbench hosts.

They are the ones who make this happen.

You may be interested in hosting your Workbench.

Please contact Jim, AF3Z, or any of us, and we'll help you get started.

Lastly, please join us this Thursday at 8 p.m. for the 985 Roundtable.

At this time, we're going to start the check-in process.

Remember to indicate if you have a question for the group.

We're going to start with digital stations, those using only Echo Link or All Star first.

I will leave long pauses to make it easier for you folks on digital to get in.

So, pardon the long pauses of dead air.

Just waiting to make sure everybody has a chance on digital to get in.

So, digital stations only, those using Echo Link or All Star.

It's your turn to check in.

This is WA3VEE, and you're listening to the 985 Workbench.

Check-ins digital only now.

Whiskey 8, Charlie Romeo Whiskey, CR, no question.

I acknowledge CR.

If there are any additional digital stations, Echo Link or All Star, please call now.

Now we will take RF and other digital stations.

Please spread them out a bit in case there are other digital stations who have not had a chance to check in.

So, all stations, RF and digital, please call now.

NA3CW no questions.

KC300K no question.

AF3Z no question.

KC3SQI no questions.

That's correct Ron, this is Frank, a new gun.

Very good, well you have a noisy signal but we can copy you and welcome, absolute welcome tonight.

Let's continue the check in process. RF and digital check ins, please continue to check in. This is WA3 VEE.

This is KC3SCY.

Spot 3 Foxtrot, Foxtrot, no questions.

Let's stop right there and boy we got some great check ins tonight here. So let's go down the list and let me see if there are any corrections and make sure I captured everybody.

You have CRWHCRW, KC3RFG, KB3MNA, Chris good to hear you tonight. Good signal by the way, a little noisy but good signal.

NA3CW, KC3OOK, AF3Z, glad to have you on board. I don't know what happened to your photography meeting but glad to have you here Jim.

KC3SQI, KC3SQI, KD3BWLFrank, welcome aboard and welcome to 985.

I'm going to get squared away and get your email put on QRZ so I can send you some info.

KC3SCY, I want to come back to you in just a second, Luke. I got a question for you. Good to have you on board.

And Renee, my goodness, glad to have you on board. K3FOXFOX. Excellent, excellent, excellent. Luke, just for a second. KC3SCY, would you like me to put you at the top of the list?

No need for that and I have no question. Back to you, this is KC3SCY.

Luke, very, very good. Let me give one more call here for check-ins before we get the round table portion started.

This is the 985 Workbench. Your host is Ron, WA3VEE in Westchester.

and calling for digital or RF check-ins for the 985 Workbench. Please call now before we get started.

This is Kilo Delta 3, Bravo, Papa India. That's KD3BPR.

Very good, Simon. Got you at the end of the list here. We're going to run down the list again.

By the way, I have my son on here, KB3MNA, so we need to hook you two guys up. That's for sure. He's up in Lionville.

So you'll be part of my simplex, little simplex network over here.

Alright, so it's WHCRW, KC3RFG, KB3MNA, NA3CW, KC3OOK, AF3Z, KC3SQI, KD3BWL, KC3SCY, K3FF, KD3BPI.

Are there any of you guys out there have any questions tonight? I have no questions on the docket.

So if anybody has a question, let me know before we get started.

Sounds like we'll be talking about crickets tonight. Excellent.

CR, what did you do in ham radio this week? Take about a minute and tell us.

WHCRW, WA3VE.

Very good, Ron, and thanks for taking the chair tonight. Good evening all. This is CR.

And let's see, this week in ham radio, nothing special. Just a normal 985 activities, some nets on some other frequencies.

And I played a minor role the other day up at Joe's assisting with the first phase of the tower lift.

With that, let's go to Jim.

KC3RFG, WHCRW.

This is KC3RFG. Thank you, CR. Jim here in Malvern. And also a short report from this station, unfortunately.

Not too much activity this week. The normal nets and some 985 activity, but not much else happening in the shack.

We've been outside a lot. So with that, I will pass it over to Chris, KB3MNA from KC3RFG.

Thank you, KC3RFG. This is KB3MNA. Thanks for having me, Dad. Good to be on again.

I will also keep it relatively short. I don't have anything going on too much with radio.

Still trying to get my home setup situated a little bit. Taking longer than I thought it would, mostly because there's not a ladder to my attic.

So I kind of have to make my own ladder and get up in there and kind of set things up the way I want them to.

But something still technical, but non-radio related. I've been getting into setting up the Linux operating system on my home computer.

So that's been pretty interesting. Getting to root around and dig around to some technical software stuff.

And who knows, I might be able to tie that in with radio somewhere down the line.

But other than that, yeah, that's pretty much everything I've got going on. So with that, I will hand it over to NA3CW. This is KB3MNA.

Thank you, Chris. KB3MNA. NA3CW. Well, the big story in action news is, of course, Joe's Tower got planted.

It's not up, but it's planted. And I'll let Bill go through the details of that one.

But currently the base unit is bolted firmly to the earth and the tower is on its hinge, laying over on its side.

And when Joe gets back in circulation, there are very few things that need to be done to put it up and use it.

So, kudos to Bill and as well Scott for their great help and experience and equipment.

Bill had all kinds of heavy-duty drilling stuff and experience with rods and epoxy and concrete.

And the most valuable player of the game was Scott's large heavy-duty engine hoist in the back of a car trailer.

And with a remote-controllable hoist that was able to help us to get the old tower picked up and carried out of the way.

And the new tower put in place and held securely while we made it to its base.

So, it was a good day.

Things got done. Any mistakes were easily rectified.

And nobody got hurt, as far as I know.

A very good day indeed.

And then the other thing, a good day for me, was this past week Pico got rid of its line noise that was driving me nuts since July.

It was a lightning hit.

Blew up a lightning arrester and caused it to arc and buzz 24 hours a day at S9 to 10 overnight.

And that is now gone.

So, I was on the PMAM net.

I was running the PMAM net on 75 meters yesterday in Joe's absence.

And, well, his absence because his antenna is on the ground.

And it was a pleasure to be able to use my receiver again to hear these guys direct instead of relying exclusively on an online receiver.

which is, they could be a godsend, but it was nice to be able to do it directly as well.

So, over to Mr. Bill, KC-300K, NA3CW.

NA3CW, KC-300K.

Thanks Chuck and Ron.

Thanks for taking the chair tonight.

We've got a nice group in here.

Well, for me, I'll get to the insignificant things first.

Not all that insignificant.

But, of course, the 985 round table.

Saturday night, I did south control for the simplex net.

We only had two net controls.

So, I had a lot of contacts.

And publication was actually very, very good.

I had contacts from Glen Burnie, Maryland, York, Lebanon, Lancaster, Chester, of course.

And, Jeff, N3RBG said he was hearing me up in Plymouth meeting.

So, it was kind of fun when the bands were open.

Yeah, but as Chuck alluded to, the big event was the culmination of, Chuck, you'll have to say how many years you and Joe have been working on this.

I came into this on the tail end.

But the culmination of that, as Chuck said, it is planted.

And the base plate on this base section is a half-inch thick, 36-by-36-inch piece of stainless steel plate.

And the bolts, the existing anchor bolts are in the center of it.

Massive bolts, but they're in the center.

And we stood the tower up for the first time.

It rolled the back of that plate up 3/8 of an inch.

So, we were able to, there were many other holes in it, fortunately.

So, we were able to drill and epoxy it.

And, yeah, Chuck, you said without mistakes.

Well, there was one that I didn't tell anybody.

But, Scott was able to help me resolve it today.

We had epoxy between the concrete and the steel plate where each bolt was.

And that stuff is really hard.

But we were able to chip it all out around each bolt and draw it all the way back down to the concrete.

So, I'm feeling a whole lot better tonight.

A whole lot better.

So, with that, I'll turn it over to Jim.

Hopefully, he's feeling great, too.

AF3Z, KC3O, OK.

AF3Z, OK, Bill.

Just getting a little extra pause there.

I laughed out loud when you say there was one thing you didn't tell anybody.

And I could see how that could be a problem.

So, I'm glad that worked out for you.

I guess I said it, but anyway.

AF3Z.

And, yes, Ron, I am here earlier than I thought.

But, normally our camera club meetings start at 7:00.

Today it started at 4:30.

Some of you may know about the Star Barn.

It was along Route 283 up here in Old Barn.

And people were trying to save it.

It was sort of a landmark.

And, finally, somebody did take it.

But they relocated it.

And it's part of this -- I don't even know how to describe it.

It's called Stone Gables Estate, I think.

And it's a wedding venue and other kinds of stuff like that.

But they rebuilt it and, you know, moved it and built it and whatnot.

It's quite an amazing place.

So, anyway, our camera club was able to get up there for several hours to just take pictures.

And with the sun getting down so early, it was getting pretty dark.

And I was done anyway, so I headed out.

So that's why I'm back in time for the round table tonight.

Or, yeah, workbench.

So that's a scoop on that.

And I do have -- sort of like my question last week -- I have another question that might be interesting if you need one, Ron.

Well, it's sort of a personal question.

It's sort of like last week, kind of a discussion question or sharing question.

So that's it.

And the other thing, reporting back, some of you will remember a long time ago.

I shared about an electrical problem I was having.

And you guys diagnosed it correctly as a bad neutral coming into the house.

And so they put this temporary transformer thing out back to get me back in business.

And today the guy stopped for the initial thing of getting the actual new line put into the house to replace the old one.

And so he was checking it out and doing the 911 -- not 911.

What's the call they do for -- I just lost it.

But he was going to get, you know, checked out to see what else is underground before they do the work.

Excuse me. It's clogged up here.

So they're finally getting around to the finishing touches on the project.

But from my point of view, it's been fixed for a while because that transformer out back does the job.

And what else ham radio-wise? Not a whole lot.

A little bit of CW here, there.

And that's about it.

And round table and stuff like that.

So who's next here?

Wayne.

KC3SQI.

This is AF3Z.

This is KC3SQI.

A little bit more getting things about ready to go.

Still have to get the two meter off of the garage roof and get it mounted onto the new mast and get a little more distance between the antenna and the TV antenna so that the wife can watch the football and I can actually get on the radio.

I did try to check in with John on the old folks net.

Ten meters.

I did try to check in with John on the old folks net.

I didn't quite make the contact but at least he heard me.

Couldn't make the name.

So I thought there was another local person so I went up a couple megahertz and sat there and finally got an opening and put the car in the house.

And it was, you know, he was coming in with 20 over 9.

So I really thought he was local and he was talking about doing a lot of TX and that's what he likes.

And none of the people in his club could help him.

So, you know, I suggested he come over and, you know, ask some questions on this net.

Then I found out he was in New Mexico so that was something else.

He said that my roof signal was coming in with 10 over 9 in New Mexico.

So, 10 meters must have been open but I didn't realize it.

So, anyway, that's about all I've got.

If I'm not in for the rest of it, I just got an implant put into my jaw this morning.

And my jaw is a little bit sore from having the dentist crawl around my mouth for an hour or so.

So, with that I'll turn it over to KD3BWL. This is KC3SQI.

KD3BWL. This is KC3SQI.

Thank you.

Nonetheless, I tried hearing you on the input as well over here down by the hospital, and I can't even copy you.

So, unfortunately, we're going to try to get through the list here and give you one more shot and see if you can make it.

But I just thought I'd let you know.

So let me turn it over to Luke here to continue the list.

KC3SCY to take it, WA3VE.

This is KC3SCY.

And, Ron, thanks for hosting.

Yeah, I wasn't hearing him on the input at all.

So, anyway, good to hear everybody on the net today.

This week in ham radio.

I haven't been too busy.

I've tried to get on some CW a little bit, get my CW speed up.

I think I'm about 18, 19 words a minute right now.

My goal is 20, but I haven't had a ton of time to get on CW, so I've kind of just been sitting around 18, 19 words a minute.

I was over at Joe's on Saturday.

I don't know how much assist I was, but we were over there doing the tower projects for Joe.

So they brought over the 400-pound base and mounted that all down super sturdy to the ground.

And then they cranked up the tower.

But, like Bill said, it flexed.

So we had to put some more bolts in and put back down.

So now, once it dries and it's all tightened up, I'm pretty sure next time all they have to do is put on all the cables for the rotor, antennas, stuff like that.

And then, of course, put on his vertical and the arm that the dipole will attach to.

So I'll keep it moving, and I'll turn it over to, I think it's K3FF.

This is KC3SCY.

Thank you, Luke.

It's K3FF.

First of all, I want to thank Ron for inviting me to the internet.

It's great.

Looks like a great group of guys.

And I'm enjoying it.

I'll be here again, I'm sure.

What did I do this week?

Well, this weekend was busy with ham fests.

We're selling some equipment, and we did real well.

What was encouraging about it was that the rigs, which are 1980s, 1990 versions that have been restored,

in fact, all of them went to young hams or new hams.

And I think that's very good.

I'm glad to see somebody that young people are still coming into the hobby.

Looking at you, Luke.

And what else?

Oh, I've been spending the rest of the week both preparing for the DX contest at the end of the month

and restoring rigs.

Let's see.

Working on a 570.

An old FT1, which is a really nice old rig.

And an IC746 Pro.

And my only comment is that, well, I do like to work on rigs most of the time.

I spend more time trying to source parts for some of these old rigs than I do actually debugging.

So let's see.

I'll pass it on to Simon, I guess.

KD3.

I think it's BPI.

It's K3FF.

KD3BPI.

You got it right.

Thank you, Ron, for running the net tonight.

It's good to hear everyone.

And good to hear about the tower progress.

I've been listening in on GMS as I commute to and from work.

And it's cool to hear the progress.

And it's cool to hear the process as well of putting up the antenna and sort of restoring the used antenna mask.

Because I'm pretty sure whenever I get an antenna mask, probably not going to buy a new one.

Probably get a used one.

And so it's neat to hear about the work and what it takes.

My week in ham radio, well, every morning, every afternoon, I have my radio on in my car as I commute to and from work.

And sometimes I put my call out there.

Sometimes I just listen in.

And that's about the extent of it.

My home setup is pretty much finished for now.

I just need to organize my desk a little bit better.

I did just hook up.

I got a free speaker at the Kimberton Hamfest.

It's a large Motorola metal can one, 3 ohms impedance.

And I finally got the mating 3.5mm audio jack.

soldered a wire onto it.

And it works great.

It just works great.

It's of course very loud.

If you turn it up, it'll start to resonate a little bit.

But other than that, it's a great speaker.

Very heavy.

And it was free.

So can't argue with that.

Yeah.

Other than that, just keeping up with work.

I'm always happy to talk about what I do.

I do design and repair on avionics at a company up next in innovative solutions and support.

And we've been doing requalification of an auxiliary radio control unit, a Honeywell unit.

And the electroluminescent panels have been long discontinued.

The unit originally was first offered in 1993.

Perhaps even earlier.

It's an old unit.

And the panels, of course, fail.

And they're obsolete parts.

So we have to try to source a new one.

And it's a process.

A lot of testing.

A lot of testing to make sure these units are just as bright as they're supposed to be.

And with that, I'll turn it back to NET.

Thanks again, Ron.

WA3VEE.

This is KD3BPI.

Sorry, I foot slipped off the foot switch here.

This is WA3VEE.

And you're listening to the 985 Workbench on the W3GMS.

Parksburg, repair.

146-985.

So one more call for check-ins before I get my run down here.

It's busier than I thought I was.

This is WA3VEE.

Additional check-ins.

Any mood.

Please call now.

This is WA1RC.

WA3-KFT.

John here.

John, I acknowledge you, but right before you there was David.

Give me your call one more time slowly, please.

G-L-I.

Still be 1R-C.

Yes, very good.

And David, that was Kilowatt Alpha 3 Papa Lima, India.

Did I get that correct?

That's Gulf Lima, India.

Okay, great.

Well, welcome.

Absolutely.

Glad to have you on board tonight.

Glad all this recruiting I did is paying off, that's for sure.

And John, WA3KFT.

And Mr. Mike, W1RC.

So, David, how this works is we go through a roundtable portion here

where we spend one minute, and you'll be up next,

where we talk about what we did in ham radio in the past week.

And you will pass your microphone when you're done to John, WA3KFT,

and John, you'll pass it to Mr. Mike, W1RC up in Marblehead, Massachusetts.

So, David, one minute on what you did in ham radio in the last week.

KA3GLI WA3VEE with the workbench.

Hey Ron, WA3VEE KA3GLI.

I spoke with you, it might have been a week and a half ago now.

Anyway, I'm getting back into the hobby here.

And after a long absence.

And it seems like the time is right.

And so this past week I went to the Red Rose Ham Fest in New Holland.

And that was fun.

And upgraded myself to extra class, finally.

And it's been a long-term goal.

And then right after that I went to an electrical supply place and bought a ground rod for my home.

Since I have yet to set up an HAP station here.

So I'll be working on that the next little bit here, I guess.

So let's see.

I'll turn this over to John, I guess.

WA3 KFT KA3GLI.

WA3 GLI WA3 KFT.

Okay.

I hope the ground rod is 8 feet long.

Not 4 feet.

They're supposed to be 8 feet.

I have two towers.

And both towers have two 8-foot ground rods.

So I have tall lightning rods.

And that one tower with five vertical antennas on it.

You look at that and say, boy, that certainly will attract lightning with metal vertical antennas up there.

But they're all DC ground.

So they're basically tied to the tower, which is tied to Mother Earth.

So we're in good shape there.

I was at the Ham Fest this past Saturday.

And I managed to sell a few things.

I came out ahead of the game.

I covered my expenses and had some left over.

Which is a good thing.

And what I got rid of has been in my collection for quite some time.

And I'm happy to unload it.

Ron has been over to my house.

I know once.

So he knows how large a collection I have.

I think the oldest piece I have dates back into the 1920s or 1930s.

It's a transmitter.

And only a transmitter.

It uses crystals.

And I do not have the external power supply.

It is a five-meter transmitter.

And that's because television didn't exist.

Of New England to Mike.

W1RC.

WA3KFT.

Yeah.

WA3KFT.

And the Monday Night Workbench.

This is W1RC from Marblehead, Massachusetts.

What did I do last week in amateur area?

Well, I guess I went to the best Ham Fest there is.

Near Fest was last weekend.

Friday and Saturday.

Went up Thursday, got all set up,

had the volunteers cookout dinner on Thursday night,

and then we were there Friday night,

stayed over Thursday night, Friday night,

two days of flea marketing and running around

and looking at all the stuff and picking up some

and selling some and seeing a bunch of friends

and having a great time.

So that certainly was a very busy week in amateur radio,

but we didn't really get on the air that much.

It doesn't matter.

Hamfest counts as ham radio activities.

They sure do.

So I think I turn it back to Ron.

WA3VE, the net control traffic cop of the Monday night workbench,

this is W1RC.

Very, very good, Mike.

Well, one of these days you're going to convince me,

it won't take much more convincing for me to get up there,

my love for New England to begin with.

This is WA3VE, and this is the 985 workbench.

All very, very good.

Before we start the question and answer session here,

let me just quickly go over my list of stuff that happened here.

First of all, I had a great time, absolutely fun time,

talking about solar weather on Friday night to the Pottstown Area Amateur Radio Club.

And I'm going to send that presentation over to Joe if he wants to put it on the W3GMS repeater website.

What it did, or the reason I did that presentation very briefly is because I knew nothing about it.

And I volunteered to do it so I would know a little less than nothing about it, which I succeeded in doing.

So the bottom line is that I came up with a cheat sheet card that has the salient solar weather metrics of x-ray class and solar flare,

how many CMEs, coronal mass ejections there are or were, and what the solar wind is, and all this kind of good stuff.

And when you go on some of the sites like QRSA, you'll see a panel on there, and that panel basically has all the metrics,

also has current propagation conditions.

So now you can take this little tiny card.

You can say, oh, okay, KP is between this number and this number, and A is this, and so on and so forth.

Oh, okay, that means that I've got good propagation, et cetera, et cetera, or it's poor, or get ready to duck under the desk.

So that's what I basically titrated that down to.

A great group up there at Pottstown.

Of course, you folks remember that we invited them to our field day, and a couple of them came down to do that.

Very quickly, New Holland Ham Fest, you'll see pictures very soon about that.

Did see John up there, saw a whole bunch of people.

Renee was up there.

He's on our workbench here.

Check-in list tonight.

And Bob Z-I-M, Elizabeth and Corbin, a whole bunch of other 985ers, Jeff, J-A-M.

So Gene, K3DSM.

So it was great.

Spent most of the time up there talking with people and ended up going back to where I came from.

Essentially, I had gotten rid of an HP 8640AB, sorry, beautiful RF signal generator that I just did not have time to repair.

I got rid of that at basically almost gave it away at Mullica Hill.

Ended up getting a working one, but another one that doesn't work.

I know exactly what's wrong with it, though.

A beautiful signal generator and got both of those for $75.

So basically stole those.

And let's see, really quickly, after the Ham Fest, went over to Joe's and joined Chuck and C.R., Dylan, Scott, and a whole bunch of other people over there.

Bill especially and Joe.

And Luke was there, as he mentioned.

So got some photos there.

I'll be putting those together as well.

And that was quite an operation, no doubt about it.

So also coming up, looking forward to this coming weekend, the PA QSO party.

I worked almost all 67 counties from the QTH here last year.

So that should be pretty good.

RF Hill Ham Fest coming up on the 19th.

That's up in Percisee.

And also what we're going to be doing is, of course, the DX contest at the end of the month that somebody already mentioned.

And what we're going to start doing is taking some of these presentations that we're going to be doing, that I'm doing.

And we're going to be doing that.

And we're going to start a series of back to Ham Radio Basics as soon as we can get a hold of George and start to finish the K3DTS ARRL affiliation.

So lots going on all the way around.

So with that, let's see.

One more call for check-ins before we get started with the Q&A session.

This is WA3VE.

One last call for check-ins.

Please call now.

A couple other comments before I get started here with the question and answers.

Renee, I sent you a clip of what you sound like both through the repeater and direct.

And my compliments.

I don't know what you're running up there in Boyertown, but I have you on the input.

You'll hear it.

It's phenomenal.

It is just really a good signal down here tonight.

And John KFT, yes, I've seen your collection.

And all I have to say is I'm getting too fat to fit through your collection.

So we'll leave that at that.

So, oh, very good.

Okay.

Well, now I'll turn to the questions and answers here.

We encourage all stations to make comments, observations, and share experiences.

Don't assume that your level of experience and knowledge isn't enough.

We can all learn from each other and contribute to our discussions.

So feel free to pick up the mic and have some fun.

And I believe that Jim is the person with the questions.

So, Jim, you're up.

AF3Z, WA3VEE with the workbench.

All right.

Thank you, Ron.

I am still up, though I might be in bed soon.

Had a good day here.

Very busy.

And a lot of exercise, but good.

Yeah, my question bounces off of some of the pre-net discussion here about computers between you, Ron, and Chuck in A3CW.

And it's something I played around with in my head years ago, like 2003 or something or 5.

I played around a little bit with Linux.

But my question for us tonight is to move to Linux as your main computer.

What kinds of ham software?

One of the things that held me back was some of the key things I wanted to run for ham radio on a Linux machine didn't run there.

I didn't know how to use them.

But how easy is it to get set up on Linux, primarily for ham radio reasons, for me?

What software is available?

Anybody know what kinds of things are available for Linux?

Or how do you make such a transition?

Are there still Windows programs that you really can't get around any other way?

So that's sort of my general question.

Back to you, Ron.

AF3 is it.

And that's a golden goose egg question.

So let me turn it over to the group directly.

This is WA3VEE.

Comments and answers and wisdom for Jim.

If you go to Linux, I run Linux on a few laptops.

They're not my main computers.

But I play with them a lot.

And Linux has an application called Wine, W-I-N-E.

And that is a Windows emulation mode.

And if there's some software in Windows that you simply must run, you can run it under Wine and it will run fine on the Linux machine.

So don't be too timid about trying it out because you can always run stuff under that.

Windows has a similar thing to run Linux now in itself inside of Windows 11.

So each of them can emulate the other in a box and run each other's software.

So don't be too intimidated about that.

I know there's some software that you just can't get anywhere and they're written only from Windows.

So don't talk it out just because of that.

That's my comment.

KC3 RFG.

Back to net.

Comments.

I did not know that either.

Again, all of us are learning here, me especially.

Other comments for Jim.

This is W-A-3-V-E-E.

W-A-8-C-R-W.

Let me see.

Let me get you in here.

N-2-A-H-T.

Make sure I got the call correct.

And what's the name there?

This is Ted.

Tango Echo Delta.

Used to teach with you.

And I met you at the Ham Fest this weekend.

I have some Linux comments for you, Ron.

Ted, welcome.

I'm glad you finally made it on 985.

My goodness.

Like I said, my recruiting's paid off.

So meet Jim AF3Z and your comments.

And Jim, Ted used to be on my advisory committee for the college.

I've known him for decades.

So don't let him tell you how young he is.

Ted, your comments, please.

U-M-U-N-2-A-H-T.

W-A-3-V-E-E.

Please go ahead.

Very good, Ron.

I'm in the...

My battery's running down here.

I don't know how much I have left.

So I'll just throw out a couple of keywords for you.

In Linux, if you want to get started, a good way to get started is U-M-U-N-2.

Uniform, Bravo, Uniform, November, Tango, Uniform.

It's an African word.

Easy to install.

I use software that is Ubuntu based on all my computers.

I only run two Windows computers in this house.

And my wife is right now working FT8.

All the software that she's using, she used today to talk everywhere from, or contact everywhere from Australia to Europe.

It's like Ted's battery died on him there.

But let's come back to Ted to see if that's really the case.

Other comments for Jim.

This is W-A-3-V-E-E in the meantime.

CW, do you follow up?

Stand by one second.

Let me turn it over to Jim.

And Chuck, when you're done, turn it over to KC-3-RFG Jim.

NA3CW, WA3, V-E-E.

Since he was already on a slot there, let's go back to Jim.

R-FG.

Chuck, I just, Ted rattled my brain a little bit.

I forgot to mention, if you want to start in Linux, you have to install an operating system.

And Ubuntu is the most popular one.

I can also recommend Linux Mint.

Linux Mint looks and operates just like Windows.

It even has a start button.

So that's the second most popular.

And they both, Mint runs on Ubuntu software.

So they are the most prevalent and easy to get and easy to get programs for and all that.

There's also a third option called Zorin, Z-O-R-I-N.

And those are the three most popular distributions.

Back to you, Chuck.

Do I have it?

Thanks, Jim.

I have a house full of Linux Mint.

I have tried Ubuntu.

It's not as intuitive to me as Mint is because I'm an old Windows refugee.

Patty's been using it for years.

I use it for years.

We each have our own laptops in the living room that we run on our laps.

They're both Linux.

My mother-in-law runs Linux.

And she's not a technical person.

My non-technical sister runs Linux.

Linux Mint.

All these are Linux Mint.

And my Linux Mint group is growing.

That's my recommendation, obviously.

Now, what do you do?

The question, well, let me back up.

Wine.

Some things run on wine and some things don't run on wine.

And by the way, wine is an emulator, but it stands for wine is not an emulator.

Go figure.

Some things will run on wine and some things won't.

And some things run somewhat on wine and some things don't.

So that's kind of, it depends.

In my case, I have my daily driver.

And Joe's running Linux Mint as well.

My daily drivers are all Linux Mint.

However, I have a virtual machine with Windows 10 that I've had that for a long time.

Because there's some programs, especially engineering design programs, that are just not available under Linux.

One is my favorite, Antenna Simulator.

Easy Neck.

It's not available under Linux.

It will not run on wine.

My favorite PC board program is DipTrace.

It will run on a wine, but occasionally it hangs up, but it runs much better under Windows.

And so on.

The only thing that, now you can get Linux-based antenna simulators, but it's not as easy to run as Easy Neck.

You can get Office packages for free.

Actually, Linux Mint comes with an Office package called LibreOffice, but it's not as compatible with Microsoft Office documents as is another one that I use, which is called FreeOffice.

And that works with, interacts with Microsoft Office documents very, very well.

So it's about, I would say, in the last six months, my main reason of going to my Linux virtual, I mean my Windows virtual machine, which lives inside of Linux, is to keep Windows updated.

There is one database program that I really like.

On a rare instance, I need a database program, and that's called Microsoft Access.

And that's what I will be using this Thanksgiving for the local Thanksgiving dinner distribution that the Consortium of Churches in Parksburg are running.

And I make up the labels, and it's a whole lot easier to do it in a proper database than any other way I know.

And they've tried others, and they don't work very well.

So we talk about ham radio software.

There's quite a bit of ham radio software that is available in Linux, quite a bit.

But it gets down to, in all cases, what is the very specific stuff that you want to run.

And, you know, check it out from there.

But as far as daily driver, you're online, you're doing stuff, office package, you know, yada, yada, yada.

I'm on Linux 99.9% of the time.

But I do maintain a virtual machine of Windows.

Sorry for the long tirade.

NA3CW.

Very good, Chuck.

Additional comments for Jim on programs that will run, ham radio programs that will run on Linux, etc., etc.

This is WA3VEE.

This is KD3BPI.

And go ahead, KD3BPI, WA3VEE.

Well, thanks, Jim, for the good question.

This has been a great discussion to listen to.

My two cents.

I don't have experience running many ham radio programs yet.

But I have worked with Linux on and off.

My first, the first Linux I used was Ubuntu 10 a good while ago, which very quickly gave way to Ubuntu 12.

10.10 and then 12.04 LTS were the two, to be precise.

And they were very good, very stable.

And it was easy to keep them updated.

And they did everything I needed to do at the time.

Mostly office software for school.

And then web browsing and some games.

In my last job, I attempted to use Linux to run a very old Windows program for this school signaling system, those flashing school signs that say 15 miles an hour at a certain time of day.

There was this one company, LTC had a system that was connected all through 900 megahertz radios.

And then you could network with them.

Well, the host unit had an Ethernet port.

But it wasn't a web interface.

It was you had to have your Windows machine running the software on there.

And then you would use that would talk to the unit.

All that to say that I tried to run this Windows program in Wine.

And it was unfortunately one of the ones that Wine could not do.

Primarily because of some weird, it was a LabVIEW based program, National Instruments LabVIEW.

And they had, the developers of this software had relied on some deprecated Windows command.

That I guess never made it into Wine.

Or never would have worked in Wine because it relied on something.

I can't remember exactly what it was.

Windows NT comes to mind.

But I might be wrong on that.

So Wine is hitter.

Depending on the software you use, as others have said, Wine can be hit or miss.

But Linux, which I don't know if anyone said yet, Debian Linux.

That's Delta Echo Bravo India Alpha November.

That is the overarching kernel of these types of Linux operating systems.

That includes Ubuntu, Linux Mint, and another one that means straight Debian Linux.

That's another one that's very light and easy to use.

And then Raspberry Pi.

The stuff that they run on those is a Debian version of Linux.

Linux.

Easy to install and run.

The cautions that I've found and that I always have to remind myself.

Linux uses a different file system.

So you can't natively grab stuff from Windows.

And put it right onto Ubuntu or any Linux distribution.

It uses ext4, I want to say.

I might be wrong on that.

Whereas Windows uses NTFS primarily.

And that's just the hard drive partition structure.

I'm sure many are familiar with that.

And you can't natively go from one to the other.

I believe Linux can grab off of NTFS.

A Windows installation.

But Windows cannot grab off of Linux.

Unless you do some hocus pocus with the Windows subsystem for Linux.

Which I wasn't able to get it to work.

So.

But yeah.

And if you go into Linux you'll find it's very robust.

And very reliable.

I always enjoy Linux.

But as others have said.

The software that you use day to day.

As a double E.

It just doesn't always work on Linux.

So you're kind of stuck with Windows.

For better or worse.

Though.

I've been able to run a lot of Python stuff.

Especially on Raspberry Pis.

Very good for scripting.

And Raspberry Pis.

I mean you can write a.

You can write C.

And then just you know.

Compile it.

Just like you can on Windows.

But.

If you're smart about it.

You can access the GPIO directly.

You can write drivers first.

Things like.

Spy Bus.

The.

Sierra Papa India.

Serial peripheral interface.

So.

I think I've yapped long enough.

Maybe it's getting close to three cents.

So I'll send it back to that.

This is KD3BPI.

Simon.

Thank you so much.

KD3BPI.

WA3VEE.

Additional comments.

And.

Clarifications.

For Jim.

This is WA3VEE.

CW.

Chuck.

N-A-3-C-W.

WA3VEE.

Please proceed.

Jim.

Maybe at the next breakfast.

If you're able to attend.

I just bring one of my laptops with me.

And you can look at it.

And see what you think of it.

The last person I did that with.

Was at church.

We have a.

An old.

All in one.

computer.

That was.

One.

Windows 10.

Not capable of updating to 11.

And we used that.

As a part of the.

Control system.

For our digital.

Audio mixer.

And so I loaded.

The.

And the software for that.

Comes in Windows or Linux.

Because they do a lot of international.

It was Behringer.

And they do a lot of international stuff.

And Linux is quite popular in Europe.

And so I loaded Linux Mint into this thing.

And we use it every Sunday.

And so there was a.

A lady that.

I help her with her computers from time to time.

And she says what.

You know what.

What do I have to do.

Do I have to buy a new machine.

And I know she's a widow.

She doesn't have a lot of money.

And so I said no you don't.

Tell me every single thing you do with a computer.

And so.

Her needs.

As most people's are.

Are very modest.

So I said.

Come on over here.

And I'll show you.

What I got here on this Linux Mint.

And so I showed her.

Showed her how you do stuff.

And she says.

Oh.

I can understand that.

And showed this.

That and the other.

I got online.

And you know.

It'll play video.

It'll play audio.

It'll do it.

You know.

All that kind of good stuff.

And she said.

So.

Make my computer look like this.

And so that's.

On my to-do list.

But you know.

She's a.

An older woman.

A very.

A people person.

But no technologist.

And she was very comfortable.

At first sight.

Looking at it.

So.

What I can do.

Is bring a.

As far as that goes.

I can lend you.

One of my spare laptops.

That has Linux Mint in it.

And you can play with it.

Take it home.

And play with it.

And see what you think of it.

NA3CW.

Good Chuck.

Any additional comments.

Before I turn it back to Jim.

This is WA3VEE.

In the workbench.

KC3RFG.

Please.

KC3RFG.

WA3VEE.

It's all yours.

KC3VEE.

Thank you again Ron.

I'm just thinking of things.

And Chuck has brought up.

A lot of great.

Points as well.

One that I forgot to mention.

Is.

That Linux will run.

Just perfectly.

On a 10 year old computer.

So.

If you have an old one around.

You can install it on there.

And it'll run just fine.

It's not like Windows.

It doesn't have to have.

The latest bells and whistles.

And super duper chips.

And lots of memory.

It will run just fine.

On a 10 year old laptop.

And it's happy with it.

So.

His suggestion is great.

That's.

And that's how I learned.

Playing with Linux.

I put it on an old laptop.

Put Linux Mint on it.

And play around.

Don't worry about.

You're not going to.

You can't break anything.

So try stuff.

See how it works.

And that's an excellent.

Excellent suggestion.

So.

All in all.

A very great.

Great session.

Get an old laptop.

Put some Linux on it.

And play around.

There's a lot of stuff you can do on ham radio.

For Linux.

So.

Great subject.

And thanks for.

Thanks for bringing it up.

Jim.

All right.

KC3 RFG.

Back to WA3BE.

Thanks.

You're still noisy.

We're still noisy.

But I'll tell you what.

We will work on this.

We do this every week.

We have a round table on Thursday night.

We'll get this fixed.

So you can have a good signal Thursday night.

No doubt about it.

I've got a mag mount.

And an adapter.

And we'll get you going.

So shoot me an email for sure.

So I have your email.

And I'll send you my cell phone number.

And we'll get this squared away.

Yeah.

It's still noisy.

It's still really, really tough.

All I hear is static.

So we'll have to get that fixed for you there.

But again.

One last call for comments before I turn it back to Jim.

WA3VE.

2 Alpha Hotel Tango.

Better, Ted.

Probably got a new battery.

N2 A-H-T WA3VE.

Go ahead, Ted.

On his last legs, too.

I'll say this.

Everybody look for the package Andy's Ham Radio.

Andy's Ham Radio.

It's a package of all kinds of pre-installed stuff on an Ubuntu-based distribution.

And it will run live.

It's a good way for people to try out Linux who don't know whether they want to install it or not.

It will run from a disk or from a thumb drive.

So look for Andy's Ham Radio.

And it's an excellent place to start.

Lots of stuff on YouTube as well.

Before this battery dies, I'll check out.

Thanks, Ron.

Thanks, everybody.

Good evening.

November 2 Alpha Hotel Tango.

Very, very good.

So an antenna for Frank and a battery for you.

Got them both.

Excellent.

Great to have you on board, Ted.

Finally got you on 985 after all these years.

Let's make it a regular, definitely.

Jim, let me turn it back to you and see if we've confused you and have filled up your notebook with notes.

AF3Z WA3VEE.

Did we do a good job?

All right.

Yes, you guys did a great job.

Yeah, fortunately, in my playing around before, I'm familiar with some of the language like distributions and Ubuntu and Mint and all that good stuff.

So it wasn't totally a foreign language to me.

And first of all, Chuck, I like the thought of borrowing a laptop or something.

The next breakfast, though, I'm planning to not be around.

I'm going to be in Ocean City, New Jersey.

Taking a few days there, and that's when I could finally fit it in my schedule.

I'm hoping to sail maybe the day before the breakfast, that Thursday.

But anyway, but sometime we can get together.

I could stop by Parksburg or whatever.

Or I could wait.

This is not urgent.

But something I've thought about many times, and as Windows keeps going, whatever, it would be nice to get off of that, at least in the shack here.

I'm a Mac person for my main computer.

And I had a little experience.

I don't know if they call it wine, but there's a similar thing for running stuff on the Mac, and I played with that a little bit.

But my follow-up question, briefly, if somebody wants to hit it, is you said Mint is very good for being sort of like you feel like you're in Windows almost.

And one of the things I had trouble with when I played with Linux before was, and I'm one that likes to get in under the hood.

But I had trouble understanding some of the operating system stuff about loading in programs and digging through the file structure to find stuff that you need or, you know, all that kind of stuff.

Is there a big learning curve for being able to really get in there?

AF3 is it.

I'm about to learn some more stuff here.

Comments for answers for Jim.

I'm anxious to hear this one also.

This is WA3, VEE.

We're going to have to.

We're not paying you enough for all this good information here.

KC3RFG, WA3VEE, please.

WA3VEE, KC3RFG.

Sorry, I didn't want to preempt Chuck because Chuck uses this on a daily basis, the Linux Mint.

What was I just going to say?

Oh, Jim, AF3 said, everything that you want to do digging into the operating system, there is a YouTube video for.

I'll leave it at that.

KC3RFG, back to net.

Excellent.

Also, I'm on Andy's Ham Radio Linux, KB1OIQ.

Very, very interesting site.

Other comments for Jim for his follow-up question.

This is WA3, VEE.

CW?

Please go ahead.

WN-A3, CW, WA3, VEE.

I think Ubuntu might be more appealing for an Apple user as far as the way they lay it out.

Mint is merely Ubuntu with a Windowsy face.

But if you get back into the filing systems, they're all about the same.

It's just how they package it as far as how it looks and what things they put on the desktop and all that sort of thing.

It's different.

Again, how far down do you go?

There's a basic structural difference between Windows and Linux in that, in any of the Linuxes.

There is called the root.

I'm getting into areas beyond my experience.

But there is the root.

The main machinery behind the curtain is not accessible to the normal user.

So when you put it in an account, you have a separate world separate from the root.

And the root does its thing.

When you do updates to the actual operating system, you always have to put in the administrator password because those updates are going in to the holy of holy of the computer.

And so it's structurally safer in that nobody is allowed in there unless you know the password and all that kind of stuff.

Not to say that there's no way to hack a Linux machine.

It certainly is.

But, yeah, the way they package the accounts and the way they package access is different than Windows.

But you still have the basic, you know, upfront stuff.

You have, you know, documents, downloads, yada, yada, yada, programs that you want to run, favorites, all that kind of good stuff.

But, again, yeah, we'll get you a computer and you can play with it as much as you want and, you know, load things, erase things, blow it up, whatever,

because it's all very easily fixable.

But Jim was absolutely correct.

There's YouTubes to do pretty much anything you can think of in Linux because, you know, a lot of experimenty kind of people like it.

Back to net, NA3CW.

Very, very good, Jim.

Additional comments.

This is WA3VEE.

KD3BPI.

I'm in KD3BPI.

WA3VEE.

Thank you, Ron.

I'd like to thank Chuck for his great comments on Linux.

This is, it's jogging my memory of things that I've read over the years.

And you reminded me about the stability of Linux.

And I remembered it's the kernel versus the user space.

And that's what gives Linux a lot of its stability is it's very particular about the super user, the root.

You can't do things in the kernel unless you authenticate, as you noted.

Whereas Windows often confounds the two spaces.

Like drivers are a great example of that.

To do something as simple as run a printer, you have to go into the kernel space of Windows and install a driver.

They've gotten better with it over the years.

Windows has.

But it's a classic vulnerability, or it was a classic vulnerability.

Not sure if it still is with Windows 11, even Windows 10.

And so that, I wanted to also mention, at one point, when I was using Ubuntu 12.04, I had a Mac-style launcher running.

And it was, it ran fine.

But the more that you get into those, at least I found, the more that I got into those graphical tweaks,

the less stable my installation became.

Things would have to run.

I would have to go into the command prompt and, or the terminal, as they call it.

I would have to just fix it.

I'd have to remember which file had the problem, remember which services to restart.

It became ridiculous.

So I abandoned that installation.

Ha, ha, ha.

And, um, and started anew.

But, um, and then the third thing I wanted to hit on was, um, the terminal is your friend.

You can run scripting in there, bash scripting they call it, which is similar to batch files, if anyone's familiar with those.

Um, and you can do many wonderful things with that.

And, uh, you can automate updates.

Or you can just memorize commands yourself and run them as you go.

And, uh, but you have to, I would argue that no Linux installation is truly free from that.

You, you have to use the terminal to get under the hood.

Um, and so if you run into things you want to do that are not natively supported or don't show up very well in the GUI, then you have to just go into the terminal.

And with that, back to that.

Very, very good.

Excellent.

Excellent, excellent.

All the way around.

One last call for comments.

WA3 VEE.

Jim, back to you.

AF3 Z, WA3 VEE.

Okay, very good.

Thank you all very much.

And I thought it might get a little sticky, but, uh, Simon, now you've warned me.

It'll even get GUI when we get in there.

I know what you're talking about, then.

But anyway, uh, I don't know if I've ever heard it called GUI, but I know it's a graphic user interface.

So anyway, uh, very good.

Yeah, that's great.

All sounds good.

And, uh, Chuck will get together sometime on a machine to look at and play with.

Uh, years, well, being the old codger I am, uh, I, uh, sort of had some contact with some of this stuff way back in the days when you were, uh, running pine, pine, uh, mail software on a Linux machine.

And all that good stuff.

But I never really dug into it too deeply.

But, uh, thank you all very much.

Uh, very good information.

And, uh, we made it all the way to 923 here.

Uh, back to you, Ron.

Thanks.

AF3 Z.

Thank you, Jim.

Absolutely.

You know I enjoy this for sure.

Excellent, excellent, excellent.

Well, before we close down the workbench for the evening, uh, let's see if anyone else wants to check in.

If you've been listening or working or in your, your licensed TAM or you just tuned in, we would love to hear from you.

And some of the folks who got on tonight, Renee, Ted, Frank, uh, Frank, we're going to get you squared away once and for all for sure.

You'll have a full quieting signal when I get done with you for sure.

And the others here for sure, uh, David, K-A-3-G-L-I, please become regulars here on 985.

And when Joe, uh, works you, he will give you the complete rundown on 985, uh, from when he first designed it all the way up to the present for sure.

And it is worth listening to.

So I want to say welcome to all of you.

Glad to have you on board here.

And as I just said, please become regulars.

And that includes Ted also.

Almost forgot for sure.

So one last call.

If you've been lurking out there, please get on the log.

We've got 16 folks here on the log.

Like to make it a good, uh, if we can get to 20, that'd be great, but I doubt it.

But let's see if we can get at least one or two more check-ins.

This is WA3VEE.

We had a perfect double there, so I'm going to treat this like a pile up.

The Tango Station, go first.

Hello, Charlie 3, Yankee Tango Delta.

Hey, Steve, got you on the log, the other station now.

Go ahead.

Good.

Keyler, Charlie 3, Whiskey, Romeo, Yankee.

Matt, currently somewhere in Maryland, heading to Lower Windsor Township, York County.

Very, very good.

Well, glad to have you guys on the log.

Thanks for joining us.

Better late than never, that's for sure.

So, Steve, excellent.

KC3YTD got you on here, and KC3WRY.

Anyone else?

Final, final, final call.

It's a repeater of 1,000 finals, by the way.

This is WA3VE.

KD3BWL.

is a lot better.

So, you found a ladder.

So, Frank, great to have you on board.

We're about ready to close down, but whatever you did, it's working.

So, excellent.

Glad to have you on board, and glad to have you here.

And we've got, let's see, 16, 17, 18 check-ins, which is pretty good, if I counted correctly.

So, again, all good.

Again, send me your email.

Send me an email.

I'm good on QRZ.

And we'll hook up.

All very, very good.

So, again, thanks for checking into the 985 workbench.

You're invited to use the repeater often.

It's a great way to show you appreciate the gift of 985 to us, the amateur radio community.

And a big thank you to Joe W3GMS for making his 985 repeater available for all of us all the time,

and especially here for the workbench.

This has been really a good learning experience, especially for me tonight.

Finally, we hope to hear you again on Thursday evening at 8 p.m. for the 985 roundtable.

This concludes the workbench for tonight.

Feel free, however, to stick around afterwards and continue the discussion on 985.

Joe really likes high electric bills, so go ahead and run up his electric bill.

Use the repeater often.

Have a good night.

Great week ahead.

This is WA3VEE73, and I'll be clear.

KD3BPI listening.

Comments tonight on that Linux stuff.

All very good.

Well, you certainly know me well enough from school.

You know I'm a wires and watts guy.

WA3VEE73, and by the way, you probably remember Chris from the Valley Forge Ham Fest.

He was on tonight.

You probably heard him earlier.

KD3BPI, WA3VE, and if anyone else wants to join us here for the post-game show.

VEEKD3BPI. Thanks for coming back Ron. I wasn't sure if you would be done after hosting the long net. But yeah, wires and watts, I sympathize with that 100%. The only reason I can code is because it makes wires and watts somewhat easier. Some of the time.

I'm thinking of Arduino's and PLC's and FPGA's primarily. Once you get into those crazy multi-threaded and, well, things that are well above my understanding, it just gets crazy. Heck, even C confounds me sometimes. I'm used to C++.

But yeah, and Linux, I am a big fan of Linux, generally speaking. However, I think that, you know, like you think about the old cars.

Think about all the interesting features that they had. Like, for example, the old French cars, the Citroëns, the DS, the Deux Chavaux. No, that's the 2CV.

I'm thinking of the DS, though, with its hydropneumatic suspension. Let's just say, though that was clearly a superior product, it did not catch on. For obvious reasons. And I think that Linux often finds itself in that place.

Because, well, frankly, some things are quite complicated to implement, which are trivial on Windows. Or even if they're not trivial on Windows, often someone's done them already. And has a nice little double clickable, executable ready to go.

So, yeah. And I was happy to hear that your presentation went well. Tell me about that. This is a KD3BPI. Anyone else, feel free to jump in.

Got a nice pause there for the cause, as they say. But, um, have a furry thing. Wants to steal some of my food over here, which is not unusual. Um, nice, uh, net control assistant here. Sound asleep alongside here. So, uh, yeah, very good. Um, yeah, that's, uh, that's all, that's all foreign stuff to me. But we're running complete Windows over here.

And, um, because I'm pretty much a dumb user, just have a lot of monitors, um, I generally don't have any issues. I don't dig into it. Don't try to do anything fancy. Although it looks like it with all these monitors. But the hardware is doing the hard work. It's heavy lifting here.

All the, uh, they're, uh, they're, like I said, they're, they're doing the heavy lifting. I do need to get another PC for the shack here. So I'll be looking, I'll be looking around for that. But it's probably going to have to, uh, be this place where I got the, uh, the professional desktop.

I have behind me here on my desk. That's a trading computer's place out in Wyoming. Because I need

probably two graphics cards to handle eight monitors. That way you can handle the six with margin.

So, uh, the computer has six monitors on it. There's an additional, um, uh, there are two, two subsystems here.

One does run on Linux, and it's, it's transparent to me. And that is the, um, um, oh heavens, it's called a ham clock. And another has its own system. It's the, uh, geocron. So, those are the two other monitors that are, they're currently not on right now.

But they're usually on over here on the side. They'll be on over the weekend when I'm doing a PA QSO party, which by the way is a lot of fun. That's down on HF. When you get your general, you'll have a good time with that. The, the objective is to work every one of the 67 counties in Pennsylvania in one weekend. Go ahead.

The pause for the cause. I do like that phrase. I think I will borrow it, perhaps indefinitely, if you don't mind. Um, yes. That does sound interesting. The, uh, hit all 67 PA counties. I, I can't wait for my general. I've been studying when I have a few moments at work, or frankly, when I just need a break. It's very easy to have that sort of thing up on my computer screen and not look at it.

I don't look suspicious because it is adjacent to my actual work. Not always, but, um, uh, occasionally. Um, so I will look forward to that. Uh, and it does sound like your system, your setup, with PCs and everything, is the ideal. Um, as with anything, as soon as you start messing with it, it, uh, it can start to break in weird ways. Um,

Like I remember, well, even Microsoft would do it occasionally.

I remember the Windows 7 machines, the thrice, the three times hand-me-down machines we had in the engineering wing at Dell Tech.

Those very seldom would complete their updates without problems.

And I remember writing a script that would just run through a whole reset, like purge the cache of all these updates,

contact Windows update again, do this, do that, because I was so fed up.

That was a moment where Windows was oddly like Linux in that you couldn't just click one thing and have it done.

You had to go into the command prompt and tell it, run this, run that, do this, do that.

In Linux, that is far more common.

And if you ask me, they have the terminal better.

Windows with the batch files is a little antiquated, whereas Linux with bash.

But I'm speaking Greek to you.

And that's perfectly fine, because let me tell you, it's a difficult thing to moonlight in.

It's a difficult thing to dabble in, coding and IT, for that matter.

Or at least that's what I'm finding as I get further into my career.

But, yeah, keep doing what you're doing.

And your computers will be just fine.

Just fine, indeed.

Back to you.

Yes, I remember at the college.

That was a whole different realm down there.

I mean, I couldn't understand.

They had nice computers and why they ran so slow.

I don't know.

And I think they re-imaged for the sake of re-imaging.

Every time I turned around, they were re-imaging.

Why?

I've never understood that.

I have never had anything re-imaged that I know of outside of F-108 and the classroom we were in down there.

Why they kept doing that, I don't know.

But it seems like they just did it to do it.

I never got a clear answer about why they would re-image something over and over again.

But that seemed to be the common thing.

It's the only place I ever heard of it, too.

So, in fact, one night I remember asking CR, WHCRW, who's a good computer guy, too, here on the machine, what's re-imaging?

And, okay, so now I understood what it was.

It's like, why would you completely redo a system like that?

But, anyway, for all the work that they did and all the IT they did, there's not one system down there that I ever remember running what I consider to be really well or half as good as any of the ones I have up here.

And this happens to be the one I'm sitting in front of right now in the shack, the one you see on QRZ, the monitors to it.

This is a gaming computer.

It came from Dylan, a K3DZM.

I had a couple graphics cards put in it to accommodate all the monitors and a couple updates here and there.

And it's been working flawlessly for years.

So, I don't know.

It was always disappointing because, especially for instructors like me, you're trying to teach and the computer is so slow.

And it's like, okay, who poured molasses into the CPU port or whatever it was because it was terrible down there.

So, I think I understood that things had to go through Dover and all this.

And I think every bite had to be kissed by the governor or something.

I don't know what it was, but it was just terrible.

So, anyway, I hope the business, I'll bet the business office down there ran a lot more quickly, I can guarantee you.

Because I don't think that Dan Eamon would put up with slow machines down there.

So, I've been the campus director for a while.

But Dan and I got along very well.

And he knew where every dollar was on that campus, I could tell you.

KD3BPI WA3VEE.

KD3BPI WA3VEE. KD3BPI.

That's indeed the curse of the education, well, the educational institution computer, or any institutionalized computer for that matter.

I don't know what it is.

My computer at work, they've loaded it up with some anti-malware software, which uses up so much memory.

It's incredible. My computer has 32 gigabytes of RAM.

And it's consistently over 80% used.

Which I can't believe it.

Like, none of it's my stuff.

I have stuff running, I admit.

But it's not using hundreds of megabytes of RAM.

So, I do remember those computers at Daltech.

And I would wonder if maybe because they were older hand-me-down computers, they just were, like, super critical of them.

And they just decide to, oh, well, we don't know what's wrong, so we're going to image it anew.

I don't know.

It seems a little bit silly to me.

At least do it once a week at a prescribed time, like, perhaps 3 in the morning.

So that you never know.

Like, you sure, you can do that.

But as an IT professional, it seems unprofessional to have your work extend into where it becomes bothersome.

But anyway.

Oh, my.

Yeah, I'm sure you noticed I did not make it to the Red Rose Repeater Ham Fest.

Sorry to say.

My fiancée, Summer, as you know, her sister was moving that morning.

And I thought that we were going to help her in the afternoon.

But then it turned out the morning was the convenient time.

So, had to, uh, had to, uh, forego the Ham Fest, sorry to say.

But from what I understand, it was a good one.

Back to you.

KD3BPI, WA3VE.

Very, very good, Simon.

I'm going to try something here.

Stand by one second.

Yeah, copy.

Uh, not, not very good signal strength.

But you're, um, let me see if I can do this right.

I guess you'll be a five and a five.

Assuming signal strength is the second number.

Back to you.

Okay, very good.

That was direct.

That was actually me transmitting on 985.

So, uh, that's good to know.

You'll have to check out the simplex thing.

I'll probably put a beam up to aim it over in your direction.

And I could do that probably almost, not far off the ground, as long as it's a beam.

Because right now, the house is blocking the signal in your direction.

So that's probably what it is.

So I've got the X300 out back, but it is blocked by the house.

So, oh, excellent.

And Rene tonight was, uh, he was up in Boyertown.

And I could copy him, oh, tremendously down here.

I sent him a clip also.

So while everybody was commenting, I was sending, uh, audio clips out to various people as they were checking in.

I would record him here, uh, nowhere near the professional level.

That, for instance, Joe would do right off his, uh, his audio bus.

But using my phone, I was making MP3 like I did for you one time.

And just send it off to people.

So, really good to have the, uh, the, the, uh, different check-ins tonight.

I ran into these people from various different places.

And like I said, uh, Ted, um, N2AHT, uh, he was on my advisory board when I was chair down at the college.

I was chair for like 25, 26 years running straight.

And he was on there for a good portion of those 26 years.

He was on the board when we came up with the CEM 100 course.

Go ahead.

Yeah, that's what I thought.

I, I heard Ted.

And I remembered, I was, I'm pretty sure that, um, we met at, he, I met Ted and his wife, who I can't recall her name.

But, um, at Kimberton.

And it was really cool to talk to him.

Because it's, you know, clearly a guy who knew what needed to be taught.

But also had the, uh, he was able to get it done.

And clearly, you, you both were allies in that, in that effort.

So that was, it was cool to hear him again.

And of course he had something great to offer in the, in the question.

So, uh, yeah, really cool indeed.

Back to you.

Very good.

Uh, yes, now I remember.

And I also was texting Chris back and forth.

And yes, he remembers meeting you also at Kimberton.

And so that was good.

So good to have, uh, uh, eye-to-eye contact.

And again, ham radio, we call it an eyeball QSO.

That's what that's referred to.

And finally you say, oh, wow, you really do exist in, in the flesh.

Wow.

Because you talk, talk in the ether all the time on RF.

And when you finally meet somebody and have a conversation with another ham, we refer to that as an eyeball QSO.

So all very good.

So Simon, I'm, uh, going to get out of here.

And, um, I have a, a breakfast appointment tomorrow morning.

So, uh, I've got to get, uh, get rolling here.

Get these, uh, uh, furry things upstairs.

Get them fed and off into bed as well.

And, um, I'm going to do the same.

So we'll say, uh, great conversation.

Great, uh, post-game chat here.

And, um, good to have you on the, uh, good to have everybody tonight.

On the workbench.

It makes it, makes it even more fun for me.

Uh, that's for sure.

And, uh, oh, I did, uh, before I go, uh, let me answer your question.

Yeah, the, um, I think I mentioned earlier, the solar weather, um, presentation.

What I did was, uh, and I, like I said, I'll, I'll share this to Joe and he can put it on the website.

Um, explain where all the solar weather comes from, what, what actually causes it, and so on and so forth.

And, uh, the perturbations that occur to RF propagation, et cetera.

And, uh, what the different metrics are.

And where the, what the ranges are.

And when the numbers come in, in the various ranges, what effect that has on radio.

That's a top-level cliff notes version of what I presented the other night at Pottstown.

So, I'll be having those panels up here on, on my system.

Uh, when I'm on HF, especially this weekend, which will probably mostly be on 40 meters for, uh, working around the state.

So, anytime during the day, could probably get around the state on 40 meters with no problem at all, generally speaking.

So, I'll say 73, and, uh, you have a good night.

Please pass on, my dearest, to, uh, summer.

And, um, we'll be talking to you.

Uh, KD3BPI, WA3VE.

W-A-3-V-E-E-K-D-3-B-P-I.

Alright, sounds good, Ron.

And, uh, you have a good evening.

Restful evening.

Hope those cats don't bother you too much.

And, uh, thanks again for coming back.

Always good to, always good to talk and catch up.

And, and I'll look forward to seeing that presentation.

That sounds really cool.

Uh, something that I've, well, frankly, I haven't bothered looking into extensively, uh, because of how wide-reaching the topic is.

Goes from astronomy to engineering to, uh, well, quantum mechanics.

So, I look forward to seeing your, uh, your boil down of it.

I'm sure it will be a true boil down.

Not the 500-page textbooks that some people do and claim.

Ha, ha, ha.

But you know what I mean.

Ha, ha, ha.

Good to talk to you, Ron.

Uh, I'll stay behind here for a little bit and, uh, keep listening.

I'm just working on my computer here, working with, uh, some CAD software.

So, uh, probably be on until about 10.

Uh, but, um, good to talk to you as always, Ron.

And, uh, I'll say 73.

KD3BPI.

Great, Simon.

You have a good night.

And I'll say 73.

I'm going to go QRT here.

And the cats are never a bother.

These are, these little guys here are great.

Fantastic.

To three mouse cat tears.

Three mouse cat tears.

So, it's my, uh, little, uh, nightdom over here.

Take care.

Have a good night.

WA3VEE.

Clear.

And QRT.

you

Thank you.

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