This is what I wrote about this on 2018-01-07:

What is amateur radio? What’s not part of the hobby and what is?

The more you dig into this, the deeper the rabbit hole goes. I’ll start with an analogy to set the scene.

In aviation, Sir George Cayley was the first person to investigate heavier-than-air flying vehicles. He invented the aeroplane in 1799. The first full-sized glider, built in 1849 carried the first person in history to fly, the ten-year-old son of one of his servants. Since then the Wright brothers made their flight at Kitty Hawk. We saw the invention of commercial aviation, the turbo prop, the jet engine, the space-shuttle, helicopters, drones, rockets, hot-air balloons, the Hindenburg, the Goodyear blimps, hang-gliders, gyro-copters and many, many other contraptions.

Each of those are considered aviation and the person controlling the device is considered a pilot.

In amateur radio we talk on the radio.

We also create repeaters and talk on them. We link them together using what ever technology is available. We make it possible to connect to such networks using software such as Echolink, AllStar Link, IRLP and other internet based systems. We create digital networks with DMR, use WSPR to exchange information, make contacts using CODEC2, have contests using CW and Morse code.

We build software defined radios where we use computers to decode and encode radio signals, test back scatter using all manner of signal processing, use packet radio, RTTY, Hellschreiber and bounce signals off the moon and nearby meteors or an overflying aircraft.

We make auto-tuners with a Raspberry-Pi or an SWR meter with an Ardiuno. We build valve based amplifiers and program mp3 voice-keyers, GPS lock radios, map propagation using the internet and have a rag chew on the local 2m repeater.

We investigate 13cm propagation, do experiments with amateur television and we set up radio stations on top of mountains, in light houses and on remote islands.

All of this is amateur radio, and frankly I’ve only just scratched the surface.

There are heated discussions about if a linked repeater using the internet to create the link is real amateur radio or not, whether using your mobile phone as a node on the Echolink network is real amateur radio or not, if using a computer to create contacts on a digital mode such as JT65 is real radio or not.

Each of these questions highlights a misconception about our hobby.

There are no boundaries in amateur radio. We’re a bunch of inventors, mavericks, people who attempt the unthinkable, try the impossible and make progress.

There are people who are passengers on planes, and there are people who fly them. There are people using technology and there are people who invent it. We have a unique perspective as a community. We have the ability to imagine something that doesn’t yet exist. Why would you spend any energy on whether that thing is real amateur radio or not?

Amateur radio is a myriad of things, some of them related to antennas and radio spectrum, some not. This hobby is what you make of it, so go forth and invent something, try something, get on air and make some noise!

I’m Onno VK6FLAB

Source: https://podcasts.itmaze.com.au/foundations/20180107.foundations-of-amateur-radio.txt

Ultimately only you can make the decision about what you want to do with your life.

One thing to consider is, what does failure look like? Not that I’m suggesting that you’d fail, rather, does this help you choose?

In other words, try to find things that distinguishes between the choices. Things that make them different.

You might also ask people already doing the things you’re choosing between. Perhaps you can ask them what they discovered that they liked or hated about their chosen profession.

At this point that’s not unexpected. Given the proliferation of tools generally, if not freely, available, it would be naive to think that the published PoC was the only one in existence.

As a result, the curl project has just changed their CVE policy to publish all with a severity less than HIGH, starting 26 October.

See:

https://github.com/curl/curl/discussions/23458

The server has been hugged to death … I wonder why 😁

It’s telling that in this discussion there’s no mention of the ITU, the FCC or any form of discussion about interference or other spectrum users.

Since radio spectrum is shared globally because radio waves don’t follow political boundaries, it’s coordinated by a UN body called the ITU, the International Telecommunications Union.

There are a few frequency ranges set aside for so-called ISM (Industrial Science and Medical) use.

The 2.4 GHz band was set aside for such use and together with Wifi, Bluetooth and baby monitors, it’s used for all manner of other things.

Since the range at low power is quite short, many devices can share the same frequency and not interfere with each other.

Here’s some background.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISM_radio_band

Also:

https://youtu.be/ncCf00M7Axk

In many ways a vending machine is precisely that.

AI generated SPAM is beginning to leak through. It’s getting pretty personalised and harder to distinguish from real email.

What does the future of this look like?

It always was.

I moved from VMware Fusion after a hardware failure and migrated to Proxmox. I use VMs to isolate client information and to test and use different OS versions and distros.

I have a VM that runs Docker and connect to it via SSH for running applications I don’t want to install on my main workstation.

My main workstation is also a VM.

I came from bare metal Linux for years and found that I spent too much time recompiling kernels to make it work with my hardware.

Now that everything is a VM, changing underlying hardware, and even hypervisor is trivial.

If VMware hadn’t been bought by Broadcom and allowed me to virtualise x86 on Apple Silicon, I’d still be running VMware Fusion. UTM by the way is completely unreliable … I really tried.

As it is, I’m running Proxmox on AMD.

in summary, Proxmox allows me to build what I need when I need it virtually and it’s running on a standard Debian host.

Edit: #$#__# autocorrect (unreadable -> unreliable)

It’s a collection of repos for different aspects of using SDR to decode, collate and distribute to all manner of different projects.

There’s plenty of documentation and a set of wikis.

Essentially it’s like walking into your nearest hardware store with the instructions to “build a house” … some assembly required.

Box Jellyfish, Taipan, Stonefish, Redback Spider, Drop Bear, Hoop Snake.

Yeah, I suppose you’re right, we do like to name things in an understated elegance.

PHP is written in text files which can be managed using any number of version control systems. Pick your poison.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_version-control_software

As someone else said, you can document your patches with a Docker file, but you’ll still need to track your changes.

Ultimately, what you’re essentially doing is maintaining a local fork of the code and keeping it synchronised with upstream.

On September 11, 2001, nineteen terrorists who were members of al-Qaeda, an Islamist extremist network, hijacked four California-bound commercial airplanes shortly after their departures from airports in Boston, Massachusetts; Newark, New Jersey; and Washington, D.C. In a coordinated attack that transformed the planes into weapons, the hijackers intentionally flew two of the planes into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, and another into the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia. Learning about the other hijackings through telephone calls, passengers and crew members on the fourth plane launched a counterattack. When the passengers attempted to breach the cockpit, the hijacker pilot, who had changed course toward the nation’s capital, crashed the plane into a field in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, near the town of Shanksville.

Nearly 3,000 people were killed on that day, the single largest loss of life resulting from a foreign attack on American soil, and the greatest single loss of rescue personnel in American history. Approximately two billion people, almost one third of the world’s population, are estimated to have witnessed these horrific events directly or via television, radio, and Internet broadcasts that day.

Yes please!

If you missed it, this is the video: https://youtu.be/CJZyh2EqvkU

We told you so …

https://www.techdirt.com/2026/02/25/hackers-expose-the-massive-surveillance-stack-hiding-inside-your-age-verification-check/

Tomorrow my weekly podcast goes into how this map is created. It’s quite the journey.

May I ask what you do with the failures?