Hey, before we get started, be sure to head over to Hamradio two dot com forward slash email dash sign up to join my email list of over nineteen thousand subscribers, where I like to send emails about upcoming events, upcoming shopping deals, keep you updated with all the stuff going on with my videos. Once that list reaches twenty thousand, I will be doing a giveaway of another HF radio sign up today and thank you for the support. Okay,
I show seven o'clock guys. It's like we've got a good, good group in the chat tonight, so I appreciate everyone being here, and we're gonna switch over right here. So guess what. I drove to Ohio this week and I got back about three hours ago, so I am I'm a little bit tired. It was a fun trip. It was fairly uneventful as far as I mean. I mean, I don't have any issues or anything. But it was a good trip. And you guys are going to be seeing my new RV on the Unplugged channel very soon. Okay,
So tomorrow morning I'm driving again. We're going to Galveston for the week tomorrow, and that brings me to a couple of different things, So a couple of different announcements I wanted to make real quick here. So the Houston Hamfest is next weekend. It's Friday and Saturday, March seventh and eighth, noon to sixth on Friday, eight to three on Saturday. Most likely I will be there on Saturday
and not Friday. I will be there, and in the past I've gone both day but most likely I'm probably not gonna go Friday this time, but I will be there on Saturday. They're raffling off of ftd X ten grand prize. They're also given away FtM five hundred ft seventy ft five R several prizes there and it's a it's a pretty good show for Texas. It's ever since we lost Hamcom a few years ago, we don't have a large show in Texas anymore. But this is a
good show. So and HRO will be there if they've been there for the last two maybe three years, so they'll be there again this time. So that's next weekend, Friday and Saturday. I since I'm driving to Galveston tomorrow. Originally I was supposed to drive to Galveston tonight this morning, No,
yesterday morning, Yesterday morning, yesterday morning. We're supposed to go yesterday morning, so got pushed back due to some vehicle issues I had, so instaid I'm going down there tomorrow, and I was going to live stream tomorrow night for my February giveaway, I'm giving away brand new IC seven oh five. I'll put a link to that in the chat right now, you guys go sign up for that. I think at last count we had about twenty seven hundred people signed up something like that. I don't remember.
I haven't looked at it in the last two or three days because I've been on the road. But rather than doing that tomorrow, I think I'm gonna push it back a week. So I'm gonna give you guys another week, and we're gonna live stream that giveaway on the channel this time next week. I'll be back. We're coming back from Galveston Sunday morning, be home by early afternoon next Sunday. So we're gonna do the giveaway of the Icy seven
oh five then. And I also have a brand new IC seventy three hundred that I'll be giving away for the month at the end of the month of March. Basically, so I gave the January giveaway, I gave it away. The Ft eight ninety one, I gave it away. I think it was the first Sunday of February. So the February giveaway is gonna be done the second Sunday of March, and then the March giveaway will be done sometime in early April. So we're kind of pushing it out a
little bit. But hey, you're getting free radios, So there you go. February Repeater Challenge. I've been getting a lot of you email me logs for that. That's still ongoing. I mean, it's we're done with February now, but if you haven't sent me your logs four February Senate, go ahead and send it to me. Gonna do a drawing that same night, a week from today for the February
Repeater Challenge. And this is this is the live stream that I created that I was gonna do tomorrow night and for on March third, but again I'm gonna push it till next Sunday. So we're gonna do that on Sunday on this channel a week from tonight. So there we go. Special shout out to everybody in green text in the chat, all the YouTube channel members Lee, I saw you in there earlier. K I five YPR. I think you were the first one in there that I saw.
Aaron KQ four h z K you're in there earlier, Kooley Cult forty five, Michael KD eight g I, J Phil W zero R HP, Wayne K nine W kJ thank you for joining. Ronald, Jeff A A four B C Mark another ron K and four Z v U thanks for joining, guys. Jerry, see you in there. Thanks for being here tonight. James k I five O E B Corey in one x w S. Let's see Jim G y M Jim K nine O s U. Are you at the gym at OSU right now? That's what I want to know. V A five S A R
thanks for joining tonight. And yeah, a lot of other people in there. I see Bill in there, Hem, Radio Tectonics, digital ranchers in there, Tank is in there all right?
Good?
Just want to make sure I acknowledge everybody. Thanks for joining tonight, guys. Should be a pretty fun stream. Let's bring on gas Stone and Frank. They're talking in the background right now, so let me my zoom screen, my zooms. Here's my zoom screen. And Jeremie. There's a transition there. What's up, guys, How are y'all?
Oh, I'm good. I was waiting for Frank to jump in.
Thanks for halving me on, Frank. Frank knows he's supposed to let the guests talk first.
I was told.
First. Okay, oh boy, yeah, yeah, Now I'm good.
Thanks for having me on, Jason. Today has been a fun day. So a lot of us to talk about, for.
Sure, good, good deal. Yeah, yeah, I know that we've been going back and forth. We were going to do this a couple of weeks ago and then my schedule got food bard and you were out of town, and uh, but I'm glad to I'm glad you took the time.
Man.
It's going to be a fun talk.
Yeah.
So we're going to talk about some InCom tool stuff, and I'm going to ask you a few questions about InCom tools and if you if you don't want to answer them, or you can't answer them, don't don't worry about that. So I've got a couple of things that I wanted to ask you specifically about, but you know, feel free to just say whatever you want to because I know that you you give it out to your not Paigre, but your channel supporters. First through you do
through buy Me a Coffee. You have a membership thing and it's.
Free for everybody. But okay, I thought we do some behind the scenes, a lot of behind the scenes, right, been called the Nerd Hour. Yeah, yeah, we did seven of those last ye Those were fun.
Good, good good. Okay. Yeah, I'm a I'm I'm a member of the of your buy Me a Coffee thing, so I get the emails about that and when I when I can join, I do. But yeah, good deal. So Frank, what's h How was you did a that wasn't a live stream? You did a premiere for that?
You could tell. I changed clothes very fast, quick change.
It says premiere at the bottom of the video when you do a premiere frame.
No, that was pre recorded. It's just how schedules will line up. And I wanted to get it out a couple of weeks before the Go Kit Challenge, so it was pre recorded. I I pre recorded the bumpers also, Hey, but you know what, it was a bunch of fun just to sit there and was I honestly thought it we would go for like twenty minutes, but then we went for forty five minutes and at the end, I just got to end this now because we feel like
we're gonna keep going on. And after I hit the stop record button, we went for another forty five minutes.
Is that coming up again this year? Is that coming up in the next Yes?
That that is not this weekend? Next weekend, March fifteenth is the weekend after the Houston ham Fest.
Okay, you know what I'll be. I should be home. No, no, no, I'm not. I'll be that's I'll be in I'll be in freaking New Jersey that weekend for New Jersey hamsid New Jersey Technology Institute. Technology is where ham SAI is this year. So yeah, I will be in New Jersey from Thursday to Sunday. Let me back then. So I'm gonna unfortunately miss that this year. But okay, good, good, good deal. Glad good to know that. So okay, yep, all that doesn't look right?
Okay, so oh also we'll fast you go help. You were saying it was raining, and it is raining. You better not melt on the way to your hamstrack.
Oh no, no, it's no problem. No, I was, uh, I was, yeah, I was wondering if it was going to be because I heard some thunder earlier, and then when the rain started it was very light. I can actually I've actually got the door to the shack open right now. I can hear it lightly raining out there.
Cool.
You see it was rumbling. Yeah, it was rumbling a little bit, but not a big deal. So cool. Okay, Well, Gastone, thanks for joining it tonight. Man, it's always good to have you. It's been a while. And uh for people who may not know, to go ahead and give a brief tell briefly who you are and what you do and that kind of thing. Your what's your channel for? So congrat I don't think I've said this publicly before.
Congrats on one hundred thousand subscribers. Yeah, there's your play button right there.
Yes, it happened in August of last year. You, I just want to hear the story real quick before we do it.
Sure, do it, go for It.
Was at maybe forty thousand subscribers and kind of just picking up a thousand every month or so, and I wanted to set up a windlink RMS gateway and I wasn't familiar with how did they do that? On the Linux side, so shame on me, and everybody was like, go the RMS route, and I said, you know what, I haven't used Windows since two thousand and one and I did not want to deal with the Windows updates
and all that stuff. So I did this off grid, air gapped install of Windows and went through that process. The next day was when that cloud strike incident happened, and it impacted the point of sale systems, the banks, the airline kiosks, and there was that update that was pushed out to all of those customers and did the blue screen of depth. I picked up sixty thousand subscribers on that one video and I just like shot across one hundred k.
So it's insane. But yeah, yeah, good timing, good timing, Yeah, good timing. Yeah, totally absolutely so how did that did that? Do you still got a lot of traction on that video or how's it doing now?
No, it's it's pretty much flatlined after that breaking news. But yeah, A long story short to answer your original question, very latecomer to amateur radio briefly saw it once in high school in the nineties and twenty seventeen, I decided to get licensed and couldn't make any contacts, So I put amateur radio on hold with my bowfing and during COVID, I thought, you know what, it's probably time to pull
out that radio and get into comps. We moved to this property, made my first contact, and I spent the last five years. May fifth will be five years on the air, and I've been documenting on YouTube on the
tech Prepper every single experience. So I would say the tech Prepper is an experienced channel that's focused on my journey and amateur radio, with very specific goals of doing off grid, offline operations, and a lot of it takes place in the back country because when I have downtime, nothing's better than trail running for me, hiking, backpacking, So
it's kind of a bridge. I mean, we talked about it before the show, but the day I did a fun radio and concealment exercise with drone footage in the back country and it's just the best of both the world. So that's what I'm about. I don't do fancy production, I don't do multiple takes. So if you're up for fumbling for my words, ums and us and just a good time, that's what the channel is about.
Sounds like a normal day on my channel. But yeah, right, so I was talking with So I don't know if you know who Chris Weatherman is. He he writes the Survivalist series books Going Home and all those. Yeah, yeah, under the pseudonym of a American Yep. He lives in Florida. So long story short, he lives in Florida. And I was trying to get him to come to him cash this year.
Oh, they'd be fun.
Yeah, And he had a he had a pre planned event that weekend and he's he was going on a two day ruck what he called a two day ruck. And I'm like, okay, that's interesting. I'm gonna put that in the back of my mind and kind of look that up. I was having lunch with a friend in Huntsville, Alabama, two days ago and he's like, yeah, we're going on
a ruck this weekend. And I'm like, okay, I got to figure out, Like, like my friend in Huntsville apparently found a group like like almost like a meetup group. I don't know if anybody still uses meet up or not, but like a meetup group that you know, they just get together and they just they go they go ruck
and go rucking and go hiking and whatnot. So I'm like, yeah, I gotta find something like that to do in my area because I think that would be a fun thing to do, especially if you're gonna involve radio in it. So that's something that's in the back of my mind that I gotta I gotta figure out here soon. But you said so like for.
The exercise side of it, the go ruck the.
Yeah, that's that's part of it. Yes, absolutely, I mean, you know, the hiking exercise, but also just to kind of like, you know, uh pack you know, you know this from experience, you know, pack up your backpack, get out in the field, realize you brought too much crap, it's too heavy, You're not in shape for this, and then redo it again, and redo it again, and redo it again, and then on the sixth or seventh try you get You're like, okay, now I got it. Now,
I got now. I understand how it I should and should do so very trial and error about it, right, So that's what I but that's how I like to do it. I was like, Okay, well, I think I want to take this and this and this, but then once I go do it, and I'm like, okay, I definitely want to take this with these three items I don't need because I you know, and then just learn by experience and that kind of thing. So that's that's what I'm I'm looking so to do.
Go do it, man, I've had so much fun with it a year ago. If I could talk to myself right now, I would say, who are you? You freaking imposter? You're breaking all the rules.
I think you're a LARPer now right because I saw your Instagram post about being a LARPer. Who knew?
Well, there's that, right. I I my pants of knee pads and they really do save your bacon out there and just make it more comfortable. But I said, I will never buy a toy in amateur radio. I'm not going to buy Chinese radios. And after spending a lot of time in the back country this year, Chinese radio b tech. You've yes right, So my VXXR, as much as I love it, has taken a back seat. But then even the eight one eight, where I love that little guy for the back country, this is about gear.
I can't get enough of the true SDX and it's just those are the little things that you learn. It's like, man, you feel so depleted after scaling two thousand feet of a peak with a man pack. Even the eight one seven is small ast it is, but now going with something this tiny and yeah, you learn by doing, and those micro refinements are just the best way to do it.
What are you doing on HF with the true SDX mostly digital but JSATE every single mode, so all of them, okay, okay, a lot of envies.
I mean I'm able to light up and get into all of the Southwest. I've even done. We were holding forty meter regional net Saturday mornings. I did it straight with the onboard speaker and mike and made the contact out to the guys within about three hundred miles. About what the literature suggests for enviz But yeah, I used the did you rig light with it? Not the USB interface, and I pick up the little f ZM one and I'll do our dop on HF. Recently, I finally gave
in and on MCom tools. It hasn't been released this version yet. It works with VARA and that little guy. I'm able to do VARA connections over HF, but mostly JSA. You know the kind of wore course HF digital modes okay, anything that's not FT eight. That's the only digital mode that I'm not on board for because it has no m com purpose in my opinion, outside of maybe a propagation tool.
I mean, I don't know. There was on one one time I was on FT eight and uh, and I was some guy was yelling at me, you saying that YouTube sucks and I should get off, I should get a real job or something like that. And he was just typing that through the thing so you can send messages over it. I mean I just ignored the I was actually live streaming, and I was like, look at this guy. I think it was like a Christmas morning one year, like three years ago. But oh wow, yeah,
yeah it is. Yeah, some people, I tell you what, but no, Jesse, I mean JSA call us works on the same protocol as FD eight, as you know. So it's uh, that's if you can if you can do FDA, then you should be able to do JSA call, which is really We did some JSA call for on Winter field Day.
Oh it's a lot of fun.
Yeah, yeah, it can be a lot of fun.
So we'll get this. So for we did anti Summer Field Day about two years ago. I remembered that coffee group and we specifically went out and challenged herself to QRP and JSA and we did it. And we did it by doing it on the work modes or the work bands. Oh see if if all the contesting bands that you would be on for field day, they were crowded, obviously, but twelve, seventeen and thirty meters quite as can be.
And we were able to relay track from the southwest to the East Coast and then back to the guys in the southwest, mostly because we weren't able to do our normal forty meters stuff and get the regional guys. But yeah, relays was kind of a big thing we did for Anti Winter field Day to do the hop to the East coast and back to work around limitations on those higher bands.
That's good. So you mentioned MCom tools. Go ahead and tell the audience what that is exactly. And I would like to know myself, because I've been talk to you about that for probably at least two years. I thought that you were still I thought it was still basically
in beta for lack of a better description. I didn't think it had been released yet or however, not to the point where you wanted at least I know it's probably gonna be ever evolving, right, You're never going to be done with it, but just what stage is it currently? And also after you explain what it is.
Yeah, So MCom Tools was designed out of frustration as being a new ham and the operation I wanted to do in the field. So when I was doing summits on the air or field day, I just wanted to quickly make my contacts and breakdown. But dealing at that time five years ago with a Raspberry Pie and then manually configuring the radio and the audio levels and doing all of that stuff and dealing with tiny keyboards, and
I said, this is just too much work. I just want to plug in my radio and switch to a mode, do wind link, maybe jump to APRS, maybe switch to JAA sate and just have everything be plug and play. So what MCom tools is in a high level right now, I'm calling it the R three release, and it's not done. But it was released Thanksgiving of twenty twenty four. It
took seven weeks off of work unpaid. So that's where a lot of the buying me of coffee funds went was to pay myself for almost two months to work on it, and I was able to achieve during that time the plug and play vision, so you only have to do three thanks if you're able to build the image first boot, you actually end up. So the goal of epcome tools is also to have a operating system that is fully built and it never has to go online.
So once you take the time to build it, you carry that around with you and ten years from now you could plug it into an older computer and it never needs to get any packages. But I wanted to automate everything and turn it into appliance. So number two MCME tools is and appliance, And I mean maybe they could show you a quick demo really quickly. There's only three things you have to do, assuming you have the correct radio ready to go. Okay, so let me know if you can see my screen.
Okay, yep, yep, see it?
Okay, So this is running mcome tools. It's the R four release, which is going to be released on community dot mcomtools dot com in April. Ok So this one's a little bit ahead, but assume that you've just installed it using the USB thumb drive in your computer, and it is one like installing a boon to. In fact, this is built on a boon to. So the one question people have is is it an application. No, it's a full Linux distribution based on a boon To, and it's locked at a point in time. It's locked on
a version that is now out of maintenance. It's what they called end of life, and it's by design. This is an appliance, and I've patched every single thing. So for example, you log in for the first time, and let's say that we want to This is on the command line, but there is going to be a graphical
version coming. You put in your call sign, you put in your grid square, and optionally, if you don't have wind Link, just leave it blanket enter or put your existing wind Link password and you could just confirm it if I may kill that. If nothing ever changes, you never have to run that command again. You're done. Every time I want to now use this system, I can
switch radios. There's a command that right now is kind of command line based, but it will be a graphical application later, and it lists all of the radios that it has full plug and play support. So what I like to tell people is the path of least resistance is if you have a radio already that works with the digit rig light or the digit rig Mobile, you're good to go. You're pretty much all.
Set now, you say, if nothing ever changes, but you put your grid square in. So is it dependent on your current location or are you just telling it what your home qth is?
Yeah, you enter it. Let's say that I go to activate a park and I want the grid square to be reflected in the applications. You can rerun that command again. And so the cool thing about it is that is what it does every single time is it always reads that configuration. So if I want to also switch operators, let's say that I want to be you, you could just go ahead and we could put let me put my old call sign for example, it's actually kind of nice. We'll do KT seven are U when KT seven? Sorry?
Oh KT one are you? When I'm getting confused? And I can change my grid to delta MIC thirty four and we'll keep the password the same. It's it won't work and we'll just do yes. So that's all that is. So the normal flow is, if let's actually do this, We're gonna pick digit rig light for example, right now, good? And if there actually was something for you to configure, you would do it. Let me actually show you another radio real quick, like let's say the seven o five.
So the Icy seven oh five, seventy one hundred, seventy two hundred, and seventy three hundred are all plug and play. In fact, the seven oh five is the easiest one. It's actually kind of cool.
You know.
There's not a whole lot to this. But let me go back to the digit rig light here, okay, so we'll take our did you rig light? M h. I'm actually gonna use a Balfang for this demo.
Cool, okaying about that.
So I'm on the two meter packet frequency which is one four or five uh seven to one zero out here. And the cool thing behind the scenes is that it has plug and play. When you plug this thing in, it knows that it is a did you rig light, and it does all the right things. It configures the audio levels like there is zero configuration, and that's the other big thing. So give me a second.
Here, Frank, are you taking down questions in the chat?
Yeah? I am looking for questions just and.
You turned your camera off. That's why I ask. But no worries, That's fine.
Oh I did. I'm sorry I was poking others.
All right.
Yes, while you're pulling that up, I am looking for a questions we ask them on air later and if it makes it, I'll interject them as need be.
All right, thank you, go ahead, guess jone.
Okay, So this was a clean install. All we did was enter et user to put in our call sign and our grid and our password. Now, the operational thing you do every time you go out, you run ET mode and it gives you all the modes, and every time you do this, it fully rewrites the configuration. So let's say that I want to do a wind link packet for example. We'll hit okay, and it does all of this behind the stuff. It starts Direwolf behind the scenes.
It rewrites the configuration, it launches pat wind Link for you, and you're good to go. Now, you notice I've got the call sign here K T one r A u N. Let's go ahead and kill that bad boy. We'll fix my call sign. We'll do KT seven r U N. We'll leave it at at delta Mike thirty four. Yes, we're good, and then we'll go back into the mode. So this is how you switch modes very quickly, and we'll even do a BBS demo. So let's do windling packet. Yeah,
over A twenty five. And the cool thing is, if you're running like a new BTECHUV Pro, it'll actually not use direbol if it use the Bluetooth instead. So now let's go ahead and connect to a station. Actually, I want you guys to see what's going on. We'll do connect and we'll connect to my gateway and hopefully the Bao fang will light up here and you see, yeah, it's doing its thing.
Nice.
Yep, we're connected already to my gateway and my gateway is now checking for four messages. So that's simple. And it looks like I have a email that came through on the pine phone that's coming in right now. Yep, first email from ETC Mobile pine phone. So I sent this to one of the guys. Now check this out. Now, let's say we want to transition to another mode. We'll just go ahead and close this. And let's say I
want to connect to the BBS. We'll use for this demo para con and you can select now which modem, so as long as your radio supports it. Obviously doesn't make sense for three hundred BOD and for the digital work like you won't get ninety six hundred, but it rewrites all of the configuration appropriately based on the mode you're about to go when so again, now it's starting dire Wolf again on the back behind the scenes. And now we can do a connect and we're going to
connect to my BBS. Let's see if this works. And if we see it, we should get a banner message that says, yep, connected to KT seven are you in? There's the BBS. And the BBS is something that I'm
working on for a different thing. But I've written all kinds of cool applications, like for example, we can get now if I was just over the air, like I am over my balveank, I can ask my remote station give me the space weather right now, and the station at the house now goes and is getting all of the space weather alerts if there's any blackouts, what the KNDX is. So a lot of cool stuff. But now I can even go and jump into the BBS. We'll jump into that application. I'll show you JAS eight here
in a second. So now we're connected to BBS, it should say hello guests, Towne and I can go now and list let's say, my message will list the last five messages for today. And I have all this stuff running on the phone, by the way too as of yesterday. That's something we'll dive into here.
Yeah, that's pretty slick.
That's not real fun. Let's do list bulletin So we'll get into this in why a bulletin board system in twenty twenty five. But our group has been using it now for over ninety days, and we can upload and download files here. This is actually where I post very early access. You can see here on message three seventy four mcome tools commute R four dot thirteen. So I'm doing incremental releases that I'm not publicly talking about, but I'm using this here to socialize that stuff early. So
that's just another example of another mode. And we're going to just go ahead now and disconnect.
You've got the BBS running over HF. Is that it right now?
This is VHF twelve hundred BOD But I also have a Vara HF port, so put it earlier in the chat. If anybody wants a free license, I have one left remaining. I bought ten. If you go to launch Vara HF and then VARA terminal and connect to seven decimal one zero zero upper sideband. You can connect to KT seven, run DASH seven and if you type in BBS and send me a message using a SP and the my call sign, I'll give away a license. It doesn't look like anybody who has done that because I just checked
my messages and there weren't any. So yeah, I just disconnected from that. And we can also know go ahead in and quit that. Let's say now we want to do APRS for example, we can go ahead and now drop into a wind link. Oh we could even do viur FM, but I haven't configured it. Yeah, let's do the APRS client. So behind the scenes again it fires up everything that it needs and now we've got APRS running. And the cool thing about MCom tools is part of how I guide you online on how to set this up.
I also have tools at the end of the installer to pick the state you're in, and it downloads the entire maps you for your state, so you fully have that stuff available so you don't even have to fetch it in the future. So this is why it's very much a gread down situation. If you have GPS connected. It detects that. So for example, let's say that I want to send a message to you, we'll use let's do the weather WX bot. Uh oh, I don't know if I'm gonna it's gonna be able to hear. Is
the did you pee mode? Yeah, let's try this. We're gonna do wide one blah blah blah and eight five zero eight seven. I don't know if this will go through, but we'll We'll definitely give it a shot. Yeah, packets are going through. Hopefully the other station will hear it
and retransmit it. You can actually see that the little RF guy was going But anyway, so the vision first was to do plug and play, so make it easy where all you do is connect the radio and then it fully configures all the applications with saying defaults and you can just mode hoop and every time you switch modes. What it does is take an appliance model where it just force kills everything. So if something is screwed up, you hit it with a hammer just by getting out
of this and you're good to go. So yeah, let me go ahead and kill that. I'm inside the house, so not a huge thing. So some of the other things that are coming here are well, they're all in
here in the new release. But you could even set up services so you could do point to point chat using something called chatterbox with digital signatures, so you can verify person you're talking to using encryption, not to obfuscate anything, but you can use private public key cryptography to sign your call sign and then the other end can have that locally and they can verify you. So there's an
exchange of keys. So if someone just were to put your call sign Jason in on their computer, I would know that it's not really you because it doesn't match your your keys that I have.
Oh I see, okay, yeah.
So really cool stuff. And now if you do have var HF installed, that's all good to go. But let me show you another cool demo. We're gonna get canceled here, okay, and we're gonna disconnect this radio. And it wasn't really planning on doing this demo. Now we'll take the UV pro, we'll turn it on.
I've been having I've been really really liking my UV pro. I've been doing a lot of thing. Isn't a wind link over my uv pro with oh with In fact, the video that I post tomorrow will be about wode wind link over Android using the UV pro. That's that's the video I'm doing tomorrow.
So it's very cool. Yeah, it's really nice for that.
It is it is.
So this one's one off. So the Bluetooth interface was something I didn't want to do, but I saw so much value in having this Bluetooth with a built in T and C for what it is, like one hundred and fifty bucks compared to the Kenwood D seventy four D seventy five.
Yeah.
So there's again a lot of this stuff is a gradual evolution, so people that are on the window side don't freak out. This stuff takes time, but all of the magic behind the scenes you'll see. You haven't had to put a comport in a serial port, you haven't had to deal with sound settings. In fact, I should have jumped over to jsa call to show that. That's actually pretty cool. So I've got this command called et uv pro. There's also one now for what is it, the vr VGC.
The oh yeah, the N seventy six VGC.
That's the one six. Yeah, So a community member donated something that was built on the same command so that's going to be coming out. And then we also have a contribution for the D seventy five, so they all work the same way. So I've already paired, so I'm just going to type connect and it's going to go do all the nerds to for you. In fact, in yellow here you can see that it's giving you instructions. So menu general settings, make sure you have kiss, T
and C turned on, and then enter one. Done, and now it's going to try to talk to the UV pro and it's going to go through and do all the negotiation. It even creates the ports for you, the AX twenty five ports. You don't have to worry about that yourself. So that all works. And now, for example, we can do I could connect to the BBS again using the native tools and we'll put w L two K here and I'll just go straight to the TTP BBS and this is literally just happening straight over this guy.
No wires right now, and again we're connected. We get that same Hello, guest O and welcome, and we can do the message listing there. So just going to exit that. And now let's say we want to transition over to a wind link. We're not we're going to be using wind Link on packet. We just run our normal et mode again. It now knows that it's not using dire Wolf over a sound card. You can kind of see here it says win Link native packet puts you right
back in. You can see here it's doing a X twenty five plus Linux and we can go ahead and I can quickly. Let's say, I want to compose a message. What's your call signed Jason?
Yeah, send send me something k C five HWB.
Right, and we'll just do a live demo here. I've been checking.
I've been checking and sending win the emails for about the past two weeks. Guys, all of you who have sent me a win link email I've applied to so I did some location sharing, location position reporting, I should say, while I was on my road trip this week as well.
So we're gonna do connect again. It's gonna be fast. I got to put the outbox here. C see we're already connected. In fact, I find that the packet TNC is faster than the Direwolf stuff. So we're sending that off. Your live demo thing should disappear from my outbox pretty quickly. You could see down here at bottom it's transmitting, So again you kind of should have some context on what you're doing. I've done a field training exercise with my guys and we've got every We did what we call
it an install fest. So building the image for income tools is technical and requires you to play with a Boontu. So at the Huntsville, Alabama Fest, I'm actually going to rent probably two or three booths or a large one and have an installfest there and we could just put the USB drive because I can't allow people to download the ISO because I'll get sued by Canonical, the copyright holders of Ubuntu, and there's too much work to de
Ubuntu boontu, and there are specific reasons. I spent six months evaluating different distributions that would work on rugged ice hardware, and at that time it was the best one for the job. So that's that.
So can people not get this right now without coming to one of your install fests?
No, they can't. It's just an Intel process. I mean I could go ahead and try to open a browser real quick. Here, let me see Chrome, give me one second here.
Yeah, Because Freddie was asking how do we get a copy of the software, which I was that was going to be my next thing after you were done anyways, Like how do people get on? And you're running this on your little I forget the model number of that tough pad.
You have Panasonic FCM one and it was designed for that that class of stuff so that all has needed support for everything. OK, so it was designed for the Panasonics. You have twenty the FCM one. It runs on any computer that will run a BOOTU twenty two dot ten, So you're fine with a minimum of one hundred and twenty eight gigabyte SSD drive. I like eight gigs of RAM,
mostly because I have some future things. I'm about ten years ahead on the development I'm doing for because I'm poorting over the mapping and all the cool stuff people used to see on my videos, and that stuff's all coming over very slowly. So this release was more foundational. But yeah, go to community dot mcomtools dot com and
this is for the R three release. It doesn't have the VARs stuff in there, and it walks you through the mission statement and this design or the site is designed to be run in order so home, you know, go to getting started. It talks about user expectations, but you have to build the image yourself, and I walk
you through everything. So carve out is Saturday. But the cool thing is, once you have it written in that image working, keep that USB drive and you can literally boot off of it and use it whenever you want. But yeah, so that's the process. You have to build the image yourself.
So I have I have the big brother to your Z one. I think it's a G one, FM's g one or whatever it is.
The larger works just fine.
Okay, And it's running Windows Windows ten and uh and it's and it's fine. But you're you're saying that everything you're doing for this, this community Income tools is running on a USB drive, so I could just boot it from any computer that that would be supported.
So there's two ways.
Yeah, is it not? Is it not locally installing on the computer or do you have that option? Do you have that option to do either?
Or it's both. Yeah. So here's how I like to do it. So let's say that I have someone else's computer and we're in a situation. I will pull out my uncomm toal drive, we'll boot off of it, and we'll click on try it now, and all the features that show you work the caveat is it's running every thing in memory, so the experience will be very slow and slug. It'll probably feel like a Raspberry Pie three B plus.
Yeah, okay, that's what you get for a live image.
Yeah, so yes, yes, I blow away and reinstall this on all my stuff. In fact, I don't even dual boot anymore because I did have a problem when I was playing with Windows. I had MCom Tools and Windows dual booted. When I when I was playing with the off grid setup, and I temporarily just for a second booted into Windows and I connected to Wi Fi to do just one thing. Okay, and this is what happened. Let's stop sharing a real quick. Yeah, it's like, oh,
Windows update. I said, nope, nope, no thank you. So it downloaded without me knowing the Windows update, and it went out to go film a video, booted up the FCM one and I'm like, that is weird. There's no bootloader to get me into MCom Tools. It used to allow me to choose if I want an income Tools or Windows. Well, that update just erased the boot record. Yeah, because it's like I'm Windows, I'm just going to take over. So for that reason, my recommendation is always install MCom
Tools as the only operating system. I would recommend most people just go to eBay, find one hundred or two hundred dollars notebook that has been you know, released in the last ten years, and fully install it on there so you don't have to worry about losing data if you're not familiar with how to back up Windows and
do all that stuff. But for you, Jason, if you want, you can ship me You're g one and I'll do the install for you and ship it back so you don't have to go through the headache and just get a sense for it.
Actually, you know, I think that would be a fun video. I think that out of my I think I might try to. I keep going back and forth. So I recently picked up a I switched my main laptop too. I have a tough book now for the actual laptop. So I carry my my g one and my my my laptop. I forget the model number on it, but I'll tell you here in a second, and that's what I carry now. But in fact, I pulled out that laptop at ham kh and Ack came for a CKJ.
He was like, WHOA, where'd you get that, and I'm like, you know, the newer ones aren't as tough. You know, they used to be kind of early bulking. You could throw him down a flight of stairs. You wouldn't worry about it. The newer ones aren't as tough. It's still a cool laptop. But uh, but that's what I've been But I've got but I've got duel boots on that with the with the thumb drive that I did my
my off gride Windows ten video four. But I've just always kept I've just always kept off grade Windows ten. I'm sorry. I've just always kept Windows ten locally installed on my G one. I probably could do that on the g one actually, because I keep going back and forth and whether I want to switch over to Lenox
or not. A ck and I had a long conversation about leaving Windows and going to Linux and doing this, and I don't think I'm ever going to leave Windows completely because there's a lot of DMR software and radio software up there that works only on Windows. But you know, about ten years ago I tried to do that and I finally got frustrated with it because of all the compiling of drivers you had to do and Jason's like, he's like, it's come a long way since then, and
he really likes Mint. Mint twenty two is the one he likes. So yeah, it's I've never used Mint twenty two. That's that's the one he keeps talking about. But I think that might be a fun project to just go through this community dot income tools steps myself and you know, follow follow the instructions, and when I invariably get stuck, I'll reach out to you. What did I do? You're wrong?
It's a it's a two phase process the first time, because what you have to do is you have to install u BOONTU twenty two dot ten first, and then there's some minor things you have to install, like the
image creation software and some scripts. But then at that point you can go and produce the image, and then you kind of go through a second install of m com Tools, and this whole architecture may go away based on some new breakthroughs I had literally as of yesterday and the day before where I have now m com Tools running on Mobian on the phone, which is wild, and.
I looked, I looked up the pine phone while you were going through that demo just now, and those things are not expensive.
They're not, but i'll tell you right now. So I've got the pine Phone Beta edition, three gigs of RAM and a thirty two gig eat MMC storage. It's a full blown Linux distribution that's based on Debians. So for me to quickly bring over what I had developed, everything works on here, the sound cards, the plug and play, It's going to take me the rest of the year to get those two two get to the same level that you're able to do, because there's some tweaks I
have to do. So I was afraid that I would release that quick, shaky, terrible video yesterday, like, oh my god, guys, I could connect to the BBS with just this is all I have, and I showed how you could technically run JS. So I've got some custom applications. I'm gonna actually work on a port of jsa call that has a mobile friendly display later this year. And so I was afraid. They have a newer phone called the Pine Pro, and I was afraid, so I bought two of them
just in case. So it has newer hardware and it's gosh, it was it's four it's four gigs of memory and one hundred and twenty eight gig e MMC drive and it's got updated camera, updated GPU, and I'm hoping that the battery life isn't terrible. I think it is going to be bad. I think that's going to be what's going to kill this device is the battery. But if it's snappier, it could be a daily driver. I mean, when I went out today in the field, it was
great pulling this out of my chest. Frick doing et UV pro and I was doing windlink and the BBS out in the middle of nowhere, and yeah, I can even connect directly to the phone using the digirig light.
Does the phone have a US well, does the phone have a USB port?
Has one USB C port, USBC port?
Again, that's that's good enough, That's all you need.
Yeah, but the whole audio subsystem worked. I was not expecting that. The way that I built m contols to be plug and play. There's some low level Unix stuff. All of that stuff just worked. When I was doing these experiments on Android phones, none of them were true Linux distributions and all of that stuff failed. So people ask, will it work on Android? Nope? Will I ever write an application for Android? Nope? Will I ever do ATAC Nope.
I am committed to building on top of Buntu ten or now the Wan twelve on here, and I'm going to be working with old software. Uh you know, radio is not going to change and all of that stuff works. And if you're concerned about security, my point is these are designed to be off grade air gap solutions. So if you want to compromise the things via security, you better have a hacker that's able to figure out how to inject packets over the air with an exploit that
can take over your your phone. The attack surface is minimal, so.
Well sorrow an exploit before that was over JSA, was it JSA? It was over JSA. That was I think, I swear to JSA. I got to go back and reread the story. It's been a while, but it was able to create a malicious payload. Then it's through JSA. Well all, then we'll do remote code exploit through the memory overrun and then that triggered it. I was like, guys, and then this is a issue with all our software. All our software is ten years old. We need new digital software.
Let me tell you what the issue is on that front. Because I'm trying to crack that nut. The most powerful thing that we have are all of these different modems. So I take a look at Direwolf and that being a packet modem or packet TNC, the R modem and JSA is also essentially a modem. It's modulating and demodulating
this traffic. The problem is the barrier to understanding the mathematics to doing the audio encoding, decoding, dealing with the ARA, the multipathing, fading, and all of the techniques they use. That community of developers is so small, So I realized that personally, I can't write that Motivum software. I'd have to go back and spend probably two years of just learning all the basics to write like another modem to
compete with something like Vara for example. The approach I took was, all of these brilliant people have done that work. What I can do is make it plug and play. Have access to Packet three hundred, BOD, twelve hundred BOD, ninety six hundred BOD, art up, Vara HF, Vara FM, the Mercury modems, and I'm planning on modifying or building brand new mobile friendly, touch friendly, good user experience on top of them. So yeah, I'm gonna be working on a modified version of JSA call. So that's where the
problem is. I don't think it's a lack of wanting to do it, is just that the skill set to do the low level modem work is those engineers are starting to retire, and I don't think this new generation of engineers has the talent and the education and the background to do it. So that's where the problem is. I think the reason why there hasn't really been a
great competitive Vara is because of that. The closest thing that's coming out right now is a modem called Mercury, and it's supposed to be Vara compatible from a application perspective, So you could connect Mercury into like your Windling client, but you'd have to talk to another Windlin client that is using Mercury, and then as far as they're concerned, they think they're talking to Vara, but they're not. And that's nice and open and so those are the things
I'm going to be exploring. So yeah, it's interesting now that we've got newer hardware and all of this other great software. It's just a matter of cleaning them up and packaging them up nicely.
Are we ready for some questions here?
Yeah, one thing, one thing real quick. Some people are talking about twelve olt laptops. I know the question came across will it work on the evolved Maestro? Yeah, so we can tackle that in a second.
I was going to skip that one because my answered that thing away. Yeah, it's that I'm done with.
I want to Well that's great, but I wanted to address it on the live stream. Nevertheless, I will say this, Okay, I have got let me make sure I got the right screen size here. This is the one I've got right here, and I bought this off of Amazon. This is the FC g one. Now this is a oh, ten inch ten inch tablet, the one that Gastone is using as the M one, which I think is what five to six inch nine inches? Oh, I thought it was a lot smaller than the.
Ten Well it's seven it's seven inches seven inches.
Okay, that sounds for they measure yeah, just the screen. I think they're just measuring the screen here.
So it's yes, this is the size of my hand right.
Right, yeah, okay, so I have the I have the the larger one, and people talking about, uh, twelve olt laptops in the chat. I have this, and they make a car adapter for this vice. Now I didn't notice at first, but they make a car adapter for it that plugs into a regular cigarette lighter adapter. And I had from something I got from Biyu in a long long time ago, is a cigarette lighter to power pole receptacle.
So I just take my and you could you could cut the cigarette lighter adapter off and put your own power poles on it. Sure, but I've used that many times on my battery box, multiple battered boxes with no issues. What I figured out after I got my new laptop, which was the new laptop, is this f Z fifty five. The laptop takes the exact same twelve oolt adapter that the g one takes, so I can power there are Yeah, and that's kind of that's what I was gonna add.
I kind of figured that after I saw that that they were all the same. But all of this Panasonic tough Pad and toughbook stuff has this twelve bolt adapter or or the one ten adapter, and they they all work across the cross platform. So yeah, so essentially my fcg one I have is a twelve volt tough pad because I charge it from my battery box with no issues, or I can if I want to.
Yeah, So here's my thoughts on that. So really quickly the evolve you and I tried it two years ago at Courtzfest, Yes, and it was just you were waiting on everything, so I don't recommend.
It is really slow.
When you go to these ruggedized machines like the Panasonics, they're either fifteen point eight volts or sixteen volts and they can fluctuate a little bit what I went with for the field, since I also standard on twelve volts like every other amateur radio, or thirteen point eight volts. There's a company called Lind Electronics Lima, India November Delta Lind and these are used by public service agencies to drive their tough books and they're kind of expensive. I
find the mon on eBay for like thirty bucks. And the cool thing about the Lind Electronics is they'll go from one ten to the sixteen volts that these need and they work across all of my tough pads and tough books. But they also have an input for twelve vaults, so in the field they can use my bio. We know going into this little brick and then on the outside there's a little jumper cable that goes to sixteen vaults and I've been using it now for almost two years,
and I absolutely love it. It has a little bit of RF noise, so I use it mostly to charge it when I'm not doing stuff. But it's it depends on how much of a peerist you want to be. JSA call and the modes that're working were working fine when I had the solar panels running going into that whole system. But yeah, that's my philosophy. Go to it. Get a twelve vult to sixteen vault adapter and one that's not
terribly noisy. I prefer the Lind electronics because they're ultra rugged and some of them are dual power source, like one ten AC plus twelve vault TC.
Now I'm starting to come to the thought of I'm just going to be getting aa US one that charges off the USB because I already have plugs USBC plugs and the higher vault is USBC plugs on my system already and that's always in my bag. Instead of trying to get another twelve volt and get the adapter, why don't just go with a standard, and that's kind of where I'm leaning right now, and just charge everything off the USBC. Make sure it's the USB three or the newer standard in Colin day.
The PD. So the machine that we're using, and I haven't socialized this too much because it's not a good field notebook. This is the Dell seventy two to twenty, the Dell seventy two twenty. It's a tablet and there's a keyboard for it that Dell makes. It's terrible because it has a kickstand on the back. I swap mine out with this Ike keyboard, which has a hinge that allows it to just stay where its app But the nice thing about this guy is that it uses us.
It will take in I think it's twenty vaults from that guy, nineteen or twenty volts. But you can also charge and run it off of us b C power delivery, so you can use your little I use my batteries for example, like the for the RVU. We standardize on eighteen volt REO B batteries for everything, and I've got a little guy that plops right on top of those contacts,
and I'll use that for PD. So that's another option if you don't want to deal with twelve volt is find a USBC capable power delivery small form factor machine for the field.
It's just another art tool in our kit. And I think just be easier for me just to standardize it around the twelve volt the PD because I already have one of the connectors, and all the battery boxes have the USB connectors on them.
We install them so well, you get some of those little power banks now that'll do up to like they'll do twelve or fifteen, maybe even eighteen volts through power delivery with USBC, so you can you can get some stuff like that. It's much smaller than carrying around a battery box. But I always have battery box with me anyway, but you know I wouldn't go rocking with one. To go back to that conversation, so all right, Frank, Yeah, let's do some uh let's let's do some questions.
So I think we kind of tackled on what hardware this is running. Do you have just any like requirements because you're kind of leaving it open, do you have like minimum requirements RAM hard drive spabes go for it.
Yeah, And it's mostly because I have a vision so people keep on asking me about features, I'm not taking any feature request because I've done development on the commercial version, which I'm pulling parts, so there's a whole off gride offline mapping component that's coming. So the requirements that I'm giving people now are for the future needs that it's
going to be. So when R four or five, R six, those releases come out, and I'm planning on doing an R or release roughly every quarter to move the need and they'll have themes. So right now, if the minimum you want is a one hundred and two eight gig SSD drive, perfectly an M two. If you're going to dual boot, which I do not recommend because of Windows hijacking the bootloader on updates, you want to look at least at two fifty six to five twelve if that's
your requirement. Personally, these days, I'm only looking at systems that are have two hundred and fifty six gigs because I just plan to run it. In terms of memory, it can run with less. I found that out with
the Pine Phone. It technically does work on three gigabytes of RAM, but I will be doing lots of memory management, memory mapping the future So the hard recommendation is if you want to buy something now and have it work in a release that comes out two years from now or a year and a half from now, eight gigs of RAM, and then for CPU, I run a ton of iCore five or iCore or I five core processors. You know, two to four cores is fine. If you're looking at the Panasonics, I will tell you avoid all
of the early Mark versions. So if you're getting a Panasonic FZM one, the nine inch one, the Mark one will work. In fact, I'm running the Mark one for the BBS and it's been up and running for close to one hundred days by itself. The Mark two is the sweet spot. It runs really nicely. If you want to get the Ike keyboard, don't get the Mark three. They don't mate. So for me, if I can make a recommendation and you want the small form factor tablet,
I would get the Mark two. For the f zg G ones, I would say try to find either a Mark four or a Mark five the later models, not the one, two or three. But rule of thumb, if you're not going to be running rugged as hardware, I get that not everybody does what I do, but m come tools designed for for kind of that operating delivery level. Get yourself a del that will run a Buntu twenty two ten again, anything in the last ten years that sixty four bit Intel should work. That's the only other
hard requirement. This is sixty four bit only until architecture.
My FCG one is a Mark three, So you think it won't run on that or not.
Well it will. No, it'll be fine. But if you're looking at like eBay for example, to source these, and you're trying to figure out do I spend the extra twenty bucks thirty bucks whatever that Rialta is.
Yeah, okay, I lost you, Gastone, No.
He's oh yeah, no audio, No audio, Gastone.
I don't think you can hear us either, I know, right, Can you hear him?
Frank? No, Well I got Pandora growing in my ears?
No, no, no audio.
For me.
Yeah, you're back everything? Okay, Yeah, I can hear you now everything you just said. We couldn't hear you.
Oh when did I drop out? Or what was the last thing you heard?
Right after I said that I have the Mark three on the FCG one and you said it to work. Just that that delta of if it's only twenty bucks more than you're gonna want, you know, the later one.
Yeah. So there's a company or the guy Bob Johnson's computer stuff. Look him up and type in ceial look up or mark look up, and he has for every Panasonic that's out there, like the CF thirty three's, the twenties, the f ZM ones, the g ones. He's got a way to look up the cereal and tell you whether you have a Mark one, two, three, four or five
because it's not always obvious. And if you go find a seller, ask them for the serial number so you could verify that what you're getting is actually my case, I wanted an f ZM one Mark two because I had the ones for so many years and I wanted to verify it. He sent me the serial number. I looked it up. Maybe I can find it at some point here for you guys.
And I have that little Ikea what do you call an ikea keyboard?
Ike keyboard?
Ike Yeah, yeah, the Ikey, that's right. Yeah. I took that thing off. I got to where I just it made the it made the kit to bulky and it works. It works great. It's nice in waterproof. I mean you're not going to do any fast typing on it because the way those keys are just kind of like beneath the kneaprint or whatever that is. But I mean it
works fine. I just the last time I took it out, and I beautiful use with that thing with wsjt X and FT eight with the d R eight ninety one from digirig on my FT eight ninety one from Yazoo and PoTA with that all day long, no problem. And I just I didn't like the keyboard.
I just I don't know, so I'll disagree there for one reason. I don't like carrying the keyboard, and that's why part of what I'm doing in the later releases is to rebuild the applications to be touch first and mobile friendly and just use the existing back ends. Try doing JSA call on an f ZM one on a seven inch screen without a keyboard and mouse, and that's my go to you mode, especially since I rock the true SDX dealing QRP, that's the mode that really is
best suited for it. So for me personally, I've run in to an issue. If you don't want the ike keyboard, hold on one second, let me show you what I'm running.
All right, that's quick.
Yeah.
It also looks like we have someone connecting with Vervara HF to the BBS right now.
Oh nice, okay, good.
This is this little guy right here. They running about twenty five bucks on.
Oh yeah, I used to have one of those. I may still have one around here somewhere.
They work exceptionally well with the FCM one. So this is what I run in the RV. So for the RV, I use am comfortable. I also have an offline map for the entire Southwest with turn by turn directions since they also have the off grid plug and play for GPS. Occasionally I want to do jsa call using the HF antenna on the RV while I'm in motion, and I'll pull out this guy. So I've got this thing mounted so I could use it like map thing, and it's
really usable. The mouse integrated here is really nice. It's RII and they're twenty five bucks and they're USBC chargeable, so it's just in line with all the other gear. So this will save you a ton of money. Because the IKE keyboards when I was selling them, I was selling mine for three hundred and eighty dollars a pop, which is cheaper than even some of the US once
people are pushing. So twenty five bucks versus four hundred dollars shipped is something that people may want to consider for sure.
Yeah, okay, good Frank, do we have anything else.
I'm scrolling through here? Can you do APRS through income Tools? Yeah?
I showed that. Yeah, it works right out of the box. That was one of the first modes. And let me give you a spoiler. So in the commercial version of m com Tools, which I never released but I'm porting over, I wrote a custom faster map and I also extended APRS the YAK the yet another APRS client three and a half years, four years ago, and I wrote a API HTTP API to expose everything it does. And in the early versions of m com Tools I showed on the channel, I wrote my own interface to do it.
So there's going to be some high speed mapping, more streamlined messaging. But again this is just this stuff is coming much later after I get the core platform completely done and it's bulletproof, plug and play. But yes, it does support it right now. It supports it in the R three release, the release that's out on the community dot m comtol site.
Now, if I go ahead and follow these instructions here on that website and install R three, yep, and then you release our four in April or May or whatever it is, how do I have to start from scratch over again or is it upgradeable?
There's no upgrade path. And one of the four principles of m com tools is keep it simple stupid the and that applies not only to the user operations but to the way it was implemented. So it's one radio only at a time, one mode at a time, very simple. But it was also designed where I did not want to spend my time saying, oh, I'm on R two and I want to jump to R four or five, and I have to figure out what are all the changes.
So what you can do is, if you have R three installed, all of the tools to build the new image are available to you. So all you have to do is start cubic, which is the image built tool, download the one thing in there and rebuild it and
then write that image to another USB drive. And the cool thing about that approach is you can keep AR three installed, shut it down, boot into the R four image that you built and do it in the try it now mode in that in memory mode, and you can test to see if everything still works, and if it does, then you can make the decision. And as part of our four I also added tools called et user Backup and et User Restore, so you can back
up all of your files. In fact, I can show this real quick and you could restore it so you don't have to worry about losing emails and a bunch of other stuff. All right, let me share my screen here. So again, this is command line that it will be an app in the future. So you saw that when I started winlink, I had all of those emails, right, Yeah, I can run this one command ET user backup and it's going to tell you that it's only going to
back up all of the mcome. Tools can fig in two locations, and it'll also fully backup Pat, so any in any emails you've had it with Pat, all of that stuff, and then you can ask it if you want to see all the files. I'll do no, and let me do that one again. Oh, it's already created it, so it creates this file for you and you can run this as many times and create as many backups as you want. But when you go now on a new indem image, you just copied this over to it.
And there's another command called et user restore. And the guys in my group have been testing this and it will I don't have any backups here et use restore. Well, I think I broke something there. There should have been a backup there. But it gives you the ability to pick which one that's on either a connected US spe drive. It'll scan it and then allow you to restore it,
and you can run it multiple times. So like if I have email on my field notebook, one on my shack station, one in the RV, I could do a backup from all three and then restore them all on one machine and I get the union or all of the email inbox messages from all three systems now on one machine. Yeah, so it was a fun.
Lit It was kind of cool. Yeah, that's kind of cool to have be able to do that with with Windley for sure. Okay, good.
So it's there's a very deliberate philosophy and everything. It's like everything should be easy to use, easy to restore, if it's never been configured, you should be able to get up and running it under five minutes on first install.
So whatich version of this is a custom Linux install image you're building? What version of Linux you you recommend using? Again, I saw it several different times, so I'm just read.
So the only thing that's ever going to be supported is Ubuntu, and the reason for it is that for income tools to work the way it does, I've had to customize at least one hundred different areas of the operating system. There were actually kernel issues that existed, there were driver issues that existed, there were broken GPS implementation, and I patch all of that stuff on top of Ubuntu twenty two dot ten. So it's an appliance and
a full operating system. People are like, well, you're going to miss out on the next greatest version of a boon too. It's like, well, now I have to go and figure out is the kernel still broken? Is this still broken? And there's no value because everything works and for example, the applications themselves in a lot of cases all compile everything. So if there's a new version of diur Wolf, for example, for packet, it's already I can recompile it on that version and I do that myself.
I have all the scripts for doing all that stuff behind you or behind the scenes for you. So yeah, Ubuntu twenty two dot ten, it's non negotiable. The only area where I'm giving on that just a little bit is Mobian twelve because there's so much value in having the platform, but I can't support twenty different Linux distributions across every single update. There's no way to test that stuff. So that's the other thing. Whenever I do a major release, I test every radio in every mode. It takes me
an entire weekend to connect the seven oh five. I unplug the seven oh five and hit up all ten modes, then go and get the UV pro, then go get the digi rig with the digit rigged laying. So I do all of that end to end testing. And that's the reason why I also right now I'm not really accepting full requests from other people. Is not to say no, I don't have the time to review it, and those
other people are only concerned about their one feature. And again, the whole goal for what I'm doing is to have an appliance, turnkey appliance. In fact, don't even think of it as Linux. It's just this is an appliance. Don't worry it's an implementation detailed. The fact that it runs on a boon too, and the fact that it runs on a specific version of a Boon two, So think of it like a toaster.
What's your website again.
Community dot mcomtools dot com and the site will be updated updated completely next month when our four comes out. And you know, for the Byman Coffee members, what I do is we do this thing called the TTP nerd Hour, and we'll do behind the scenes work. I'll show them previews of all the intermittent builds that users shouldn't be using. But there's a group that just wants to see what I build, you know, every couple of weeks, so they follow along very light on the support. Again, I try
my best to introduce no bugs. I did kind of mangle the last release because of the complexity of bringing in Vara. So the Vara support is one hundred percent experimental and will be forever. And the reason for it is that Vara was very much a concession for that community, and mcome tools does not behave the same way it does with the mode Switcher as it does with Vara, because Var is a Windows app. To run in the foreground,
you have to configure all these things. So it's the only app or set of applications that's not zero can fig and it's nothing that I did. It's just the fact that it's a Windows application and it breaks the model. But there is value. So there is experimental support coming in in the release, and I won't be supporting any questions or issues. I mean, that's kind of where it's at. It works, but there won't be any bug fixes for
the most part. So but yeah, if you guys want just a turnkey solution for our dot packet, you know those other modes, it works well. I tested every time I go out nice.
Yep, I'm gonna have to. I think I might go out there and grab it for I might wait till April though for the R.
Force, I would wait. Yeah, you get the good stuff, but again, if you ship it to me, I'll give it to you turnkey, so you could just kind of get the raw experience and just connect it up. And the other cool thing is when you run et radio and let's say you pick what do you do you have right now that you want to use with it?
Pick one. Man Freddy's in there asking about the IC seven or six Mark two G and correct me if I'm wrong. But it'll work with anything that dig you rig supports, right.
It will. If you want the CAT control to work, there is a configuration file you have to put in, okay, and that's how the eight five seven, the eight ninety seven, that's how all of those work. But yeah, if it works with the did you rig. If you don't need the CAT control, you can run it in what we call did you rig no cat and all you have to do is tune the VFO but it'll detect the
audio interface and do all the things for you. But yeah, did you rig is the Actually this project would not have been released if it wasn't for the dig you rig because it's like the Swiss Army Night if it's a consistent interface. Because I actually checked the hardware. When you plug in and unplug, it actually will see what radio is configured, and it will auto configure all the
devices for you, and then all the applications. It reconfigures every application on every start based on the radio, and the digit rig made all of that possible.
Nice's a didgibrig is a fantastic product, good several of them.
I don't have any more questions. There were a lot of them, but there are a lot of repeats, and I kind of smashed some of them into each other. So that's about it for me.
You guys curious about the pine Phone stuff? Yeah, if you watch, Yeah, I haven't figured out how to share the screen, so I'll tell you guys. So my goal always has been to be a communicator, and I want the thing that allows me to eat e C. It's a pain to always carry a seven inch or nine inch tablet with you, it's yeah, right, But if you have a phone and you have your ht uh, you're
good to go. I know it's getting better and Android in iOS with things like radio mail on Windows and APRS or sorry iOS and then APRS dot Fi and all of those things. But things like JSA call for example, don't work. So this is the pine Phone Beta again, Please do not go out and buy it. This thing's already showing me its words.
But that specific one is currently out of stock, the beta.
So that is it the one that's listed for one Yes, so you can get the beta if you get it with the breakout board for one night with.
The nine Okay, I see yeah, I see that one as well. Okay, yeah, so you can get the yeah nine for what the breakout board or the pro is three to ninety nine. It looks like so yeah, okay.
So yeah, I bought two. I bought actually I bought one pro before I released the video, and then I bought a second pro on the used market before this meeting because someone had a pine phone keyboard, which are unobtainedingum and they bundle them together. So I bought that. So I'm gonna test the case keyboardist as a fun thing. Okay, So I'm gonna log in here. And what I found most impressive about this is that Mobian is a full Debian distribution. Everything you can do on Linux you can
do on this phone. But I mean, as you can see, I'm still trying to log in.
So do you not have a SIM card or Wi Fi on that phone? If you're if you're trying it to be if you're trying to keep it off grid like the tablet, are you not using that phone phone?
Yeah, there's a there's an LTE module. I don't have it in here. This is offline and it doesn't even need to be connected to Wi Fi. It's got some cool features. So we're going to open up the console here and I did this today in the back country and it was just wild. So hopefully you can kind of see some of that right and focus. Yeah, that's the terminal.
It looks like the terminal.
Yeah, but I can now go and for example, there's this command here ax call to connect to the BBS like we did. I don't know of any other phone right now or app on any platform that allows you to do packet work to connect to just a bulletin board system or go peer to peer just doesn't exist. So I'm going to now try to see if we can connect to the UV pro and we get the same instructions as we did earlier on the full laptop
and we'll see if it actually pairs here. And so the point is what I'm doing here is it shows potential, and if this turns out to be success, I'm going to be developing all of the front end graphical applications to be touch friendly for tablet and laptop, but also design them at the same time so that they work on the phone. So it's not that I'm adding more work to myself. It's the application now will work on all three screen devices. By Virtue of having access to
this at the same time. So we're going to go and try to connect to the BBS. I'm gonna do this in real time. You guys, let me know if it says ttpbbsy is connected.
Yeah, that's connected, right, Uh huh yep.
Yeah.
So I use this to post a message on the BBS to a friend while I was out four miles from the house. Did not have to have any kind of special hardware. So there's a lot of potential early on. Like I said, the biggest challenge I think we're going to have with the pine Phone is going to be the battery life. Because one thing I found with this is this phone wants to if you're not touching it, it's inactive. It's doing some type of long lived session
for like jsa call or wind link. It will go into the lock screen and then all of a sudden that connection gets dropped. So I've had go and turn off all of the things that say hey, if I'm inactive, don't do anything, don't lock me out, and I've turned on all the power things to be on full blast, just like MCom tools is right, because you want to do your mode. You want to make sure it's successful and you don't want to stop. So I killed the battery life very quickly because I don't want it to
operate like I'm a normal phone. You haven't touched me. Let's go back into the lock screen and hibernate. So don't buy this phone right now. I'm a day and a half into proving this concept out and I'm taking it slow. Now that I know that I can plug it a digitirach and it sees it, and I could do the plug and plate and it sees it, It's like, okay, Now I could spend one thousand hours developing one application at a time to dial in that experience with the
goal of just having the lightest weight edc kit. So yeah, that's the pine Phone why I'm working on in parallel.
Sweet. That's great, man, I am awesome.
Man, you're smashing all the comments. I'm not seeing some of these because I'm just looking for the questions and trying to point and spawn people. But you got two guys already. I was like, how did I not see that?
And already No, it's fine, Yeah, it's fine.
Yeah.
Part of the reason is I spent a lot of time with the buy me a coffee. Guys, when I took seven weeks sabbatical and these questions came up over and over, so I've been long winded. Not to be long winded, I preemptibly answered, get a mark two if you're gonna get this one, get a mark four or five if you're in g one get it's this tuff comes up a lot.
And yeah, kate E six g a E wants to know if his message came through the Vora terminal.
Oh uh, you know, I'm gonna check it on the phone. That might be fun. There you go, let me see if we can do this. Hold on a second here, Yeah, yeah, this will be fun. Let me see if I can go and reconnect again. And I wish I could show this to you guys. I just haven't figured out well, I mean toolgit.
Yeah, if it's not if you don't have an Internet connection with it, then you can't open zoom and connect. But otherwise you could open zoom and connect.
Oh no, but I can connect to it from one of my other radios here, which is kind.
Of yeah, you could do that all right, So let me.
Go and list my messages. Hold on standby here. It is pretty quick. Over twelve hundred block packet. Yep, new user, hold on, hold on, there are a few users here. Let me do list last four messages. There are a few people. And that was my commitment to I told the guys on buying me a cof At least for the buy me a coffee guys, I'm going to give away to the members two var licenses every month, and I'm buying ten at a time, and this will be
my tenth license from the first batch. So let me list the last three one more time.
Here we were, we were messing around with var HF at winterfield Day, and I think I'm just gonna go buy myself a license too. Oh it's worth it, man, Yeah, it's pretty cool.
You have the bio license for that.
You don't have to, but it's it's like it opens up a lot of features. It's like, okay, well you can use the free version, but.
You don't get the nag screen, which is really obnoxious that it pops up every time you do a connection. If you're on a win link connection, it'll drop you after five minutes, regardless if it's finished what it's doing. The modem just co oh, that's terrible. Oh yeah, I found that hard away.
Yeah, yeah, wait for.
Do a five minute session. If you get as much email as I do on wind Link, you'll find out pretty quickly.
I'm working on it, man, I just yeah, I'm working on trying to get more and more on wind Link. I got I got your message, A guess done about your bag KQ four h z K. I got your message on wind Link this evening as well, So thank you on that.
So I've got the screen is tiny, and I haven't figured out the scroll lock. We actually have two people that came in. Nope, no, three, Okay, guys, let's transition over. Let's read all of them. If you got a second in here, because I think that might be fun for the people.
Let me all of their wind Link emails.
No, I've got too many BBS people. I had a lot of people connect.
Oh oh good, okay, good good, good good.
And the screen is too small because it's not designed for this. So we're gonna turn off the UV pro turn it back on. We'll share the screen. And now we're jumping computers, so we'll share that. We're gonna use my okay, we'll do et UV pro connect.
Come on.
Well, I think it's gonna work because the way I design them comforts that kills everything every single time. It just hits it all with the hammer. It doesn't even.
Huh.
Okay, yeah, cool, Yeah, we're gonna be fine here. So then we'll go in connect to the BBS. We'll go right into it. We'll go let's list the last eight messages. There were some housekeeping stuff there, so I'm gonna do a video on this. But there's a ton of value for this, especially if well, okay, yeah, there are a few people. Okay, so it looks like there was a The winner is Kilo Echo six golf Alpha echoes for
I'll send him a license. Okay, there was a new user, so this is someone who connected k zero w A V.
Yeah, he's often in the chat on.
He was number two. You know what, I'm gonna go ahead and purchase a bulk license another ten seats. I'll send it to these two guys. Yes, I will send it to both. So just give me this week and I'll arrange it. And the cool thing is we can see what they wrote. So on the left hand side there you can see the Those are message IDs you can type in read and let's take a look at, hopefully the first one's PC free license. It's four sixty five, and I'm even going to be working on reimagining in
the BBS with a graphical experiences as a title free license. Hello, my name is Dave, and trying this out for the first time. Terminal use of var FM and HF for a wind link. So yeah, that was his first connection. The other cool thing here is if you're in the BBS, not only can you leave messages for other people, but I've got this area that I'm building to start hosting what I'm going to call underground files. These are files that maybe what I remember as a kid in the
mid nineties during the dallup areas. So I've been working on writing up articles on how to defeat DRM, and I don't want to talk about them on YouTube here, I don't want to post in public, but as a gift to people that connect, they can type in files and they can read or download how to remove audible DRM. And I've got stuff on how I did the firmware upgrade. So my goal and public keys of a few of the guys. We've got our net schedules here. I'm doing
all of my after action reports. So let's say that we want to read how to defeat the DRM. So I know it feels old school, but I'm very concerned with where we're going with big tech and government oversight and all of this. I'm going back thirty years to be able to host very small bits of content. I want to make it be a place where people come and check in daily, and I want to provide value.
So instead of posting stuff online, I'm posting stuff here now over radio, and it can be accessed over packet locally here in Arizona, or over HF if we get propagate. And it's all written using very simple plain text. So I don't know if this is ever going to make comeback, but hearing me stop it right there, I walk you through the process. So they'll be maybe lock picking articles. They'll be how to defeat anything that might be a gray area, and written as an academic exercise. How to
do encryption over radio. I know how to do it, and I've done it on my business license, but I'm specifically only going to post how to do encrypted image payloads, how to use steganography, how to use wind link for encryption, which I've already cracked again, I'm not advocating for anybody to break the rules. I've done all of this via my business license. But I want to incentivize people to own their own data, own their own systems. And Google
can't do anything about this thing. You know, there's nothing really illegal. It's just hey, here's an academic exercise on this right up side.
Well, and there's something and we don't have to get too deep into this, but there's something something to be said for when you purchase something, do you own it or not. Recently, recently Amazon stopped allowing you, like just this last week, Amazon stopped allowing you to download your books that you buy on Amazon, like I mean, in other words, yeah, the Kindle books. Yeah, I used to
be able to download them. And there's some free software out there that will transfer them to epub or mobile files or a couple other ones, which I used to do that all the time. I've got a bunch of books that I you know, it'd be like it'd be like going to Barnes and Noble buying a book and then they come knock on your door a month later saying we need that book back, but they're not going to refund you for it. You know, it's like or
the book. You know, this book was self destruct in thirty days or whatever.
So well, so it's kind of the same, that same issue that with the e books. I'm like, shoot, I've got three hundred and eighty audio books that I've been buying, yeah, month since two thousand and seven, and that's why I wrote this article. So I started downloading. Well, no, I did not do anything, but I wanted to understand how it removed. But I didn't a DRM on audiobooks.
You used to be able to download DRM MP three's from Amazon. When you would buy a new audio CD from pick your favorite audio artist, you could go on on Amazon and download DR. I probably have a thousand DRM free MP three files that I bought ten, five, ten, fifteen years ago, and I don't know if they still do that or not, but it used to be really easy to do that. And I'm like, man, I can't believe they because because I absolutely loathe the iTunes, not
because it's Mac, but because iTunes the program. I haven't used it in probably like ten or twelve years, but the last time I used it was like absolutely corrid on iTunes on Windows sucks. Trying to get music off of an iPod completely sucks. I hate iTunes.
That's that's why I stopped buying anything iPhone related. I write a couple iPhones. But then this is the experience with iTunes, the story.
Right, exactly. Yeah, but used to be you could get DRM free MP three's from Amazon, and I haven't checked that in well, I don't know if they still do that or not, but I always thought that was a cool thing to do with this new thing.
Well, we also say services. When services go down, you can't all your digital content you bought in your own you can't get it.
Yeah right, yeah, right.
So there's a reason why a goodwill and good old DVD or Blu ray player is amazing to have a little library for yourself.
Yes, very true.
Yeah, but I hear the kids, he says, don't want to own anything. I don't know if that's true. Maybe I'm just getting older.
No, I've heard that too. They want to stream everything, and then when when the stream when the when the stream lags or you get out of we well to eat five gen range or something, it stops working and they get bad.
So I agree with that, But however, there's something to be said just to buy pay for a library and have instant access to everything versus buying everything piecemeal. Yeah, and I'm okay once I stop paying that, oh, I don't have access to the library anymore. It's just on a way.
Here's the thing, right, Yeah, I have Amazon Prime is probably most people do. I originally got it early on because you get the free shipping, you get the free streaming without ads. That started to change, and I have purchased movies over the last i don't know, five six years. If I stopped paying that account, I no longer have access to that twenty four and ninety nine you know copy of Top Gun. It's like this is a BS.
Yeah.
If I went to the store and purchased that same thing for about that price point, I would have it. I could let someone else borrow of it. I could, you know, use it as long as the Blu ray players still working.
There's a service. There's a free service called Movies Anywhere. I ran into that I started researching debt a few years back. There's a free service called movies Anywhere. It will it will audo. If you go buy a movie on Amazon or on Hulu, or on YouTube or Google or Apple TV or any of the services. You log into Movies Anywhere, you log into all your accounts, and when you buy a movie one place, it replicates them everywhere.
So if I turn if I turned off Amazon tomorrow, I would have Now there's every now and then you'll find a movie that, oh it's everywhere except on Apple, or it's everywhere except on Hulu or something like that. So it's not one hundred percent accurate, but it's probably like ninety eight percent accurate. But if I turned off Amazon tomorrow, all of my movies are still there in my YouTube account or my Hulu account.
So do you want to link that service to all of the other accounts?
Correct? Yeah, you create a free account on Movies Anywhere. It's been a year, a few years since I've done this, but when I go buy a new movie on Amazon, I usually buy movies on Amazon. When I go buy a new movie on Amazon, I can log into my YouTube account and I can see it. So you create an account Movies Anywhere, and then you log into your all your services through that new account on Movies Anywhere, and it just just auto. It's like cloud service almost just auto.
Interesting, Now, is the price more expensive or is it still what you would probably pay for that movie if you went directly to Hulu or went directly.
So you don't buy them. You don't buy them through movies anywhere. All that is is a sinking.
Service somehow sinks the license.
It sinks some it sinks all your accounts together. You're still buying the movie on Amazon or on Hulu or wherever.
I have to look.
There's another there's another website out there and I can't remember the name of it right now, where you could buy movie codes like I went one time and I bought all five of the Dirty Harry movies and it was like thirty five dollars for all five movies. Where you can buy all of the Lord of the Rings movies or all of the Star Wars movie or I don't know if you can do Star Wars now, but
you know you can buy packages and whatnot. And there's another website that did that and I can't remember where that is right now, but yeah, so that's that's But yeah, you don't buy anything through movies anywhere. All it does is sink all your stuff together.
Very cool stuff.
So yeah, YEA.
On Solar Chip says we have way too much free time.
Takes away a lot this Well, that's the guy who was in there asking what why do we need a comms plan? What is comms? And then he comes back and he says, oh, I'm already I already do calms. And I'm like, well, you kind of answered you question in question there, Bud, So I don't know what you're saying.
So I went out this morning. It was so much fun to go out the back country with this guy, Jeffrey from School of Survival out of Moab, and him and I were talking just about all of these myths of why get a radio because you're going to be direction found. Uh if stuff goes sideways, uh, FCC doesn't matter.
And they were all based on training, whether it was firearms, medical, blah blah blah, And a lot of these people don't realize that training and muscle memory and regular practice are are are vital comside.
Oh go ahead, I'm green with you. Oh with the comms. I'm going to add two your answer here. If you don't utilize it, you're gonna forget it. If you got a new thing and you need to use it now for an emergency situation, you don't know how to use it if you do not develop The third prong here is if you don't develop the relationships with the other guy on the radio, especially locally, what's gonna get me to leave my house in a situation to deliver you water because you can't go and get it if we
don't have this connection. I'm just gonna laugh, haha. I should have bought some last week.
Yeah.
Community is king, And yes, that's why I'm a fan of the bulletin board system. Not so much for the HF link. That's great to get a little bit farther out. But our four, at least four of m comfortables is going to have a mode called ETBBS server and it's only going to be simple. It's only going to do twelve hundred bod packet on either VHF or UHF. And the goal is if you get one of those stood up in your area, you now can get people to just really easily share files or posts.
Yeah. I like that.
I like that right, And I guess you could do the same thing with meshtastic here. But the problem, at least where I'm at is that we're so ruled. There isn't one node that's close enough for it to do anything.
But va mm hmm, yeah, we did. So is your BBS running on VHF or HF both?
You could do multi supports?
So you could, so, so I could in theory I could HF. What band are you on.
Here?
What that end?
This range? Probably just on the outskirts.
Probably so yeah, I mean I can talk. I usually talk to I usually get guys in Arizona. Case seven sen Neil, he's out there in Arizona somewhere and he's he's a huge PoTA hunter. I probably work him every time I activate. Yeah, but it's it's usually a good pipeline to Arizona from Texas. But so I could, so I could connect to your forty meters BBS over HF right now. We ran Rob in the chat Digital Rancher.
He ran a BBS on Meshtastic at winterfield Day and it was just kind of tinkering around in twyin with it. We were kind of out in the sticks and we put it up and we announced it. We see if anybody wanted to connect to it, and they didn't. But he had one hacasion also and people were using it there. It's awesome, but with Meshtastic and even with VHF. You're talking about local comms right there. The cool thing about
having an HF BBS, that's that's interesting to me. I'm like, cause it'd be like Vara HF at that point in time. You know, you could connect to a wind link node, you know, a couple hundred miles away and still send win link packets. So I think that that that part for me is interesting.
So I actually you can run multiple ports, and I was experimenting with all of them. I was running five ports at one time. I was running and I had five radios and five antennas. I was running three hundred bod packet over HF on forty meters, so you could do that ninety six hundred bod FF on VHF, twelve hundred bod on VHF, Vara FM on VHF or yeah, and then also the var stuff. And what I found was no one used ninety six hundred bods, so I was just out a whole radio in a whole antenna.
So after about a month that I decommissioned it, and it also decommissioned Vara FM as well. But it's absolutely amazing the amount of pathways in and what's even cooler about packet networking. You can node hoop. So let's say that you can't get to me, you can do vara HF into me, and then you could go out like a VHF port to somebody else and you could start to bounce around nodes all over and you could build your own map.
That's kind of neat, Okay, it's really slick.
So we use that. When we were in court Sight, we went in through HF and then we went out through FM twelve hundred, and then I was bouncing around four or five nodes in Arizona.
I yeah, we're I think Frank and I were talking a week or two ago. I think We're going to try to come back to Courtsfest next year. We'll see what happens.
I'm not going last year, going next year. This is my last one.
You heard what happened, right, No, I don't guess, so huh oh.
Okay, So if you guys are again, I want to be political here. I use the phrase ham nerd, and I'm a big nerd and I'm a ham But one thing I can't stand is the pedantic hams that just want to, I don't know, expound on their wealth of knowledge for no reason would not prompted. So I had a mcm tool's talk for the first night at eight pm, and I had a large outdoor screen. It was at night and we had twenty to about thirty mile per hour winds through there, and I was parked in Egypt
with my buddy and we were keeping to ourselves. So about two hours before the event, I wanted to go check out where the venue was where we or I was supposed to present. There was not one soul. There was like three hundred RVs, but no people. We go to the event and the screen is warped from the wind. The speakers are fall had fallen over. So I go back to the RV with the guys and I get on the simplex frequency for the event and Chris.
Was k k R seven ss KR one kra one ss that's it. Yeah, please in charge of it.
Yeah. So I said, hey, Chris, this is a KT seven R one guest and I'm scheduled to do to talk and Chris said, oh, well, it's been canceled because of the wind. I said, hey, uh, I've got battery backup here, that's what we're running on. I've got starlink, and I have a streaming platform, and I think I could get everything up and running and I can give you over radio the link. So in about thirty minutes for putting stuff out through the window, set it up.
Got a thumbnail going go to KIA on the event simplex frequency and there's two guys talking about ten meters and I was waiting and waiting. Three minutes go by, five minutes go by. They won't shut. They won't even. So I was there with a friend, Brian. He's like, just say break, damn.
It, I break, break and nothing.
I said, Well, at least somebody else should hurt me, not the guy that was key down, but the other guy should hurt me. So do it again. Break. I think someone's trying to break in. And then this third unknown party comes in doesn't announce their call. I'm about ready to go after saying break three times.
Yeah.
Well, actually in amateur radio it's not procedure to use the term break. Perhaps you should throw your call sign in And he has no idea what my tracks on the event?
Huh?
Right, like everything should stop when you say break.
Yeah.
Actually, there's a lot of there's a lot of nets that said that their preamble says any emergency traffic should be preceded by break break. Yeah, it's very common.
So anyways, I jumped in and said, you know, I put it up Chris's call, signed mine again and said here's how to find me. We're ready to go. We'll do it live. So anybody who has starlink or internet access to welcome go. We ended up having ninety eight concurrent people on that last minute one at Courtz Fesco and but there was a few other Ham things that
just drove me crazy. So I can't go again. I'm going to do my own thing and just go into the field with a bunch of guys, and that's going to be the plan.
So I'm gonna do Yeah, I was. I'm actually gonna look at doing my own thing this year too. I want to do an overland gas I want to do a Ham Radio two point zero gathering and say if you are if you enjoy overlanding, I don't care if you're in a Honda Civic. If you want to hang out and come out and come out to a field. National forests are all free to camp and their PoTA spots. I'm like, let's pick a national forest. Let's go out there and park in a circle and set up an antenna,
and let's just do a camping thing. Because I enjoyed doing that in the vehicle. So yeah, we're gonna.
Should merge ours. I told the first I did the first TTP field exercise with my buddies, and we actually did an MCom tools installfest and good food and cook out. We even did exercises. We walked everybody through every mode.
We got not only people hooked up with MCom tools at that time, it was the R three release, people that had never done wind link, people that had never done APRS, and we got guys that were in general and their first contact was their first willing session over our dop going into a station about twenty miles out nice and we got them connected and then we broke up and we set up a tactical operations center and they ran neck control and we went out four by
four and got on some ridgelines. We trafficked our positions, We did reports a lot of fun. So we'll do that again this year. So let me know if you want to combine efforts. But it would be fun to do something like that where yeah, that's a cool, fun events. And to make it more fun, what I'm doing on the next one that we're doing in April is a
scavenger hunt. So I'm going to have a few guys come out and I'm I hope they're not on right now, but I'm going to leave a radio at the designated meeting spots on and I'm going to traffic the coordinates to where to find me, and they're going to have to move to that location, and I'm going to put cases of gear, whether it's radio gear and tendis to build like a dipole kit nice, and they're going to
have to go back. Maybe one of the exercises is they go back and do a peer to peer art up to my house and it'll give them an set of coordinates to find more stuff, like a steak for dinner that night or coffee for the morning. So I'm gonna game of find the next TTP outing. Yeah, yeah, so it should be fun.
Are you doing that in April?
If you're around, it's just right now, it's just four close guys, but uh, okay, yeah, it's gonna be in April if you If if not, we're gonna redo it again. A couple of times. You're welcome to come out to that.
April might be kind of tight. We are. We're going to a really fun overland event in Springfield, Missouri, the fourth weekend in April. We've gone to last I've gone last three years. We had about eight of us that all camp together last year. I'm trying to get more people out there because and they're those guys, the guys who run the event are really excited that we're that we come to that. So there's gonna be a big
group of us there this year. So it'd be really fun. Yeah, keeping posted, I would I would love to do some kind of joined up for it. That'd be great.
Yeah, it'd be a lot of fun. What are you doing for your overland work these days? Like what's your setup?
Look? By my it keeps changing my uh, I mean, I've just got my Ford F two fifty And the guy from Jake from grid Base, I don't know if you know him or not. He did he was interviewed by another guy and I forget the name of that channel about you guys. Yeah, yeah, that guy. Did you see his uh A video about his his U F three fifty.
No, no, Okay, I knew what that it came out, but I haven't had time. I don't watch YouTube anymore of these days.
Okay, yeah, he did a he did a video about his F three fifty and uh, it's it's a few years older than mine, but he had some cool stuff in it. And I reached out to him and I'm like, hey man, uh and he's like, oh, hey, I saw you at the Ardmore Hamfest last year, which is a local one of these local little ham fests we have here, and I'm like, you should have said something. So he and I kind of went back and forth and geeked out about our Ford F two fifty three fifty trucks.
But nice.
That's what I'm doing with mine right now. I've got I've got it's it's gonna be a total off grid comm's view. I mean it kind of is already, but I'm adding more stuff to it. It's not just ham radio.
It's going to have everything so well, like your sleep system, for example, are you in the vehicle or like with the customs set up there, or are you're going to do a tent outside of its roof.
Type Traditionally I just installed a rooftop tent. I found a good I found a good price on a rooftop tent on Facebook marketplace, so I bought one. Used. It looks brand new. Traditionally before that, I've been using a Gazelle tint. I like to have. I like to have a base camp tent if you're going to camp more than like a couple nights, like we went out to last year, we went to Yellowstone. The year before that,
we went to Grand Canyon. If you're going to do a base camp and take your vehicle out during the day, I hate one. I don't want to set up and tear down the tent on the on the top of the roof every day. So you set up your base camp tent and then you come back every day to and so you know where base camp is. So I've got I've got options for that. But yeah, right now I'm doing I did use my when I was driving
home from Orlando. I did it in two days. So the first night that I stopped, I used the rooftop tent for the first time. Then really nice, Yeah, it's it's it was. It was nice. I got a good night sleep that night, so it was all good. But yep. Cool.
Yeah, you can go down a rabbit hole with like the ARB yeah, refrigerators and just the organizational units. I mean it's a deep rabbit hole.
Well, and I've got a I've got one of those those Epoch batteries. I've got a four hundred and sixty amp hour Epoch battery in a box in the bed in my truck that runs refrigerator and all of my radios. And it's got a a d C to d C charger that connects that. When I start the truck, the alternator on my truck charges my secondary battery system. So it's like forever power, you know. So it's just it's
freaking and that battery will last for a week. Like I drove to Orlando and I parked my truck and I let APRS becon at fifty watts on my YASUFTM five hundred for four days, and I think the battery was at like seventy percent after that or something like that. And it was running my fridge also that time.
So let me ask you a question. If you got a second here, you are the person who put on my radar the Ridotto batteries in December of last year, yes, I impulse saw the price or Impulse bought based on the price at the time. I bought the Giant three hundred am power one, okay, and it's still in the box. I haven't even oh it's sealed, Okayven had time for that project, and I've always gone with the Battleborn batteries and mine have been in my RV for the house
for the last five years. No maintenance have been absolutely amazing. I was kind of concerned about quality and of fire. Do you have any feedback on what you found with Rodota? Are they reliable? Any pros cons?
I mean, I would not put Rodotto up against battle Born or Epoch or even Dacota Lithium. These are companies that have eleven year warranting on their batteries. They're they're gonna be more targed, more ready, more harsh conditions, whatnot. Yeah, but for for radio comms like you and I like, like if I was going to build a battery backup system for my home, I wouldn't use red Odo but for battery cut for a radio comms for what you
and I do or stuff like that. I've got my original red Odo fifty ampower that I had I got a year and a half two years ago something like that, and it's still running very strong, very very good. They are starting to make self heating battery. They just sent me one hundred and forty amp battery that's got a self heater in it. It's one of their first batteries that has They had one hundred amp power battery before this one. And uh and they have a one forty
now that have blue too. They never had Bluetooth before, so they've got Bluetooth in the batteries now and now they have starting to have self heaters. So they're starting to upgrade their game. I think very You send them feedback and they're very open to feedback and whatnot, so that they seem to will be very easy to work with. But you know, but they're not hardened like battle Boy. You know, there's they're not battleborn batteries. But for for doing stuff that's like every day to day stuff, I
think they're okay. I think they're fantastic.
Yeah, because I built the secondary system independent of all of the other stuff I had in the RV, because I had a room end of the Dornet and I had an extra battle Born, but I went all Victron, which is also super pricey. The inverter, that pure signed inverter is clean, yes, and all of the the Bluetooth capabilities they have for the apps, so you have telemetry seeing how much is coming out of the battery, how
much solar is producing. This great, but it's I know, people just don't have that type of disposable income to spend two grand right, one hundred watt set up or one hundred camp hours setup right, and Ridotto comes in. I mean I think it was like at least a third of the price, right, Yeah, if you're mean that pure amp howers capacity alone.
The true test on them is going to be five years from now. How are the batteries working five seven years from now? You know the batteries you buy today, how are they going to be working five? I meann is gonna be solid, I mean for years and years, but an epoch too, But that's gonna be the test on the and you know who knows. I don't know. I don't have a seven year old red Odo, so I can't answer that question. But from what I've seen
so far, they're pretty solid. I do want to a Yeah, I put several Victron items in my UH setup as well. I'm gonna be adding there are the oh, what's that brain called that reports to the Internet.
Oh, I don't have that one yet. Yeah, so I've got an internet built in bus bar that you kind of plug everything into.
No, that's the UH, that's the UH. That's the links distributor. I have that, I have the look, I have the link shunt and the links distributor. And then there's another piece and I can't remember what it's called right now, but there's like there's like seventeen pieces that you could add to. But yeah, not to get off on a big tangent, but I was just thinking the other day I was talking to t O a couple of weeks
ago about doing another r V live stream. Sometimes I'll do live streams on my other channel about r V stuff, And I was talking to talking to t O about that the other day, and I'm like, you know what we need to do. I need to get with with Kyle and UH and t O. And I was thinking, I thought of one other person. Who was it. I can't remember whose it was right now, but I was like Phil, No, maybe it was. It wasn't Bill, but
Bill would be a good one to add too. That was before myself, t O Kyle and one other person, all of us who have RVs that want to, you know, get on and start talking about so but Gastone, I knew you would be a perfect addition to that show too. So I'd love to start getting just do like a once a month RV chat live stream or something like that. What you know, just talk about whatever the heck and we'll come up with a topic or something. So I want to do something like that.
That'd be fun. I pulled out the seventy five coax for the TV on the outside and put a fifty ome in there. It's so nice having a actual port inside the d net for my coats. Yeah, and I can run an infed straight off the side of the r V and a sloper.
Oh, that's so freaking.
It was the small has change. It was a bulkhead change on that that unit and just a little bit of coax and it was hard fishing everything through. But it's it's so nice, especially when you have the Anderson power to pole mounts from powerworks also built into your right your hardware. My wife's like, what are all these little things that are popping up. These are warts popping up the wall.
Yeah, it's fun. Victron Serbo, thank you, Jody, Yes you're yeah the Serbo. So it's so I have I have a LT modem in my truck with a Verizon SIM card in it. But I'm about I'm about to put my ster Link many I've got a ster Link Mini mount for my truck now, so I'm about to put the STERLNK Mini in the in the truck and and then the Serbo will connect via Wi Fi or Ethernet.
I think I probably run Ethernet and report like you'll be able to open your app and look and see what your vehicle is doing from anywhere, and it reports it to the cloud and whatnot. So it may not be for everybody, but I thought that was a neat feature.
So yeah, these are just it's a good time to be alive right now.
Yes, yeah, it is, yeah for sure. All right, guys, we've been going for two hours and I haven't had my dinner yet. Someone go in and eat some dinner. But gas Stone thanks a lot, man, appreciate that. Frank Put, I know you shared his channel link in there earlier. If you would share his channel link in there, again Yeah in the chat you guys, go check out Gastone's channel.
A lot of good uh more, a lot more technical stuff than what I do, and I mean in a good way about off grade communications and Linux based stuff and staying you know, keeping big brother at bay, that kind of thing.
So it's all in back country stuff. So if you just want some nostalished, some good scenery, like the next video that's dropping was a lot of fun out in the back.
Cool for nice, nice cool. Well, thanks a lot, guys. Once again. One week from tonight, we're gonna give away the IC seven O five. It goes sign up with the link I shared earlier. I'll put a link in the description for those of you on Team Replay and we'll catch it next time. So everyone have a good evening. We goodbye, good bye later bye guys,