Friday, October 15, 2021

Evangelism

In my last blog post I urged you to find someone in the ham radio arena to study.

Since my interests are radio and Linux, it shouldn't be suprising that I tend to pay attention to Bruce Perens. Well know as the open source definition guy, but also a ham, K6BP.

A not too distant DCC paper titled "Open That Which is Closed," will give you a pretty good snapshot of the guy and what makes him tick.

I've always been a marginal coder, so I've always adopted the "what I can't do in software, I'll do in hardware", since I was into electronics before computers became common. Now things are so much software and less hardware, so I'm feeling old and dumb. Never fear, there is this thing Bruce does that he calls "Evangelism," and it can work for you too!

Basically stuff outside of his abilities or that require group effort he gets on the pulpit about. He explains how that works attacting like minded folks in that DCC PDF. A recent example would be the Codec2 thing. He felt closed source vocoders in the hobby were bad, thus a movement was born and in comes some talent named David Rowe.

I've found the same logic works, so don't sit idle with your thoughts folks. Because thats what makes ham radio great, everyone has a talent in a specific area, and when that can all work together the community benefits.

Here are some things I've harped about (some right in this blog), that have come to light thanks to other talented hams;

802.11, HSMM (1999-> ongoing)

-Part 97 only 802.11 channels (Nov 2013)

SAME/FIPS software decoder (May 2010) (multimon-ng)

D-Star AMBE DTMF decoder (Sept 2009-Jan 2011)

AMBE voice software decoder (March 2010)

IPV6 embeded callsign application (July 2012)

Linux streamer to Zello (Jun 2020)