Ernie Tech - Can I haz tech cheeburger?

  I've had this lovely (and I mean LOVELY) Tecsun PL-880 portable shortwave radio for about a year now. I've always been determined to dig into it and really get the best out of it. And I never have...until now. One of the most striking features of this radio, besides the beautiful design, is the superb sound quality. It really has a wonderful tone and solid output. I'm a big fan of classical music, and my go-to station is WRTI FM out of Temple University in Philadelphia. I listen to it online and on the air. And the PL-880 does it justice.  I was going to upgrade to the PL-990X, but I can't see any reason to. The design pales in comparison to the PL-880 and there is nothing especially compelling about it...especially for other $200 US. I'll do a blog post on the basic operation of the radio, followed by hidden features, as there are quite a few

  According to WJ5O, the  NCDXF/IARU International Beacon Network is supposed operate on 28.200 CW. Well 10 meters is fickle band to say the lease, and at 03:14 UTC it's dead quiet. I've heard beacons on before, specifically WB3JOE via groundwave (it's only 10 miles up the road from my QTH).  But I'll leave the G90 on most of the day and listen for any openings

  Tmux is a Linux utility that makes your life so, so simple. Truth is, I wasn't using it until recently. Dumb me. Essentially Tmux is a little environment for your Linux terminal sessions when you can make what I call 'named spaces' for you command line activities. Which means that if you start a process going and get accidently, or intentionally disconnected, that process keeps going regardless. You got that. No more processes getting hoses because of a connection time-out. And what's more, you can have several command windows running at the same time, in the same session, each doing their own thing. Aaaaaand...it's complicated of course. Here's the link to the Tmux Cheatsheet -  https://tmuxcheatsheet.com

  I do. I absolutely love it. Granted, I think it's a security threat because it lacks another layer of user authentication like an SSH or FTP transfer, but for sheer super-convenience, it's the best. To set up my Hercules/MVS 3.8j mainframe emulation, instead of going through the hassle of an FPT upload or a SSH session from a Linux file explorer session, I just type:  $wget http://wotho.ethz.ch/tk4-/tk4-_v1.00_current.zip  and life is good. It's just that easy. Then open it up with unzip, do all the usual stuff you want to do with it, and be done with the transfer.

  Yet another geek installs the Hercules mainframe emulator and thinks he'll be another Moshix. Fair enough. So what. Either you want to read this or you don't. Ok, supposing you do and you've followed my advice and created a new user on your Linux server other than root to install it into, here's all you need to do. Log in as that new user, do -  $ sudo apt install hercules   Give sudo your password and that's all you have to do.  Then test it by   $ hercules  If it installed properly, she'll run through the paces but not actually start because there's no mainframe emulated OS installed yet. For that, you have to install MVS 3.8j.

Whatever you do, don't start the whole Hercules, TK4-, MVS thing up as root. Not that it won't work, it will. But you'll have exposed port 3270 to the Internet with root access. Do I need to tell you why that's a bad idea? So create a user and their home directory called mvsop , give it a funky password. Give it sudoers rights too. You could use adduser instead of useradd, but what fun is that? $ useradd -m -r -c "Hercules TK4- MVS 3.8j Operator" mvsop $ passwd mvsop $ usermod -aG sudo username The option -m creates a home directory for mvsop , -r makes it a system account so there is no expiry and -c lets you create a comment line to be seen when they log in. And usermod adds the user to the sudo group. Still has to have the root password, so at least it is somewhat better secured. This is nowhere near as secure as a cert authorization, but the intent isn't become a Linux expert, it's to get MVS 3.8j up and running. Test out the new user. ...

My first Linode shared CPU server was last year. I kept it for about 6 months before I created a local Linux server on a Raspberry Pi. It was a little $5 a month single CPU, 1GB ram, 25GB SSD storage Nanode...  a portmanteau of 'Nano' and 'Linode as Linode puts it. It was quite convenient to play with from anywhere.  Not that it's important for my experimental needs, but 40GB/1GB network speed and 1TB of monthly transfer is pretty damn good. And I suppose that the server being in Newark, NJ, only 85 miles up the turnpike makes it more reliable? Doubtful it matters much. I re-upped  again today with Linode and pulled another Nanode up for the same low low price of $5 a month. And I did so because I think it's getting risky to port forward a home server and expose it to the Internet...and I need to have one available from outside of my home domain for the things I like to do. Why is it getting risky? Its because of old home routers, home routers that haven't been ...

I bought the G90 from Ham Radio Outlet in New Castle, DE about a month ago. Great price at around $430US.  This thing has almost a cult following. You've got a couple of Facebook groups, a dedicated Groups.io mailing list and even a Discord server dedicated to it. To say that it was a disrupter in the pretty lame Ham Radio HF market is not even close. Its a game changer. The closest radio in the price range is the very staid and old Icom IC-718. We're talking about almost 20 years of tech difference with the G90 being Software-Defined and the 718 being old school. I bought the radio because my Ham friend in Florida thought it would be fun to each get one and figure them out together. Great, but he got so frustrated that he sold his at a loss and bought a used 718. The irony! Being a techie I wasn't about to let the G90 best me. In fact, I find it pretty easy to use once you figure it out. And you do have to read the manual, Mandarin -> English interpretation goofs and al...