Speaker 1: Hey, before we get started, be sure to head over
Speaker 1: to Hamradio two dot com forward slash email dash sign
Speaker 1: up to join my email list of over nineteen thousand subscribers,
Speaker 1: where I like to send emails about upcoming events, upcoming
Speaker 1: shopping deals, keep you updated with all the stuff going
Speaker 1: on with my videos. Once that list reaches twenty thousand,
Speaker 1: I will be doing a giveaway of another HF radio
Speaker 1: sign up today and thank you for the support. Okay,
Speaker 1: I show seven o'clock guys. It's like we've got a good,
Speaker 1: good group in the chat tonight, so I appreciate everyone
Speaker 1: being here, and we're gonna switch over right here. So
Speaker 1: guess what. I drove to Ohio this week and I
Speaker 1: got back about three hours ago, so I am I'm
Speaker 1: a little bit tired. It was a fun trip. It
Speaker 1: was fairly uneventful as far as I mean. I mean,
Speaker 1: I don't have any issues or anything. But it was
Speaker 1: a good trip. And you guys are going to be
Speaker 1: seeing my new RV on the Unplugged channel very soon. Okay,
Speaker 1: So tomorrow morning I'm driving again. We're going to Galveston
Speaker 1: for the week tomorrow, and that brings me to a
Speaker 1: couple of different things, So a couple of different announcements
Speaker 1: I wanted to make real quick here. So the Houston
Speaker 1: Hamfest is next weekend. It's Friday and Saturday, March seventh
Speaker 1: and eighth, noon to sixth on Friday, eight to three
Speaker 1: on Saturday. Most likely I will be there on Saturday
Speaker 1: and not Friday. I will be there, and in the
Speaker 1: past I've gone both day but most likely I'm probably
Speaker 1: not gonna go Friday this time, but I will be
Speaker 1: there on Saturday. They're raffling off of ftd X ten
Speaker 1: grand prize. They're also given away FtM five hundred ft
Speaker 1: seventy ft five R several prizes there and it's a
Speaker 1: it's a pretty good show for Texas. It's ever since
Speaker 1: we lost Hamcom a few years ago, we don't have
Speaker 1: a large show in Texas anymore. But this is a
Speaker 1: good show. So and HRO will be there if they've
Speaker 1: been there for the last two maybe three years, so
Speaker 1: they'll be there again this time. So that's next weekend,
Speaker 1: Friday and Saturday. I since I'm driving to Galveston tomorrow.
Speaker 1: Originally I was supposed to drive to Galveston tonight this morning, No,
Speaker 1: yesterday morning, Yesterday morning, yesterday morning. We're supposed to go
Speaker 1: yesterday morning, so got pushed back due to some vehicle
Speaker 1: issues I had, so instaid I'm going down there tomorrow,
Speaker 1: and I was going to live stream tomorrow night for
Speaker 1: my February giveaway, I'm giving away brand new IC seven
Speaker 1: oh five. I'll put a link to that in the
Speaker 1: chat right now, you guys go sign up for that.
Speaker 1: I think at last count we had about twenty seven
Speaker 1: hundred people signed up something like that. I don't remember.
Speaker 1: I haven't looked at it in the last two or
Speaker 1: three days because I've been on the road. But rather
Speaker 1: than doing that tomorrow, I think I'm gonna push it
Speaker 1: back a week. So I'm gonna give you guys another week,
Speaker 1: and we're gonna live stream that giveaway on the channel
Speaker 1: this time next week. I'll be back. We're coming back
Speaker 1: from Galveston Sunday morning, be home by early afternoon next Sunday.
Speaker 1: So we're gonna do the giveaway of the Icy seven
Speaker 1: oh five then. And I also have a brand new
Speaker 1: IC seventy three hundred that I'll be giving away for
Speaker 1: the month at the end of the month of March. Basically,
Speaker 1: so I gave the January giveaway, I gave it away.
Speaker 1: The Ft eight ninety one, I gave it away. I
Speaker 1: think it was the first Sunday of February. So the
Speaker 1: February giveaway is gonna be done the second Sunday of March,
Speaker 1: and then the March giveaway will be done sometime in
Speaker 1: early April. So we're kind of pushing it out a
Speaker 1: little bit. But hey, you're getting free radios, So there
Speaker 1: you go. February Repeater Challenge. I've been getting a lot
Speaker 1: of you email me logs for that. That's still ongoing.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's we're done with February now, but if
Speaker 1: you haven't sent me your logs four February Senate, go
Speaker 1: ahead and send it to me. Gonna do a drawing
Speaker 1: that same night, a week from today for the February
Speaker 1: Repeater Challenge. And this is this is the live stream
Speaker 1: that I created that I was gonna do tomorrow night
Speaker 1: and for on March third, but again I'm gonna push
Speaker 1: it till next Sunday. So we're gonna do that on
Speaker 1: Sunday on this channel a week from tonight. So there
Speaker 1: we go. Special shout out to everybody in green text
Speaker 1: in the chat, all the YouTube channel members Lee, I
Speaker 1: saw you in there earlier. K I five YPR. I
Speaker 1: think you were the first one in there that I saw.
Speaker 1: Aaron KQ four h z K you're in there earlier,
Speaker 1: Kooley Cult forty five, Michael KD eight g I, J
Speaker 1: Phil W zero R HP, Wayne K nine W kJ
Speaker 1: thank you for joining. Ronald, Jeff A A four B
Speaker 1: C Mark another ron K and four Z v U
Speaker 1: thanks for joining, guys. Jerry, see you in there. Thanks
Speaker 1: for being here tonight. James k I five O E
Speaker 1: B Corey in one x w S. Let's see Jim
Speaker 1: G y M Jim K nine O s U. Are
Speaker 1: you at the gym at OSU right now? That's what
Speaker 1: I want to know. V A five S A R
Speaker 1: thanks for joining tonight. And yeah, a lot of other
Speaker 1: people in there. I see Bill in there, Hem, Radio Tectonics,
Speaker 1: digital ranchers in there, Tank is in there all right?
Speaker 2: Good?
Speaker 1: Just want to make sure I acknowledge everybody. Thanks for
Speaker 1: joining tonight, guys. Should be a pretty fun stream. Let's
Speaker 1: bring on gas Stone and Frank. They're talking in the
Speaker 1: background right now, so let me my zoom screen, my zooms.
Speaker 1: Here's my zoom screen. And Jeremie. There's a transition there.
Speaker 1: What's up, guys, How are y'all?
Speaker 3: Oh, I'm good. I was waiting for Frank to jump in.
Speaker 1: Thanks for halving me on, Frank. Frank knows he's supposed
Speaker 1: to let the guests talk first.
Speaker 2: I was told.
Speaker 1: First. Okay, oh boy, yeah, yeah, Now I'm good.
Speaker 3: Thanks for having me on, Jason. Today has been a
Speaker 3: fun day. So a lot of us to talk about, for.
Speaker 1: Sure, good, good deal. Yeah, yeah, I know that we've
Speaker 1: been going back and forth. We were going to do
Speaker 1: this a couple of weeks ago and then my schedule
Speaker 1: got food bard and you were out of town, and uh,
Speaker 1: but I'm glad to I'm glad you took the time.
Speaker 2: Man.
Speaker 1: It's going to be a fun talk.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So we're going to talk about some InCom tool stuff,
Speaker 1: and I'm going to ask you a few questions about
Speaker 1: InCom tools and if you if you don't want to
Speaker 1: answer them, or you can't answer them, don't don't worry
Speaker 1: about that. So I've got a couple of things that
Speaker 1: I wanted to ask you specifically about, but you know,
Speaker 1: feel free to just say whatever you want to because
Speaker 1: I know that you you give it out to your
Speaker 1: not Paigre, but your channel supporters. First through you do
Speaker 1: through buy Me a Coffee. You have a membership thing
Speaker 1: and it's.
Speaker 3: Free for everybody. But okay, I thought we do some
Speaker 3: behind the scenes, a lot of behind the scenes, right,
Speaker 3: been called the Nerd Hour. Yeah, yeah, we did seven
Speaker 3: of those last ye Those were fun.
Speaker 1: Good, good good. Okay. Yeah, I'm a I'm I'm a
Speaker 1: member of the of your buy Me a Coffee thing,
Speaker 1: so I get the emails about that and when I
Speaker 1: when I can join, I do. But yeah, good deal.
Speaker 1: So Frank, what's h How was you did a that
Speaker 1: wasn't a live stream? You did a premiere for that?
Speaker 2: You could tell. I changed clothes very fast, quick change.
Speaker 1: It says premiere at the bottom of the video when
Speaker 1: you do a premiere frame.
Speaker 2: No, that was pre recorded. It's just how schedules will
Speaker 2: line up. And I wanted to get it out a
Speaker 2: couple of weeks before the Go Kit Challenge, so it
Speaker 2: was pre recorded. I I pre recorded the bumpers also, Hey,
Speaker 2: but you know what, it was a bunch of fun
Speaker 2: just to sit there and was I honestly thought it
Speaker 2: we would go for like twenty minutes, but then we
Speaker 2: went for forty five minutes and at the end, I
Speaker 2: just got to end this now because we feel like
Speaker 2: we're gonna keep going on. And after I hit the
Speaker 2: stop record button, we went for another forty five minutes.
Speaker 1: Is that coming up again this year? Is that coming
Speaker 1: up in the next Yes?
Speaker 2: That that is not this weekend? Next weekend, March fifteenth
Speaker 2: is the weekend after the Houston ham Fest.
Speaker 1: Okay, you know what I'll be. I should be home. No, no, no,
Speaker 1: I'm not. I'll be that's I'll be in I'll be
Speaker 1: in freaking New Jersey that weekend for New Jersey hamsid
Speaker 1: New Jersey Technology Institute. Technology is where ham SAI is
Speaker 1: this year. So yeah, I will be in New Jersey
Speaker 1: from Thursday to Sunday. Let me back then. So I'm
Speaker 1: gonna unfortunately miss that this year. But okay, good, good,
Speaker 1: good deal. Glad good to know that. So okay, yep,
Speaker 1: all that doesn't look right?
Speaker 2: Okay, so oh also we'll fast you go help. You
Speaker 2: were saying it was raining, and it is raining. You
Speaker 2: better not melt on the way to your hamstrack.
Speaker 1: Oh no, no, it's no problem. No, I was, uh,
Speaker 1: I was, yeah, I was wondering if it was going
Speaker 1: to be because I heard some thunder earlier, and then
Speaker 1: when the rain started it was very light. I can
Speaker 1: actually I've actually got the door to the shack open
Speaker 1: right now. I can hear it lightly raining out there.
Speaker 3: Cool.
Speaker 1: You see it was rumbling. Yeah, it was rumbling a
Speaker 1: little bit, but not a big deal. So cool. Okay, Well, Gastone,
Speaker 1: thanks for joining it tonight. Man, it's always good to
Speaker 1: have you. It's been a while. And uh for people
Speaker 1: who may not know, to go ahead and give a
Speaker 1: brief tell briefly who you are and what you do
Speaker 1: and that kind of thing. Your what's your channel for?
Speaker 1: So congrat I don't think I've said this publicly before.
Speaker 1: Congrats on one hundred thousand subscribers. Yeah, there's your play button
Speaker 1: right there.
Speaker 3: Yes, it happened in August of last year. You, I
Speaker 3: just want to hear the story real quick before we
Speaker 3: do it.
Speaker 1: Sure, do it, go for It.
Speaker 3: Was at maybe forty thousand subscribers and kind of just
Speaker 3: picking up a thousand every month or so, and I
Speaker 3: wanted to set up a windlink RMS gateway and I
Speaker 3: wasn't familiar with how did they do that? On the
Speaker 3: Linux side, so shame on me, and everybody was like,
Speaker 3: go the RMS route, and I said, you know what,
Speaker 3: I haven't used Windows since two thousand and one and
Speaker 3: I did not want to deal with the Windows updates
Speaker 3: and all that stuff. So I did this off grid,
Speaker 3: air gapped install of Windows and went through that process.
Speaker 3: The next day was when that cloud strike incident happened,
Speaker 3: and it impacted the point of sale systems, the banks,
Speaker 3: the airline kiosks, and there was that update that was
Speaker 3: pushed out to all of those customers and did the
Speaker 3: blue screen of depth. I picked up sixty thousand subscribers
Speaker 3: on that one video and I just like shot across
Speaker 3: one hundred k.
Speaker 1: So it's insane. But yeah, yeah, good timing, good timing, Yeah,
Speaker 1: good timing. Yeah, totally absolutely so how did that did that?
Speaker 1: Do you still got a lot of traction on that
Speaker 1: video or how's it doing now?
Speaker 3: No, it's it's pretty much flatlined after that breaking news.
Speaker 3: But yeah, A long story short to answer your original question,
Speaker 3: very latecomer to amateur radio briefly saw it once in
Speaker 3: high school in the nineties and twenty seventeen, I decided
Speaker 3: to get licensed and couldn't make any contacts, So I
Speaker 3: put amateur radio on hold with my bowfing and during COVID,
Speaker 3: I thought, you know what, it's probably time to pull
Speaker 3: out that radio and get into comps. We moved to
Speaker 3: this property, made my first contact, and I spent the
Speaker 3: last five years. May fifth will be five years on
Speaker 3: the air, and I've been documenting on YouTube on the
Speaker 3: tech Prepper every single experience. So I would say the
Speaker 3: tech Prepper is an experienced channel that's focused on my
Speaker 3: journey and amateur radio, with very specific goals of doing
Speaker 3: off grid, offline operations, and a lot of it takes
Speaker 3: place in the back country because when I have downtime,
Speaker 3: nothing's better than trail running for me, hiking, backpacking, So
Speaker 3: it's kind of a bridge. I mean, we talked about
Speaker 3: it before the show, but the day I did a
Speaker 3: fun radio and concealment exercise with drone footage in the
Speaker 3: back country and it's just the best of both the world.
Speaker 3: So that's what I'm about. I don't do fancy production,
Speaker 3: I don't do multiple takes. So if you're up for
Speaker 3: fumbling for my words, ums and us and just a
Speaker 3: good time, that's what the channel is about.
Speaker 1: Sounds like a normal day on my channel. But yeah, right,
Speaker 1: so I was talking with So I don't know if
Speaker 1: you know who Chris Weatherman is. He he writes the
Speaker 1: Survivalist series books Going Home and all those. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: under the pseudonym of a American Yep. He lives in Florida.
Speaker 1: So long story short, he lives in Florida. And I
Speaker 1: was trying to get him to come to him cash
Speaker 1: this year.
Speaker 3: Oh, they'd be fun.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And he had a he had a pre planned
Speaker 1: event that weekend and he's he was going on a
Speaker 1: two day ruck what he called a two day ruck.
Speaker 1: And I'm like, okay, that's interesting. I'm gonna put that
Speaker 1: in the back of my mind and kind of look
Speaker 1: that up. I was having lunch with a friend in Huntsville, Alabama,
Speaker 1: two days ago and he's like, yeah, we're going on
Speaker 1: a ruck this weekend. And I'm like, okay, I got
Speaker 1: to figure out, Like, like my friend in Huntsville apparently
Speaker 1: found a group like like almost like a meetup group.
Speaker 1: I don't know if anybody still uses meet up or not,
Speaker 1: but like a meetup group that you know, they just
Speaker 1: get together and they just they go they go ruck
Speaker 1: and go rucking and go hiking and whatnot. So I'm like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I gotta find something like that to do in my
Speaker 1: area because I think that would be a fun thing
Speaker 1: to do, especially if you're gonna involve radio in it.
Speaker 1: So that's something that's in the back of my mind
Speaker 1: that I gotta I gotta figure out here soon. But
Speaker 1: you said so like for.
Speaker 3: The exercise side of it, the go ruck the.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's that's part of it. Yes, absolutely, I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, the hiking exercise, but also just to kind
Speaker 1: of like, you know, uh pack you know, you know
Speaker 1: this from experience, you know, pack up your backpack, get
Speaker 1: out in the field, realize you brought too much crap,
Speaker 1: it's too heavy, You're not in shape for this, and
Speaker 1: then redo it again, and redo it again, and redo
Speaker 1: it again, and then on the sixth or seventh try
Speaker 1: you get You're like, okay, now I got it. Now,
Speaker 1: I got now. I understand how it I should and
Speaker 1: should do so very trial and error about it, right,
Speaker 1: So that's what I but that's how I like to
Speaker 1: do it. I was like, Okay, well, I think I
Speaker 1: want to take this and this and this, but then
Speaker 1: once I go do it, and I'm like, okay, I
Speaker 1: definitely want to take this with these three items I
Speaker 1: don't need because I you know, and then just learn
Speaker 1: by experience and that kind of thing. So that's that's
Speaker 1: what I'm I'm looking so to do.
Speaker 3: Go do it, man, I've had so much fun with
Speaker 3: it a year ago. If I could talk to myself
Speaker 3: right now, I would say, who are you? You freaking imposter?
Speaker 3: You're breaking all the rules.
Speaker 1: I think you're a LARPer now right because I saw
Speaker 1: your Instagram post about being a LARPer. Who knew?
Speaker 3: Well, there's that, right. I I my pants of knee
Speaker 3: pads and they really do save your bacon out there
Speaker 3: and just make it more comfortable. But I said, I
Speaker 3: will never buy a toy in amateur radio. I'm not
Speaker 3: going to buy Chinese radios. And after spending a lot
Speaker 3: of time in the back country this year, Chinese radio
Speaker 3: b tech. You've yes right, So my VXXR, as much
Speaker 3: as I love it, has taken a back seat. But
Speaker 3: then even the eight one eight, where I love that
Speaker 3: little guy for the back country, this is about gear.
Speaker 3: I can't get enough of the true SDX and it's
Speaker 3: just those are the little things that you learn. It's like, man,
Speaker 3: you feel so depleted after scaling two thousand feet of
Speaker 3: a peak with a man pack. Even the eight one
Speaker 3: seven is small ast it is, but now going with
Speaker 3: something this tiny and yeah, you learn by doing, and
Speaker 3: those micro refinements are just the best way to do it.
Speaker 1: What are you doing on HF with the true SDX
Speaker 1: mostly digital but JSATE every single mode, so all of them, okay, okay,
Speaker 1: a lot of envies.
Speaker 3: I mean I'm able to light up and get into
Speaker 3: all of the Southwest. I've even done. We were holding
Speaker 3: forty meter regional net Saturday mornings. I did it straight
Speaker 3: with the onboard speaker and mike and made the contact
Speaker 3: out to the guys within about three hundred miles. About
Speaker 3: what the literature suggests for enviz But yeah, I used
Speaker 3: the did you rig light with it? Not the USB interface,
Speaker 3: and I pick up the little f ZM one and
Speaker 3: I'll do our dop on HF. Recently, I finally gave
Speaker 3: in and on MCom tools. It hasn't been released this
Speaker 3: version yet. It works with VARA and that little guy.
Speaker 3: I'm able to do VARA connections over HF, but mostly JSA.
Speaker 3: You know the kind of wore course HF digital modes okay,
Speaker 3: anything that's not FT eight. That's the only digital mode
Speaker 3: that I'm not on board for because it has no
Speaker 3: m com purpose in my opinion, outside of maybe a
Speaker 3: propagation tool.
Speaker 1: I mean, I don't know. There was on one one
Speaker 1: time I was on FT eight and uh, and I
Speaker 1: was some guy was yelling at me, you saying that
Speaker 1: YouTube sucks and I should get off, I should get
Speaker 1: a real job or something like that. And he was
Speaker 1: just typing that through the thing so you can send
Speaker 1: messages over it. I mean I just ignored the I
Speaker 1: was actually live streaming, and I was like, look at
Speaker 1: this guy. I think it was like a Christmas morning
Speaker 1: one year, like three years ago. But oh wow, yeah,
Speaker 1: yeah it is. Yeah, some people, I tell you what,
Speaker 1: but no, Jesse, I mean JSA call us works on
Speaker 1: the same protocol as FD eight, as you know. So
Speaker 1: it's uh, that's if you can if you can do FDA,
Speaker 1: then you should be able to do JSA call, which
Speaker 1: is really We did some JSA call for on Winter
Speaker 1: field Day.
Speaker 3: Oh it's a lot of fun.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it can be a lot of fun.
Speaker 3: So we'll get this. So for we did anti Summer
Speaker 3: Field Day about two years ago. I remembered that coffee
Speaker 3: group and we specifically went out and challenged herself to
Speaker 3: QRP and JSA and we did it. And we did
Speaker 3: it by doing it on the work modes or the
Speaker 3: work bands. Oh see if if all the contesting bands
Speaker 3: that you would be on for field day, they were crowded, obviously,
Speaker 3: but twelve, seventeen and thirty meters quite as can be.
Speaker 3: And we were able to relay track from the southwest
Speaker 3: to the East Coast and then back to the guys
Speaker 3: in the southwest, mostly because we weren't able to do
Speaker 3: our normal forty meters stuff and get the regional guys.
Speaker 3: But yeah, relays was kind of a big thing we
Speaker 3: did for Anti Winter field Day to do the hop
Speaker 3: to the East coast and back to work around limitations
Speaker 3: on those higher bands.
Speaker 1: That's good. So you mentioned MCom tools. Go ahead and
Speaker 1: tell the audience what that is exactly. And I would
Speaker 1: like to know myself, because I've been talk to you
Speaker 1: about that for probably at least two years. I thought
Speaker 1: that you were still I thought it was still basically
Speaker 1: in beta for lack of a better description. I didn't
Speaker 1: think it had been released yet or however, not to
Speaker 1: the point where you wanted at least I know it's
Speaker 1: probably gonna be ever evolving, right, You're never going to
Speaker 1: be done with it, but just what stage is it currently?
Speaker 1: And also after you explain what it is.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So MCom Tools was designed out of frustration as
Speaker 3: being a new ham and the operation I wanted to
Speaker 3: do in the field. So when I was doing summits
Speaker 3: on the air or field day, I just wanted to
Speaker 3: quickly make my contacts and breakdown. But dealing at that
Speaker 3: time five years ago with a Raspberry Pie and then
Speaker 3: manually configuring the radio and the audio levels and doing
Speaker 3: all of that stuff and dealing with tiny keyboards, and
Speaker 3: I said, this is just too much work. I just
Speaker 3: want to plug in my radio and switch to a mode,
Speaker 3: do wind link, maybe jump to APRS, maybe switch to
Speaker 3: JAA sate and just have everything be plug and play.
Speaker 3: So what MCom tools is in a high level right now,
Speaker 3: I'm calling it the R three release, and it's not done.
Speaker 3: But it was released Thanksgiving of twenty twenty four. It
Speaker 3: took seven weeks off of work unpaid. So that's where
Speaker 3: a lot of the buying me of coffee funds went
Speaker 3: was to pay myself for almost two months to work
Speaker 3: on it, and I was able to achieve during that
Speaker 3: time the plug and play vision, so you only have
Speaker 3: to do three thanks if you're able to build the
Speaker 3: image first boot, you actually end up. So the goal
Speaker 3: of epcome tools is also to have a operating system
Speaker 3: that is fully built and it never has to go online.
Speaker 3: So once you take the time to build it, you
Speaker 3: carry that around with you and ten years from now
Speaker 3: you could plug it into an older computer and it
Speaker 3: never needs to get any packages. But I wanted to
Speaker 3: automate everything and turn it into appliance. So number two
Speaker 3: MCME tools is and appliance, And I mean maybe they
Speaker 3: could show you a quick demo really quickly. There's only
Speaker 3: three things you have to do, assuming you have the
Speaker 3: correct radio ready to go. Okay, so let me know
Speaker 3: if you can see my screen.
Speaker 1: Okay, yep, yep, see it?
Speaker 3: Okay, So this is running mcome tools. It's the R
Speaker 3: four release, which is going to be released on community
Speaker 3: dot mcomtools dot com in April. Ok So this one's
Speaker 3: a little bit ahead, but assume that you've just installed
Speaker 3: it using the USB thumb drive in your computer, and
Speaker 3: it is one like installing a boon to. In fact,
Speaker 3: this is built on a boon to. So the one
Speaker 3: question people have is is it an application. No, it's
Speaker 3: a full Linux distribution based on a boon To, and
Speaker 3: it's locked at a point in time. It's locked on
Speaker 3: a version that is now out of maintenance. It's what
Speaker 3: they called end of life, and it's by design. This
Speaker 3: is an appliance, and I've patched every single thing. So
Speaker 3: for example, you log in for the first time, and
Speaker 3: let's say that we want to This is on the
Speaker 3: command line, but there is going to be a graphical
Speaker 3: version coming. You put in your call sign, you put
Speaker 3: in your grid square, and optionally, if you don't have
Speaker 3: wind Link, just leave it blanket enter or put your
Speaker 3: existing wind Link password and you could just confirm it
Speaker 3: if I may kill that. If nothing ever changes, you
Speaker 3: never have to run that command again. You're done. Every
Speaker 3: time I want to now use this system, I can
Speaker 3: switch radios. There's a command that right now is kind
Speaker 3: of command line based, but it will be a graphical
Speaker 3: application later, and it lists all of the radios that
Speaker 3: it has full plug and play support. So what I
Speaker 3: like to tell people is the path of least resistance
Speaker 3: is if you have a radio already that works with
Speaker 3: the digit rig light or the digit rig Mobile, you're
Speaker 3: good to go. You're pretty much all.
Speaker 1: Set now, you say, if nothing ever changes, but you
Speaker 1: put your grid square in. So is it dependent on
Speaker 1: your current location or are you just telling it what
Speaker 1: your home qth is?
Speaker 3: Yeah, you enter it. Let's say that I go to
Speaker 3: activate a park and I want the grid square to
Speaker 3: be reflected in the applications. You can rerun that command again.
Speaker 3: And so the cool thing about it is that is
Speaker 3: what it does every single time is it always reads
Speaker 3: that configuration. So if I want to also switch operators,
Speaker 3: let's say that I want to be you, you could
Speaker 3: just go ahead and we could put let me put
Speaker 3: my old call sign for example, it's actually kind of nice.
Speaker 3: We'll do KT seven are U when KT seven? Sorry?
Speaker 3: Oh KT one are you? When I'm getting confused? And
Speaker 3: I can change my grid to delta MIC thirty four
Speaker 3: and we'll keep the password the same. It's it won't
Speaker 3: work and we'll just do yes. So that's all that is.
Speaker 3: So the normal flow is, if let's actually do this,
Speaker 3: We're gonna pick digit rig light for example, right now, good?
Speaker 3: And if there actually was something for you to configure,
Speaker 3: you would do it. Let me actually show you another
Speaker 3: radio real quick, like let's say the seven o five.
Speaker 3: So the Icy seven oh five, seventy one hundred, seventy
Speaker 3: two hundred, and seventy three hundred are all plug and play.
Speaker 3: In fact, the seven oh five is the easiest one.
Speaker 3: It's actually kind of cool.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: There's not a whole lot to this. But let me
Speaker 3: go back to the digit rig light here, okay, so
Speaker 3: we'll take our did you rig light? M h. I'm
Speaker 3: actually gonna use a Balfang for this demo.
Speaker 1: Cool, okaying about that.
Speaker 3: So I'm on the two meter packet frequency which is
Speaker 3: one four or five uh seven to one zero out here.
Speaker 3: And the cool thing behind the scenes is that it
Speaker 3: has plug and play. When you plug this thing in,
Speaker 3: it knows that it is a did you rig light,
Speaker 3: and it does all the right things. It configures the
Speaker 3: audio levels like there is zero configuration, and that's the
Speaker 3: other big thing. So give me a second.
Speaker 1: Here, Frank, are you taking down questions in the chat?
Speaker 2: Yeah? I am looking for questions just and.
Speaker 1: You turned your camera off. That's why I ask. But
Speaker 1: no worries, That's fine.
Speaker 2: Oh I did. I'm sorry I was poking others.
Speaker 1: All right.
Speaker 2: Yes, while you're pulling that up, I am looking for
Speaker 2: a questions we ask them on air later and if
Speaker 2: it makes it, I'll interject them as need be.
Speaker 1: All right, thank you, go ahead, guess jone.
Speaker 3: Okay, So this was a clean install. All we did
Speaker 3: was enter et user to put in our call sign
Speaker 3: and our grid and our password. Now, the operational thing
Speaker 3: you do every time you go out, you run ET
Speaker 3: mode and it gives you all the modes, and every
Speaker 3: time you do this, it fully rewrites the configuration. So
Speaker 3: let's say that I want to do a wind link
Speaker 3: packet for example. We'll hit okay, and it does all
Speaker 3: of this behind the stuff. It starts Direwolf behind the scenes.
Speaker 3: It rewrites the configuration, it launches pat wind Link for you,
Speaker 3: and you're good to go. Now, you notice I've got
Speaker 3: the call sign here K T one r A u N.
Speaker 3: Let's go ahead and kill that bad boy. We'll fix
Speaker 3: my call sign. We'll do KT seven r U N.
Speaker 3: We'll leave it at at delta Mike thirty four. Yes,
Speaker 3: we're good, and then we'll go back into the mode.
Speaker 3: So this is how you switch modes very quickly, and
Speaker 3: we'll even do a BBS demo. So let's do windling packet. Yeah,
Speaker 3: over A twenty five. And the cool thing is, if
Speaker 3: you're running like a new BTECHUV Pro, it'll actually not
Speaker 3: use direbol if it use the Bluetooth instead. So now
Speaker 3: let's go ahead and connect to a station. Actually, I
Speaker 3: want you guys to see what's going on. We'll do
Speaker 3: connect and we'll connect to my gateway and hopefully the
Speaker 3: Bao fang will light up here and you see, yeah,
Speaker 3: it's doing its thing.
Speaker 1: Nice.
Speaker 3: Yep, we're connected already to my gateway and my gateway
Speaker 3: is now checking for four messages. So that's simple. And
Speaker 3: it looks like I have a email that came through
Speaker 3: on the pine phone that's coming in right now. Yep,
Speaker 3: first email from ETC Mobile pine phone. So I sent
Speaker 3: this to one of the guys. Now check this out. Now,
Speaker 3: let's say we want to transition to another mode. We'll
Speaker 3: just go ahead and close this. And let's say I
Speaker 3: want to connect to the BBS. We'll use for this
Speaker 3: demo para con and you can select now which modem,
Speaker 3: so as long as your radio supports it. Obviously doesn't
Speaker 3: make sense for three hundred BOD and for the digital
Speaker 3: work like you won't get ninety six hundred, but it
Speaker 3: rewrites all of the configuration appropriately based on the mode
Speaker 3: you're about to go when so again, now it's starting
Speaker 3: dire Wolf again on the back behind the scenes. And
Speaker 3: now we can do a connect and we're going to
Speaker 3: connect to my BBS. Let's see if this works. And
Speaker 3: if we see it, we should get a banner message
Speaker 3: that says, yep, connected to KT seven are you in?
Speaker 3: There's the BBS. And the BBS is something that I'm
Speaker 3: working on for a different thing. But I've written all
Speaker 3: kinds of cool applications, like for example, we can get
Speaker 3: now if I was just over the air, like I
Speaker 3: am over my balveank, I can ask my remote station
Speaker 3: give me the space weather right now, and the station
Speaker 3: at the house now goes and is getting all of
Speaker 3: the space weather alerts if there's any blackouts, what the
Speaker 3: KNDX is. So a lot of cool stuff. But now
Speaker 3: I can even go and jump into the BBS. We'll
Speaker 3: jump into that application. I'll show you JAS eight here
Speaker 3: in a second. So now we're connected to BBS, it
Speaker 3: should say hello guests, Towne and I can go now
Speaker 3: and list let's say, my message will list the last
Speaker 3: five messages for today. And I have all this stuff
Speaker 3: running on the phone, by the way too as of yesterday.
Speaker 3: That's something we'll dive into here.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's pretty slick.
Speaker 3: That's not real fun. Let's do list bulletin So we'll
Speaker 3: get into this in why a bulletin board system in
Speaker 3: twenty twenty five. But our group has been using it
Speaker 3: now for over ninety days, and we can upload and
Speaker 3: download files here. This is actually where I post very
Speaker 3: early access. You can see here on message three seventy
Speaker 3: four mcome tools commute R four dot thirteen. So I'm
Speaker 3: doing incremental releases that I'm not publicly talking about, but
Speaker 3: I'm using this here to socialize that stuff early. So
Speaker 3: that's just another example of another mode. And we're going
Speaker 3: to just go ahead now and disconnect.
Speaker 1: You've got the BBS running over HF. Is that it
Speaker 1: right now?
Speaker 3: This is VHF twelve hundred BOD But I also have
Speaker 3: a Vara HF port, so put it earlier in the chat.
Speaker 3: If anybody wants a free license, I have one left remaining.
Speaker 3: I bought ten. If you go to launch Vara HF
Speaker 3: and then VARA terminal and connect to seven decimal one
Speaker 3: zero zero upper sideband. You can connect to KT seven,
Speaker 3: run DASH seven and if you type in BBS and
Speaker 3: send me a message using a SP and the my
Speaker 3: call sign, I'll give away a license. It doesn't look
Speaker 3: like anybody who has done that because I just checked
Speaker 3: my messages and there weren't any. So yeah, I just
Speaker 3: disconnected from that. And we can also know go ahead
Speaker 3: in and quit that. Let's say now we want to
Speaker 3: do APRS for example, we can go ahead and now
Speaker 3: drop into a wind link. Oh we could even do
Speaker 3: viur FM, but I haven't configured it. Yeah, let's do
Speaker 3: the APRS client. So behind the scenes again it fires
Speaker 3: up everything that it needs and now we've got APRS running.
Speaker 3: And the cool thing about MCom tools is part of
Speaker 3: how I guide you online on how to set this up.
Speaker 3: I also have tools at the end of the installer
Speaker 3: to pick the state you're in, and it downloads the
Speaker 3: entire maps you for your state, so you fully have
Speaker 3: that stuff available so you don't even have to fetch
Speaker 3: it in the future. So this is why it's very
Speaker 3: much a gread down situation. If you have GPS connected.
Speaker 3: It detects that. So for example, let's say that I
Speaker 3: want to send a message to you, we'll use let's
Speaker 3: do the weather WX bot. Uh oh, I don't know
Speaker 3: if I'm gonna it's gonna be able to hear. Is
Speaker 3: the did you pee mode? Yeah, let's try this. We're
Speaker 3: gonna do wide one blah blah blah and eight five
Speaker 3: zero eight seven. I don't know if this will go through,
Speaker 3: but we'll We'll definitely give it a shot. Yeah, packets
Speaker 3: are going through. Hopefully the other station will hear it
Speaker 3: and retransmit it. You can actually see that the little
Speaker 3: RF guy was going But anyway, so the vision first
Speaker 3: was to do plug and play, so make it easy
Speaker 3: where all you do is connect the radio and then
Speaker 3: it fully configures all the applications with saying defaults and
Speaker 3: you can just mode hoop and every time you switch modes.
Speaker 3: What it does is take an appliance model where it
Speaker 3: just force kills everything. So if something is screwed up,
Speaker 3: you hit it with a hammer just by getting out
Speaker 3: of this and you're good to go. So yeah, let
Speaker 3: me go ahead and kill that. I'm inside the house,
Speaker 3: so not a huge thing. So some of the other
Speaker 3: things that are coming here are well, they're all in
Speaker 3: here in the new release. But you could even set
Speaker 3: up services so you could do point to point chat
Speaker 3: using something called chatterbox with digital signatures, so you can
Speaker 3: verify person you're talking to using encryption, not to obfuscate anything,
Speaker 3: but you can use private public key cryptography to sign
Speaker 3: your call sign and then the other end can have
Speaker 3: that locally and they can verify you. So there's an
Speaker 3: exchange of keys. So if someone just were to put
Speaker 3: your call sign Jason in on their computer, I would
Speaker 3: know that it's not really you because it doesn't match
Speaker 3: your your keys that I have.
Speaker 1: Oh I see, okay, yeah.
Speaker 3: So really cool stuff. And now if you do have
Speaker 3: var HF installed, that's all good to go. But let
Speaker 3: me show you another cool demo. We're gonna get canceled here, okay,
Speaker 3: and we're gonna disconnect this radio. And it wasn't really
Speaker 3: planning on doing this demo. Now we'll take the UV pro,
Speaker 3: we'll turn it on.
Speaker 1: I've been having I've been really really liking my UV pro.
Speaker 1: I've been doing a lot of thing. Isn't a wind
Speaker 1: link over my uv pro with oh with In fact,
Speaker 1: the video that I post tomorrow will be about wode
Speaker 1: wind link over Android using the UV pro. That's that's
Speaker 1: the video I'm doing tomorrow.
Speaker 3: So it's very cool. Yeah, it's really nice for that.
Speaker 1: It is it is.
Speaker 3: So this one's one off. So the Bluetooth interface was
Speaker 3: something I didn't want to do, but I saw so
Speaker 3: much value in having this Bluetooth with a built in
Speaker 3: T and C for what it is, like one hundred
Speaker 3: and fifty bucks compared to the Kenwood D seventy four
Speaker 3: D seventy five.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So there's again a lot of this stuff is a
Speaker 3: gradual evolution, so people that are on the window side
Speaker 3: don't freak out. This stuff takes time, but all of
Speaker 3: the magic behind the scenes you'll see. You haven't had
Speaker 3: to put a comport in a serial port, you haven't
Speaker 3: had to deal with sound settings. In fact, I should
Speaker 3: have jumped over to jsa call to show that. That's
Speaker 3: actually pretty cool. So I've got this command called et
Speaker 3: uv pro. There's also one now for what is it,
Speaker 3: the vr VGC.
Speaker 1: The oh yeah, the N seventy six VGC.
Speaker 3: That's the one six. Yeah, So a community member donated
Speaker 3: something that was built on the same command so that's
Speaker 3: going to be coming out. And then we also have
Speaker 3: a contribution for the D seventy five, so they all
Speaker 3: work the same way. So I've already paired, so I'm
Speaker 3: just going to type connect and it's going to go
Speaker 3: do all the nerds to for you. In fact, in
Speaker 3: yellow here you can see that it's giving you instructions.
Speaker 3: So menu general settings, make sure you have kiss, T
Speaker 3: and C turned on, and then enter one. Done, and
Speaker 3: now it's going to try to talk to the UV
Speaker 3: pro and it's going to go through and do all
Speaker 3: the negotiation. It even creates the ports for you, the
Speaker 3: AX twenty five ports. You don't have to worry about
Speaker 3: that yourself. So that all works. And now, for example,
Speaker 3: we can do I could connect to the BBS again
Speaker 3: using the native tools and we'll put w L two
Speaker 3: K here and I'll just go straight to the TTP
Speaker 3: BBS and this is literally just happening straight over this guy.
Speaker 3: No wires right now, and again we're connected. We get
Speaker 3: that same Hello, guest O and welcome, and we can
Speaker 3: do the message listing there. So just going to exit that.
Speaker 3: And now let's say we want to transition over to
Speaker 3: a wind link. We're not we're going to be using
Speaker 3: wind Link on packet. We just run our normal et
Speaker 3: mode again. It now knows that it's not using dire
Speaker 3: Wolf over a sound card. You can kind of see
Speaker 3: here it says win Link native packet puts you right
Speaker 3: back in. You can see here it's doing a X
Speaker 3: twenty five plus Linux and we can go ahead and
Speaker 3: I can quickly. Let's say, I want to compose a message.
Speaker 3: What's your call signed Jason?
Speaker 1: Yeah, send send me something k C five HWB.
Speaker 3: Right, and we'll just do a live demo here. I've
Speaker 3: been checking.
Speaker 1: I've been checking and sending win the emails for about
Speaker 1: the past two weeks. Guys, all of you who have
Speaker 1: sent me a win link email I've applied to so
Speaker 1: I did some location sharing, location position reporting, I should say,
Speaker 1: while I was on my road trip this week as well.
Speaker 3: So we're gonna do connect again. It's gonna be fast.
Speaker 3: I got to put the outbox here. C see we're
Speaker 3: already connected. In fact, I find that the packet TNC
Speaker 3: is faster than the Direwolf stuff. So we're sending that off.
Speaker 3: Your live demo thing should disappear from my outbox pretty quickly.
Speaker 3: You could see down here at bottom it's transmitting, So
Speaker 3: again you kind of should have some context on what
Speaker 3: you're doing. I've done a field training exercise with my
Speaker 3: guys and we've got every We did what we call
Speaker 3: it an install fest. So building the image for income
Speaker 3: tools is technical and requires you to play with a Boontu.
Speaker 3: So at the Huntsville, Alabama Fest, I'm actually going to
Speaker 3: rent probably two or three booths or a large one
Speaker 3: and have an installfest there and we could just put
Speaker 3: the USB drive because I can't allow people to download
Speaker 3: the ISO because I'll get sued by Canonical, the copyright
Speaker 3: holders of Ubuntu, and there's too much work to de
Speaker 3: Ubuntu boontu, and there are specific reasons. I spent six
Speaker 3: months evaluating different distributions that would work on rugged ice hardware,
Speaker 3: and at that time it was the best one for
Speaker 3: the job. So that's that.
Speaker 1: So can people not get this right now without coming
Speaker 1: to one of your install fests?
Speaker 3: No, they can't. It's just an Intel process. I mean
Speaker 3: I could go ahead and try to open a browser
Speaker 3: real quick. Here, let me see Chrome, give me one
Speaker 3: second here.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Because Freddie was asking how do we get a
Speaker 1: copy of the software, which I was that was going
Speaker 1: to be my next thing after you were done anyways,
Speaker 1: Like how do people get on? And you're running this
Speaker 1: on your little I forget the model number of that
Speaker 1: tough pad.
Speaker 3: You have Panasonic FCM one and it was designed for
Speaker 3: that that class of stuff so that all has needed
Speaker 3: support for everything. OK, so it was designed for the Panasonics.
Speaker 3: You have twenty the FCM one. It runs on any
Speaker 3: computer that will run a BOOTU twenty two dot ten,
Speaker 3: So you're fine with a minimum of one hundred and
Speaker 3: twenty eight gigabyte SSD drive. I like eight gigs of RAM,
Speaker 3: mostly because I have some future things. I'm about ten
Speaker 3: years ahead on the development I'm doing for because I'm
Speaker 3: poorting over the mapping and all the cool stuff people
Speaker 3: used to see on my videos, and that stuff's all
Speaker 3: coming over very slowly. So this release was more foundational.
Speaker 3: But yeah, go to community dot mcomtools dot com and
Speaker 3: this is for the R three release. It doesn't have
Speaker 3: the VARs stuff in there, and it walks you through
Speaker 3: the mission statement and this design or the site is
Speaker 3: designed to be run in order so home, you know,
Speaker 3: go to getting started. It talks about user expectations, but
Speaker 3: you have to build the image yourself, and I walk
Speaker 3: you through everything. So carve out is Saturday. But the
Speaker 3: cool thing is, once you have it written in that
Speaker 3: image working, keep that USB drive and you can literally
Speaker 3: boot off of it and use it whenever you want.
Speaker 3: But yeah, so that's the process. You have to build
Speaker 3: the image yourself.
Speaker 1: So I have I have the big brother to your
Speaker 1: Z one. I think it's a G one, FM's g
Speaker 1: one or whatever it is.
Speaker 3: The larger works just fine.
Speaker 1: Okay, And it's running Windows Windows ten and uh and
Speaker 1: it's and it's fine. But you're you're saying that everything
Speaker 1: you're doing for this, this community Income tools is running
Speaker 1: on a USB drive, so I could just boot it
Speaker 1: from any computer that that would be supported.
Speaker 3: So there's two ways.
Speaker 1: Yeah, is it not? Is it not locally installing on
Speaker 1: the computer or do you have that option? Do you
Speaker 1: have that option to do either?
Speaker 3: Or it's both. Yeah. So here's how I like to
Speaker 3: do it. So let's say that I have someone else's
Speaker 3: computer and we're in a situation. I will pull out
Speaker 3: my uncomm toal drive, we'll boot off of it, and
Speaker 3: we'll click on try it now, and all the features
Speaker 3: that show you work the caveat is it's running every
Speaker 3: thing in memory, so the experience will be very slow
Speaker 3: and slug. It'll probably feel like a Raspberry Pie three
Speaker 3: B plus.
Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, that's what you get for a live image.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so yes, yes, I blow away and reinstall this
Speaker 3: on all my stuff. In fact, I don't even dual
Speaker 3: boot anymore because I did have a problem when I
Speaker 3: was playing with Windows. I had MCom Tools and Windows
Speaker 3: dual booted. When I when I was playing with the
Speaker 3: off grid setup, and I temporarily just for a second
Speaker 3: booted into Windows and I connected to Wi Fi to
Speaker 3: do just one thing. Okay, and this is what happened.
Speaker 3: Let's stop sharing a real quick. Yeah, it's like, oh,
Speaker 3: Windows update. I said, nope, nope, no thank you. So
Speaker 3: it downloaded without me knowing the Windows update, and it
Speaker 3: went out to go film a video, booted up the
Speaker 3: FCM one and I'm like, that is weird. There's no
Speaker 3: bootloader to get me into MCom Tools. It used to
Speaker 3: allow me to choose if I want an income Tools
Speaker 3: or Windows. Well, that update just erased the boot record. Yeah,
Speaker 3: because it's like I'm Windows, I'm just going to take over.
Speaker 3: So for that reason, my recommendation is always install MCom
Speaker 3: Tools as the only operating system. I would recommend most
Speaker 3: people just go to eBay, find one hundred or two
Speaker 3: hundred dollars notebook that has been you know, released in
Speaker 3: the last ten years, and fully install it on there
Speaker 3: so you don't have to worry about losing data if
Speaker 3: you're not familiar with how to back up Windows and
Speaker 3: do all that stuff. But for you, Jason, if you want,
Speaker 3: you can ship me You're g one and I'll do
Speaker 3: the install for you and ship it back so you
Speaker 3: don't have to go through the headache and just get
Speaker 3: a sense for it.
Speaker 1: Actually, you know, I think that would be a fun video.
Speaker 1: I think that out of my I think I might
Speaker 1: try to. I keep going back and forth. So I
Speaker 1: recently picked up a I switched my main laptop too.
Speaker 1: I have a tough book now for the actual laptop.
Speaker 1: So I carry my my g one and my my
Speaker 1: my laptop. I forget the model number on it, but
Speaker 1: I'll tell you here in a second, and that's what
Speaker 1: I carry now. But in fact, I pulled out that
Speaker 1: laptop at ham kh and Ack came for a CKJ.
Speaker 1: He was like, WHOA, where'd you get that, and I'm like,
Speaker 1: you know, the newer ones aren't as tough. You know,
Speaker 1: they used to be kind of early bulking. You could
Speaker 1: throw him down a flight of stairs. You wouldn't worry
Speaker 1: about it. The newer ones aren't as tough. It's still
Speaker 1: a cool laptop. But uh, but that's what I've been
Speaker 1: But I've got but I've got duel boots on that
Speaker 1: with the with the thumb drive that I did my
Speaker 1: my off gride Windows ten video four. But I've just
Speaker 1: always kept I've just always kept off grade Windows ten.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry. I've just always kept Windows ten locally installed
Speaker 1: on my G one. I probably could do that on
Speaker 1: the g one actually, because I keep going back and
Speaker 1: forth and whether I want to switch over to Lenox
Speaker 1: or not. A ck and I had a long conversation
Speaker 1: about leaving Windows and going to Linux and doing this,
Speaker 1: and I don't think I'm ever going to leave Windows
Speaker 1: completely because there's a lot of DMR software and radio
Speaker 1: software up there that works only on Windows. But you know,
Speaker 1: about ten years ago I tried to do that and
Speaker 1: I finally got frustrated with it because of all the
Speaker 1: compiling of drivers you had to do and Jason's like,
Speaker 1: he's like, it's come a long way since then, and
Speaker 1: he really likes Mint. Mint twenty two is the one
Speaker 1: he likes. So yeah, it's I've never used Mint twenty two.
Speaker 1: That's that's the one he keeps talking about. But I
Speaker 1: think that might be a fun project to just go
Speaker 1: through this community dot income tools steps myself and you know,
Speaker 1: follow follow the instructions, and when I invariably get stuck,
Speaker 1: I'll reach out to you. What did I do? You're wrong?
Speaker 3: It's a it's a two phase process the first time,
Speaker 3: because what you have to do is you have to
Speaker 3: install u BOONTU twenty two dot ten first, and then
Speaker 3: there's some minor things you have to install, like the
Speaker 3: image creation software and some scripts. But then at that
Speaker 3: point you can go and produce the image, and then
Speaker 3: you kind of go through a second install of m
Speaker 3: com Tools, and this whole architecture may go away based
Speaker 3: on some new breakthroughs I had literally as of yesterday
Speaker 3: and the day before where I have now m com
Speaker 3: Tools running on Mobian on the phone, which is wild, and.
Speaker 1: I looked, I looked up the pine phone while you
Speaker 1: were going through that demo just now, and those things
Speaker 1: are not expensive.
Speaker 3: They're not, but i'll tell you right now. So I've
Speaker 3: got the pine Phone Beta edition, three gigs of RAM
Speaker 3: and a thirty two gig eat MMC storage. It's a
Speaker 3: full blown Linux distribution that's based on Debians. So for
Speaker 3: me to quickly bring over what I had developed, everything
Speaker 3: works on here, the sound cards, the plug and play,
Speaker 3: It's going to take me the rest of the year
Speaker 3: to get those two two get to the same level
Speaker 3: that you're able to do, because there's some tweaks I
Speaker 3: have to do. So I was afraid that I would
Speaker 3: release that quick, shaky, terrible video yesterday, like, oh my god, guys,
Speaker 3: I could connect to the BBS with just this is
Speaker 3: all I have, and I showed how you could technically
Speaker 3: run JS. So I've got some custom applications. I'm gonna
Speaker 3: actually work on a port of jsa call that has
Speaker 3: a mobile friendly display later this year. And so I
Speaker 3: was afraid. They have a newer phone called the Pine Pro,
Speaker 3: and I was afraid, so I bought two of them
Speaker 3: just in case. So it has newer hardware and it's gosh,
Speaker 3: it was it's four it's four gigs of memory and
Speaker 3: one hundred and twenty eight gig e MMC drive and
Speaker 3: it's got updated camera, updated GPU, and I'm hoping that
Speaker 3: the battery life isn't terrible. I think it is going
Speaker 3: to be bad. I think that's going to be what's
Speaker 3: going to kill this device is the battery. But if
Speaker 3: it's snappier, it could be a daily driver. I mean,
Speaker 3: when I went out today in the field, it was
Speaker 3: great pulling this out of my chest. Frick doing et
Speaker 3: UV pro and I was doing windlink and the BBS
Speaker 3: out in the middle of nowhere, and yeah, I can
Speaker 3: even connect directly to the phone using the digirig light.
Speaker 1: Does the phone have a US well, does the phone
Speaker 1: have a USB port?
Speaker 3: Has one USB C port, USBC port?
Speaker 1: Again, that's that's good enough, That's all you need.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but the whole audio subsystem worked. I was not
Speaker 3: expecting that. The way that I built m contols to
Speaker 3: be plug and play. There's some low level Unix stuff.
Speaker 3: All of that stuff just worked. When I was doing
Speaker 3: these experiments on Android phones, none of them were true
Speaker 3: Linux distributions and all of that stuff failed. So people ask,
Speaker 3: will it work on Android? Nope? Will I ever write
Speaker 3: an application for Android? Nope? Will I ever do ATAC Nope.
Speaker 3: I am committed to building on top of Buntu ten
Speaker 3: or now the Wan twelve on here, and I'm going
Speaker 3: to be working with old software. Uh you know, radio
Speaker 3: is not going to change and all of that stuff works.
Speaker 3: And if you're concerned about security, my point is these
Speaker 3: are designed to be off grade air gap solutions. So
Speaker 3: if you want to compromise the things via security, you
Speaker 3: better have a hacker that's able to figure out how
Speaker 3: to inject packets over the air with an exploit that
Speaker 3: can take over your your phone. The attack surface is minimal, so.
Speaker 2: Well sorrow an exploit before that was over JSA, was
Speaker 2: it JSA? It was over JSA. That was I think,
Speaker 2: I swear to JSA. I got to go back and
Speaker 2: reread the story. It's been a while, but it was
Speaker 2: able to create a malicious payload. Then it's through JSA.
Speaker 2: Well all, then we'll do remote code exploit through the
Speaker 2: memory overrun and then that triggered it. I was like, guys,
Speaker 2: and then this is a issue with all our software.
Speaker 2: All our software is ten years old. We need new
Speaker 2: digital software.
Speaker 3: Let me tell you what the issue is on that front.
Speaker 3: Because I'm trying to crack that nut. The most powerful
Speaker 3: thing that we have are all of these different modems.
Speaker 3: So I take a look at Direwolf and that being
Speaker 3: a packet modem or packet TNC, the R modem and
Speaker 3: JSA is also essentially a modem. It's modulating and demodulating
Speaker 3: this traffic. The problem is the barrier to understanding the
Speaker 3: mathematics to doing the audio encoding, decoding, dealing with the ARA,
Speaker 3: the multipathing, fading, and all of the techniques they use.
Speaker 3: That community of developers is so small, So I realized
Speaker 3: that personally, I can't write that Motivum software. I'd have
Speaker 3: to go back and spend probably two years of just
Speaker 3: learning all the basics to write like another modem to
Speaker 3: compete with something like Vara for example. The approach I
Speaker 3: took was, all of these brilliant people have done that work.
Speaker 3: What I can do is make it plug and play.
Speaker 3: Have access to Packet three hundred, BOD, twelve hundred BOD,
Speaker 3: ninety six hundred BOD, art up, Vara HF, Vara FM,
Speaker 3: the Mercury modems, and I'm planning on modifying or building
Speaker 3: brand new mobile friendly, touch friendly, good user experience on
Speaker 3: top of them. So yeah, I'm gonna be working on
Speaker 3: a modified version of JSA call. So that's where the
Speaker 3: problem is. I don't think it's a lack of wanting
Speaker 3: to do it, is just that the skill set to
Speaker 3: do the low level modem work is those engineers are
Speaker 3: starting to retire, and I don't think this new generation
Speaker 3: of engineers has the talent and the education and the
Speaker 3: background to do it. So that's where the problem is.
Speaker 3: I think the reason why there hasn't really been a
Speaker 3: great competitive Vara is because of that. The closest thing
Speaker 3: that's coming out right now is a modem called Mercury,
Speaker 3: and it's supposed to be Vara compatible from a application perspective,
Speaker 3: So you could connect Mercury into like your Windling client,
Speaker 3: but you'd have to talk to another Windlin client that
Speaker 3: is using Mercury, and then as far as they're concerned,
Speaker 3: they think they're talking to Vara, but they're not. And
Speaker 3: that's nice and open and so those are the things
Speaker 3: I'm going to be exploring. So yeah, it's interesting now
Speaker 3: that we've got newer hardware and all of this other
Speaker 3: great software. It's just a matter of cleaning them up
Speaker 3: and packaging them up nicely.
Speaker 2: Are we ready for some questions here?
Speaker 1: Yeah, one thing, one thing real quick. Some people are
Speaker 1: talking about twelve olt laptops. I know the question came
Speaker 1: across will it work on the evolved Maestro? Yeah, so
Speaker 1: we can tackle that in a second.
Speaker 2: I was going to skip that one because my answered
Speaker 2: that thing away. Yeah, it's that I'm done with.
Speaker 1: I want to Well that's great, but I wanted to
Speaker 1: address it on the live stream. Nevertheless, I will say this, Okay,
Speaker 1: I have got let me make sure I got the
Speaker 1: right screen size here. This is the one I've got
Speaker 1: right here, and I bought this off of Amazon. This
Speaker 1: is the FC g one. Now this is a oh,
Speaker 1: ten inch ten inch tablet, the one that Gastone is
Speaker 1: using as the M one, which I think is what
Speaker 1: five to six inch nine inches? Oh, I thought it
Speaker 1: was a lot smaller than the.
Speaker 3: Ten Well it's seven it's seven inches seven inches.
Speaker 1: Okay, that sounds for they measure yeah, just the screen.
Speaker 1: I think they're just measuring the screen here.
Speaker 3: So it's yes, this is the size of my hand right.
Speaker 1: Right, yeah, okay, so I have the I have the
Speaker 1: the larger one, and people talking about, uh, twelve olt
Speaker 1: laptops in the chat. I have this, and they make
Speaker 1: a car adapter for this vice. Now I didn't notice
Speaker 1: at first, but they make a car adapter for it
Speaker 1: that plugs into a regular cigarette lighter adapter. And I
Speaker 1: had from something I got from Biyu in a long
Speaker 1: long time ago, is a cigarette lighter to power pole receptacle.
Speaker 1: So I just take my and you could you could
Speaker 1: cut the cigarette lighter adapter off and put your own
Speaker 1: power poles on it. Sure, but I've used that many
Speaker 1: times on my battery box, multiple battered boxes with no issues.
Speaker 1: What I figured out after I got my new laptop,
Speaker 1: which was the new laptop, is this f Z fifty five.
Speaker 1: The laptop takes the exact same twelve oolt adapter that
Speaker 1: the g one takes, so I can power there are Yeah,
Speaker 1: and that's kind of that's what I was gonna add.
Speaker 1: I kind of figured that after I saw that that
Speaker 1: they were all the same. But all of this Panasonic
Speaker 1: tough Pad and toughbook stuff has this twelve bolt adapter
Speaker 1: or or the one ten adapter, and they they all
Speaker 1: work across the cross platform. So yeah, so essentially my
Speaker 1: fcg one I have is a twelve volt tough pad
Speaker 1: because I charge it from my battery box with no issues,
Speaker 1: or I can if I want to.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So here's my thoughts on that. So really quickly
Speaker 3: the evolve you and I tried it two years ago
Speaker 3: at Courtzfest, Yes, and it was just you were waiting
Speaker 3: on everything, so I don't recommend.
Speaker 1: It is really slow.
Speaker 3: When you go to these ruggedized machines like the Panasonics,
Speaker 3: they're either fifteen point eight volts or sixteen volts and
Speaker 3: they can fluctuate a little bit what I went with
Speaker 3: for the field, since I also standard on twelve volts
Speaker 3: like every other amateur radio, or thirteen point eight volts.
Speaker 3: There's a company called Lind Electronics Lima, India November Delta
Speaker 3: Lind and these are used by public service agencies to
Speaker 3: drive their tough books and they're kind of expensive. I
Speaker 3: find the mon on eBay for like thirty bucks. And
Speaker 3: the cool thing about the Lind Electronics is they'll go
Speaker 3: from one ten to the sixteen volts that these need
Speaker 3: and they work across all of my tough pads and
Speaker 3: tough books. But they also have an input for twelve vaults,
Speaker 3: so in the field they can use my bio. We
Speaker 3: know going into this little brick and then on the
Speaker 3: outside there's a little jumper cable that goes to sixteen
Speaker 3: vaults and I've been using it now for almost two years,
Speaker 3: and I absolutely love it. It has a little bit of
Speaker 3: RF noise, so I use it mostly to charge it
Speaker 3: when I'm not doing stuff. But it's it depends on
Speaker 3: how much of a peerist you want to be. JSA
Speaker 3: call and the modes that're working were working fine when
Speaker 3: I had the solar panels running going into that whole system.
Speaker 3: But yeah, that's my philosophy. Go to it. Get a
Speaker 3: twelve vult to sixteen vault adapter and one that's not
Speaker 3: terribly noisy. I prefer the Lind electronics because they're ultra
Speaker 3: rugged and some of them are dual power source, like
Speaker 3: one ten AC plus twelve vault TC.
Speaker 2: Now I'm starting to come to the thought of I'm
Speaker 2: just going to be getting aa US one that charges
Speaker 2: off the USB because I already have plugs USBC plugs
Speaker 2: and the higher vault is USBC plugs on my system
Speaker 2: already and that's always in my bag. Instead of trying
Speaker 2: to get another twelve volt and get the adapter, why
Speaker 2: don't just go with a standard, and that's kind of
Speaker 2: where I'm leaning right now, and just charge everything off
Speaker 2: the USBC. Make sure it's the USB three or the
Speaker 2: newer standard in Colin day.
Speaker 3: The PD. So the machine that we're using, and I
Speaker 3: haven't socialized this too much because it's not a good
Speaker 3: field notebook. This is the Dell seventy two to twenty,
Speaker 3: the Dell seventy two twenty. It's a tablet and there's
Speaker 3: a keyboard for it that Dell makes. It's terrible because
Speaker 3: it has a kickstand on the back. I swap mine
Speaker 3: out with this Ike keyboard, which has a hinge that
Speaker 3: allows it to just stay where its app But the
Speaker 3: nice thing about this guy is that it uses us.
Speaker 3: It will take in I think it's twenty vaults from
Speaker 3: that guy, nineteen or twenty volts. But you can also
Speaker 3: charge and run it off of us b C power delivery,
Speaker 3: so you can use your little I use my batteries
Speaker 3: for example, like the for the RVU. We standardize on
Speaker 3: eighteen volt REO B batteries for everything, and I've got
Speaker 3: a little guy that plops right on top of those contacts,
Speaker 3: and I'll use that for PD. So that's another option
Speaker 3: if you don't want to deal with twelve volt is
Speaker 3: find a USBC capable power delivery small form factor machine
Speaker 3: for the field.
Speaker 2: It's just another art tool in our kit. And I
Speaker 2: think just be easier for me just to standardize it
Speaker 2: around the twelve volt the PD because I already have
Speaker 2: one of the connectors, and all the battery boxes have
Speaker 2: the USB connectors on them.
Speaker 1: We install them so well, you get some of those
Speaker 1: little power banks now that'll do up to like they'll
Speaker 1: do twelve or fifteen, maybe even eighteen volts through power
Speaker 1: delivery with USBC, so you can you can get some
Speaker 1: stuff like that. It's much smaller than carrying around a
Speaker 1: battery box. But I always have battery box with me anyway,
Speaker 1: but you know I wouldn't go rocking with one. To
Speaker 1: go back to that conversation, so all right, Frank, Yeah,
Speaker 1: let's do some uh let's let's do some questions.
Speaker 2: So I think we kind of tackled on what hardware
Speaker 2: this is running. Do you have just any like requirements
Speaker 2: because you're kind of leaving it open, do you have
Speaker 2: like minimum requirements RAM hard drive spabes go for it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And it's mostly because I have a vision so
Speaker 3: people keep on asking me about features, I'm not taking
Speaker 3: any feature request because I've done development on the commercial version,
Speaker 3: which I'm pulling parts, so there's a whole off gride
Speaker 3: offline mapping component that's coming. So the requirements that I'm
Speaker 3: giving people now are for the future needs that it's
Speaker 3: going to be. So when R four or five, R six,
Speaker 3: those releases come out, and I'm planning on doing an
Speaker 3: R or release roughly every quarter to move the need
Speaker 3: and they'll have themes. So right now, if the minimum
Speaker 3: you want is a one hundred and two eight gig
Speaker 3: SSD drive, perfectly an M two. If you're going to
Speaker 3: dual boot, which I do not recommend because of Windows
Speaker 3: hijacking the bootloader on updates, you want to look at
Speaker 3: least at two fifty six to five twelve if that's
Speaker 3: your requirement. Personally, these days, I'm only looking at systems
Speaker 3: that are have two hundred and fifty six gigs because
Speaker 3: I just plan to run it. In terms of memory,
Speaker 3: it can run with less. I found that out with
Speaker 3: the Pine Phone. It technically does work on three gigabytes
Speaker 3: of RAM, but I will be doing lots of memory management,
Speaker 3: memory mapping the future So the hard recommendation is if
Speaker 3: you want to buy something now and have it work
Speaker 3: in a release that comes out two years from now
Speaker 3: or a year and a half from now, eight gigs
Speaker 3: of RAM, and then for CPU, I run a ton
Speaker 3: of iCore five or iCore or I five core processors.
Speaker 3: You know, two to four cores is fine. If you're
Speaker 3: looking at the Panasonics, I will tell you avoid all
Speaker 3: of the early Mark versions. So if you're getting a
Speaker 3: Panasonic FZM one, the nine inch one, the Mark one
Speaker 3: will work. In fact, I'm running the Mark one for
Speaker 3: the BBS and it's been up and running for close
Speaker 3: to one hundred days by itself. The Mark two is
Speaker 3: the sweet spot. It runs really nicely. If you want
Speaker 3: to get the Ike keyboard, don't get the Mark three.
Speaker 3: They don't mate. So for me, if I can make
Speaker 3: a recommendation and you want the small form factor tablet,
Speaker 3: I would get the Mark two. For the f zg
Speaker 3: G ones, I would say try to find either a
Speaker 3: Mark four or a Mark five the later models, not
Speaker 3: the one, two or three. But rule of thumb, if
Speaker 3: you're not going to be running rugged as hardware, I
Speaker 3: get that not everybody does what I do, but m
Speaker 3: come tools designed for for kind of that operating delivery level.
Speaker 3: Get yourself a del that will run a Buntu twenty
Speaker 3: two ten again, anything in the last ten years that
Speaker 3: sixty four bit Intel should work. That's the only other
Speaker 3: hard requirement. This is sixty four bit only until architecture.
Speaker 1: My FCG one is a Mark three, So you think
Speaker 1: it won't run on that or not.
Speaker 3: Well it will. No, it'll be fine. But if you're
Speaker 3: looking at like eBay for example, to source these, and
Speaker 3: you're trying to figure out do I spend the extra
Speaker 3: twenty bucks thirty bucks whatever that Rialta is.
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, I lost you, Gastone, No.
Speaker 2: He's oh yeah, no audio, No audio, Gastone.
Speaker 1: I don't think you can hear us either, I know, right,
Speaker 1: Can you hear him?
Speaker 2: Frank? No, Well I got Pandora growing in my ears?
Speaker 1: No, no, no audio.
Speaker 3: For me.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you're back everything? Okay, Yeah, I can hear you
Speaker 1: now everything you just said. We couldn't hear you.
Speaker 3: Oh when did I drop out? Or what was the
Speaker 3: last thing you heard?
Speaker 1: Right after I said that I have the Mark three
Speaker 1: on the FCG one and you said it to work.
Speaker 1: Just that that delta of if it's only twenty bucks
Speaker 1: more than you're gonna want, you know, the later one.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So there's a company or the guy Bob Johnson's
Speaker 3: computer stuff. Look him up and type in ceial look
Speaker 3: up or mark look up, and he has for every
Speaker 3: Panasonic that's out there, like the CF thirty three's, the twenties,
Speaker 3: the f ZM ones, the g ones. He's got a
Speaker 3: way to look up the cereal and tell you whether
Speaker 3: you have a Mark one, two, three, four or five
Speaker 3: because it's not always obvious. And if you go find
Speaker 3: a seller, ask them for the serial number so you
Speaker 3: could verify that what you're getting is actually my case,
Speaker 3: I wanted an f ZM one Mark two because I
Speaker 3: had the ones for so many years and I wanted
Speaker 3: to verify it. He sent me the serial number. I
Speaker 3: looked it up. Maybe I can find it at some
Speaker 3: point here for you guys.
Speaker 1: And I have that little Ikea what do you call
Speaker 1: an ikea keyboard?
Speaker 3: Ike keyboard?
Speaker 1: Ike Yeah, yeah, the Ikey, that's right. Yeah. I took
Speaker 1: that thing off. I got to where I just it
Speaker 1: made the it made the kit to bulky and it works.
Speaker 1: It works great. It's nice in waterproof. I mean you're
Speaker 1: not going to do any fast typing on it because
Speaker 1: the way those keys are just kind of like beneath
Speaker 1: the kneaprint or whatever that is. But I mean it
Speaker 1: works fine. I just the last time I took it out,
Speaker 1: and I beautiful use with that thing with wsjt X
Speaker 1: and FT eight with the d R eight ninety one
Speaker 1: from digirig on my FT eight ninety one from Yazoo
Speaker 1: and PoTA with that all day long, no problem. And
Speaker 1: I just I didn't like the keyboard.
Speaker 3: I just I don't know, so I'll disagree there for
Speaker 3: one reason. I don't like carrying the keyboard, and that's
Speaker 3: why part of what I'm doing in the later releases
Speaker 3: is to rebuild the applications to be touch first and
Speaker 3: mobile friendly and just use the existing back ends. Try
Speaker 3: doing JSA call on an f ZM one on a
Speaker 3: seven inch screen without a keyboard and mouse, and that's
Speaker 3: my go to you mode, especially since I rock the
Speaker 3: true SDX dealing QRP, that's the mode that really is
Speaker 3: best suited for it. So for me personally, I've run
Speaker 3: in to an issue. If you don't want the ike keyboard,
Speaker 3: hold on one second, let me show you what I'm running.
Speaker 1: All right, that's quick.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: It also looks like we have someone connecting with Vervara
Speaker 3: HF to the BBS right now.
Speaker 1: Oh nice, okay, good.
Speaker 3: This is this little guy right here. They running about
Speaker 3: twenty five bucks on.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I used to have one of those. I
Speaker 1: may still have one around here somewhere.
Speaker 3: They work exceptionally well with the FCM one. So this
Speaker 3: is what I run in the RV. So for the RV,
Speaker 3: I use am comfortable. I also have an offline map
Speaker 3: for the entire Southwest with turn by turn directions since
Speaker 3: they also have the off grid plug and play for GPS.
Speaker 3: Occasionally I want to do jsa call using the HF
Speaker 3: antenna on the RV while I'm in motion, and I'll
Speaker 3: pull out this guy. So I've got this thing mounted
Speaker 3: so I could use it like map thing, and it's
Speaker 3: really usable. The mouse integrated here is really nice. It's
Speaker 3: RII and they're twenty five bucks and they're USBC chargeable,
Speaker 3: so it's just in line with all the other gear.
Speaker 3: So this will save you a ton of money. Because
Speaker 3: the IKE keyboards when I was selling them, I was
Speaker 3: selling mine for three hundred and eighty dollars a pop,
Speaker 3: which is cheaper than even some of the US once
Speaker 3: people are pushing. So twenty five bucks versus four hundred
Speaker 3: dollars shipped is something that people may want to consider
Speaker 3: for sure.
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, good Frank, do we have anything else.
Speaker 2: I'm scrolling through here? Can you do APRS through income Tools? Yeah?
Speaker 3: I showed that. Yeah, it works right out of the box.
Speaker 3: That was one of the first modes. And let me
Speaker 3: give you a spoiler. So in the commercial version of
Speaker 3: m com Tools, which I never released but I'm porting over,
Speaker 3: I wrote a custom faster map and I also extended
Speaker 3: APRS the YAK the yet another APRS client three and
Speaker 3: a half years, four years ago, and I wrote a
Speaker 3: API HTTP API to expose everything it does. And in
Speaker 3: the early versions of m com Tools I showed on
Speaker 3: the channel, I wrote my own interface to do it.
Speaker 3: So there's going to be some high speed mapping, more
Speaker 3: streamlined messaging. But again this is just this stuff is
Speaker 3: coming much later after I get the core platform completely
Speaker 3: done and it's bulletproof, plug and play. But yes, it
Speaker 3: does support it right now. It supports it in the
Speaker 3: R three release, the release that's out on the community
Speaker 3: dot m comtol site.
Speaker 1: Now, if I go ahead and follow these instructions here
Speaker 1: on that website and install R three, yep, and then
Speaker 1: you release our four in April or May or whatever
Speaker 1: it is, how do I have to start from scratch
Speaker 1: over again or is it upgradeable?
Speaker 3: There's no upgrade path. And one of the four principles
Speaker 3: of m com tools is keep it simple stupid the
Speaker 3: and that applies not only to the user operations but
Speaker 3: to the way it was implemented. So it's one radio
Speaker 3: only at a time, one mode at a time, very simple.
Speaker 3: But it was also designed where I did not want
Speaker 3: to spend my time saying, oh, I'm on R two
Speaker 3: and I want to jump to R four or five,
Speaker 3: and I have to figure out what are all the changes.
Speaker 3: So what you can do is, if you have R
Speaker 3: three installed, all of the tools to build the new
Speaker 3: image are available to you. So all you have to
Speaker 3: do is start cubic, which is the image built tool,
Speaker 3: download the one thing in there and rebuild it and
Speaker 3: then write that image to another USB drive. And the
Speaker 3: cool thing about that approach is you can keep AR
Speaker 3: three installed, shut it down, boot into the R four
Speaker 3: image that you built and do it in the try
Speaker 3: it now mode in that in memory mode, and you
Speaker 3: can test to see if everything still works, and if
Speaker 3: it does, then you can make the decision. And as
Speaker 3: part of our four I also added tools called et
Speaker 3: user Backup and et User Restore, so you can back
Speaker 3: up all of your files. In fact, I can show
Speaker 3: this real quick and you could restore it so you
Speaker 3: don't have to worry about losing emails and a bunch
Speaker 3: of other stuff. All right, let me share my screen here.
Speaker 3: So again, this is command line that it will be
Speaker 3: an app in the future. So you saw that when
Speaker 3: I started winlink, I had all of those emails, right, Yeah,
Speaker 3: I can run this one command ET user backup and
Speaker 3: it's going to tell you that it's only going to
Speaker 3: back up all of the mcome. Tools can fig in
Speaker 3: two locations, and it'll also fully backup Pat, so any
Speaker 3: in any emails you've had it with Pat, all of
Speaker 3: that stuff, and then you can ask it if you
Speaker 3: want to see all the files. I'll do no, and
Speaker 3: let me do that one again. Oh, it's already created it,
Speaker 3: so it creates this file for you and you can
Speaker 3: run this as many times and create as many backups
Speaker 3: as you want. But when you go now on a
Speaker 3: new indem image, you just copied this over to it.
Speaker 3: And there's another command called et user restore. And the
Speaker 3: guys in my group have been testing this and it
Speaker 3: will I don't have any backups here et use restore. Well,
Speaker 3: I think I broke something there. There should have been
Speaker 3: a backup there. But it gives you the ability to
Speaker 3: pick which one that's on either a connected US spe drive.
Speaker 3: It'll scan it and then allow you to restore it,
Speaker 3: and you can run it multiple times. So like if
Speaker 3: I have email on my field notebook, one on my
Speaker 3: shack station, one in the RV, I could do a
Speaker 3: backup from all three and then restore them all on
Speaker 3: one machine and I get the union or all of
Speaker 3: the email inbox messages from all three systems now on
Speaker 3: one machine. Yeah, so it was a fun.
Speaker 1: Lit It was kind of cool. Yeah, that's kind of
Speaker 1: cool to have be able to do that with with
Speaker 1: Windley for sure. Okay, good.
Speaker 3: So it's there's a very deliberate philosophy and everything. It's
Speaker 3: like everything should be easy to use, easy to restore,
Speaker 3: if it's never been configured, you should be able to
Speaker 3: get up and running it under five minutes on first install.
Speaker 2: So whatich version of this is a custom Linux install
Speaker 2: image you're building? What version of Linux you you recommend using? Again,
Speaker 2: I saw it several different times, so I'm just read.
Speaker 3: So the only thing that's ever going to be supported
Speaker 3: is Ubuntu, and the reason for it is that for
Speaker 3: income tools to work the way it does, I've had
Speaker 3: to customize at least one hundred different areas of the
Speaker 3: operating system. There were actually kernel issues that existed, there
Speaker 3: were driver issues that existed, there were broken GPS implementation,
Speaker 3: and I patch all of that stuff on top of
Speaker 3: Ubuntu twenty two dot ten. So it's an appliance and
Speaker 3: a full operating system. People are like, well, you're going
Speaker 3: to miss out on the next greatest version of a
Speaker 3: boon too. It's like, well, now I have to go
Speaker 3: and figure out is the kernel still broken? Is this
Speaker 3: still broken? And there's no value because everything works and
Speaker 3: for example, the applications themselves in a lot of cases
Speaker 3: all compile everything. So if there's a new version of
Speaker 3: diur Wolf, for example, for packet, it's already I can
Speaker 3: recompile it on that version and I do that myself.
Speaker 3: I have all the scripts for doing all that stuff
Speaker 3: behind you or behind the scenes for you. So yeah,
Speaker 3: Ubuntu twenty two dot ten, it's non negotiable. The only
Speaker 3: area where I'm giving on that just a little bit
Speaker 3: is Mobian twelve because there's so much value in having
Speaker 3: the platform, but I can't support twenty different Linux distributions
Speaker 3: across every single update. There's no way to test that stuff.
Speaker 3: So that's the other thing. Whenever I do a major release,
Speaker 3: I test every radio in every mode. It takes me
Speaker 3: an entire weekend to connect the seven oh five. I
Speaker 3: unplug the seven oh five and hit up all ten modes,
Speaker 3: then go and get the UV pro, then go get
Speaker 3: the digi rig with the digit rigged laying. So I
Speaker 3: do all of that end to end testing. And that's
Speaker 3: the reason why I also right now I'm not really
Speaker 3: accepting full requests from other people. Is not to say no,
Speaker 3: I don't have the time to review it, and those
Speaker 3: other people are only concerned about their one feature. And again,
Speaker 3: the whole goal for what I'm doing is to have
Speaker 3: an appliance, turnkey appliance. In fact, don't even think of
Speaker 3: it as Linux. It's just this is an appliance. Don't
Speaker 3: worry it's an implementation detailed. The fact that it runs
Speaker 3: on a boon too, and the fact that it runs
Speaker 3: on a specific version of a Boon two, So think
Speaker 3: of it like a toaster.
Speaker 2: What's your website again.
Speaker 3: Community dot mcomtools dot com and the site will be
Speaker 3: updated updated completely next month when our four comes out.
Speaker 3: And you know, for the Byman Coffee members, what I
Speaker 3: do is we do this thing called the TTP nerd Hour,
Speaker 3: and we'll do behind the scenes work. I'll show them
Speaker 3: previews of all the intermittent builds that users shouldn't be using.
Speaker 3: But there's a group that just wants to see what
Speaker 3: I build, you know, every couple of weeks, so they
Speaker 3: follow along very light on the support. Again, I try
Speaker 3: my best to introduce no bugs. I did kind of
Speaker 3: mangle the last release because of the complexity of bringing
Speaker 3: in Vara. So the Vara support is one hundred percent
Speaker 3: experimental and will be forever. And the reason for it
Speaker 3: is that Vara was very much a concession for that community,
Speaker 3: and mcome tools does not behave the same way it
Speaker 3: does with the mode Switcher as it does with Vara,
Speaker 3: because Var is a Windows app. To run in the foreground,
Speaker 3: you have to configure all these things. So it's the
Speaker 3: only app or set of applications that's not zero can
Speaker 3: fig and it's nothing that I did. It's just the
Speaker 3: fact that it's a Windows application and it breaks the model.
Speaker 3: But there is value. So there is experimental support coming
Speaker 3: in in the release, and I won't be supporting any
Speaker 3: questions or issues. I mean, that's kind of where it's at.
Speaker 3: It works, but there won't be any bug fixes for
Speaker 3: the most part. So but yeah, if you guys want
Speaker 3: just a turnkey solution for our dot packet, you know
Speaker 3: those other modes, it works well. I tested every time
Speaker 3: I go out nice.
Speaker 1: Yep, I'm gonna have to. I think I might go
Speaker 1: out there and grab it for I might wait till
Speaker 1: April though for the R.
Speaker 3: Force, I would wait. Yeah, you get the good stuff,
Speaker 3: but again, if you ship it to me, I'll give
Speaker 3: it to you turnkey, so you could just kind of
Speaker 3: get the raw experience and just connect it up. And
Speaker 3: the other cool thing is when you run et radio
Speaker 3: and let's say you pick what do you do you
Speaker 3: have right now that you want to use with it?
Speaker 1: Pick one. Man Freddy's in there asking about the IC
Speaker 1: seven or six Mark two G and correct me if
Speaker 1: I'm wrong. But it'll work with anything that dig you
Speaker 1: rig supports, right.
Speaker 3: It will. If you want the CAT control to work,
Speaker 3: there is a configuration file you have to put in, okay,
Speaker 3: and that's how the eight five seven, the eight ninety seven,
Speaker 3: that's how all of those work. But yeah, if it
Speaker 3: works with the did you rig. If you don't need
Speaker 3: the CAT control, you can run it in what we
Speaker 3: call did you rig no cat and all you have
Speaker 3: to do is tune the VFO but it'll detect the
Speaker 3: audio interface and do all the things for you. But yeah,
Speaker 3: did you rig is the Actually this project would not
Speaker 3: have been released if it wasn't for the dig you
Speaker 3: rig because it's like the Swiss Army Night if it's
Speaker 3: a consistent interface. Because I actually checked the hardware. When
Speaker 3: you plug in and unplug, it actually will see what
Speaker 3: radio is configured, and it will auto configure all the
Speaker 3: devices for you, and then all the applications. It reconfigures
Speaker 3: every application on every start based on the radio, and
Speaker 3: the digit rig made all of that possible.
Speaker 1: Nice's a didgibrig is a fantastic product, good several of them.
Speaker 2: I don't have any more questions. There were a lot
Speaker 2: of them, but there are a lot of repeats, and
Speaker 2: I kind of smashed some of them into each other. So
Speaker 2: that's about it for me.
Speaker 3: You guys curious about the pine Phone stuff? Yeah, if
Speaker 3: you watch, Yeah, I haven't figured out how to share
Speaker 3: the screen, so I'll tell you guys. So my goal
Speaker 3: always has been to be a communicator, and I want
Speaker 3: the thing that allows me to eat e C. It's
Speaker 3: a pain to always carry a seven inch or nine
Speaker 3: inch tablet with you, it's yeah, right, But if you
Speaker 3: have a phone and you have your ht uh, you're
Speaker 3: good to go. I know it's getting better and Android
Speaker 3: in iOS with things like radio mail on Windows and
Speaker 3: APRS or sorry iOS and then APRS dot Fi and
Speaker 3: all of those things. But things like JSA call for example,
Speaker 3: don't work. So this is the pine Phone Beta again,
Speaker 3: Please do not go out and buy it. This thing's
Speaker 3: already showing me its words.
Speaker 1: But that specific one is currently out of stock, the beta.
Speaker 3: So that is it the one that's listed for one Yes,
Speaker 3: so you can get the beta if you get it
Speaker 3: with the breakout board for one night with.
Speaker 1: The nine Okay, I see yeah, I see that one
Speaker 1: as well. Okay, yeah, so you can get the yeah
Speaker 1: nine for what the breakout board or the pro is
Speaker 1: three to ninety nine. It looks like so yeah, okay.
Speaker 3: So yeah, I bought two. I bought actually I bought
Speaker 3: one pro before I released the video, and then I
Speaker 3: bought a second pro on the used market before this
Speaker 3: meeting because someone had a pine phone keyboard, which are
Speaker 3: unobtainedingum and they bundle them together. So I bought that.
Speaker 3: So I'm gonna test the case keyboardist as a fun thing. Okay,
Speaker 3: So I'm gonna log in here. And what I found
Speaker 3: most impressive about this is that Mobian is a full
Speaker 3: Debian distribution. Everything you can do on Linux you can
Speaker 3: do on this phone. But I mean, as you can see,
Speaker 3: I'm still trying to log in.
Speaker 1: So do you not have a SIM card or Wi
Speaker 1: Fi on that phone? If you're if you're trying it
Speaker 1: to be if you're trying to keep it off grid
Speaker 1: like the tablet, are you not using that phone phone?
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's a there's an LTE module. I don't have
Speaker 3: it in here. This is offline and it doesn't even
Speaker 3: need to be connected to Wi Fi. It's got some
Speaker 3: cool features. So we're going to open up the console
Speaker 3: here and I did this today in the back country
Speaker 3: and it was just wild. So hopefully you can kind
Speaker 3: of see some of that right and focus. Yeah, that's
Speaker 3: the terminal.
Speaker 1: It looks like the terminal.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but I can now go and for example, there's
Speaker 3: this command here ax call to connect to the BBS
Speaker 3: like we did. I don't know of any other phone
Speaker 3: right now or app on any platform that allows you
Speaker 3: to do packet work to connect to just a bulletin
Speaker 3: board system or go peer to peer just doesn't exist.
Speaker 3: So I'm going to now try to see if we
Speaker 3: can connect to the UV pro and we get the
Speaker 3: same instructions as we did earlier on the full laptop
Speaker 3: and we'll see if it actually pairs here. And so
Speaker 3: the point is what I'm doing here is it shows potential,
Speaker 3: and if this turns out to be success, I'm going
Speaker 3: to be developing all of the front end graphical applications
Speaker 3: to be touch friendly for tablet and laptop, but also
Speaker 3: design them at the same time so that they work
Speaker 3: on the phone. So it's not that I'm adding more
Speaker 3: work to myself. It's the application now will work on
Speaker 3: all three screen devices. By Virtue of having access to
Speaker 3: this at the same time. So we're going to go
Speaker 3: and try to connect to the BBS. I'm gonna do
Speaker 3: this in real time. You guys, let me know if
Speaker 3: it says ttpbbsy is connected.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's connected, right, Uh huh yep.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So I use this to post a message on the
Speaker 3: BBS to a friend while I was out four miles
Speaker 3: from the house. Did not have to have any kind
Speaker 3: of special hardware. So there's a lot of potential early on.
Speaker 3: Like I said, the biggest challenge I think we're going
Speaker 3: to have with the pine Phone is going to be
Speaker 3: the battery life. Because one thing I found with this
Speaker 3: is this phone wants to if you're not touching it,
Speaker 3: it's inactive. It's doing some type of long lived session
Speaker 3: for like jsa call or wind link. It will go
Speaker 3: into the lock screen and then all of a sudden
Speaker 3: that connection gets dropped. So I've had go and turn
Speaker 3: off all of the things that say hey, if I'm inactive,
Speaker 3: don't do anything, don't lock me out, and I've turned
Speaker 3: on all the power things to be on full blast,
Speaker 3: just like MCom tools is right, because you want to
Speaker 3: do your mode. You want to make sure it's successful
Speaker 3: and you don't want to stop. So I killed the
Speaker 3: battery life very quickly because I don't want it to
Speaker 3: operate like I'm a normal phone. You haven't touched me.
Speaker 3: Let's go back into the lock screen and hibernate. So
Speaker 3: don't buy this phone right now. I'm a day and
Speaker 3: a half into proving this concept out and I'm taking
Speaker 3: it slow. Now that I know that I can plug
Speaker 3: it a digitirach and it sees it, and I could
Speaker 3: do the plug and plate and it sees it, It's like, okay,
Speaker 3: Now I could spend one thousand hours developing one application
Speaker 3: at a time to dial in that experience with the
Speaker 3: goal of just having the lightest weight edc kit. So yeah,
Speaker 3: that's the pine Phone why I'm working on in parallel.
Speaker 1: Sweet. That's great, man, I am awesome.
Speaker 2: Man, you're smashing all the comments. I'm not seeing some
Speaker 2: of these because I'm just looking for the questions and
Speaker 2: trying to point and spawn people. But you got two
Speaker 2: guys already. I was like, how did I not see that?
Speaker 1: And already No, it's fine, Yeah, it's fine.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Part of the reason is I spent a lot of
Speaker 3: time with the buy me a coffee. Guys, when I
Speaker 3: took seven weeks sabbatical and these questions came up over
Speaker 3: and over, so I've been long winded. Not to be
Speaker 3: long winded, I preemptibly answered, get a mark two if
Speaker 3: you're gonna get this one, get a mark four or
Speaker 3: five if you're in g one get it's this tuff
Speaker 3: comes up a lot.
Speaker 1: And yeah, kate E six g a E wants to
Speaker 1: know if his message came through the Vora terminal.
Speaker 3: Oh uh, you know, I'm gonna check it on the phone.
Speaker 3: That might be fun. There you go, let me see
Speaker 3: if we can do this. Hold on a second here, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: this will be fun. Let me see if I can
Speaker 3: go and reconnect again. And I wish I could show this
Speaker 3: to you guys. I just haven't figured out well, I
Speaker 3: mean toolgit.
Speaker 1: Yeah, if it's not if you don't have an Internet
Speaker 1: connection with it, then you can't open zoom and connect.
Speaker 1: But otherwise you could open zoom and connect.
Speaker 3: Oh no, but I can connect to it from one
Speaker 3: of my other radios here, which is kind.
Speaker 1: Of yeah, you could do that all right, So let me.
Speaker 3: Go and list my messages. Hold on standby here. It
Speaker 3: is pretty quick. Over twelve hundred block packet. Yep, new user,
Speaker 3: hold on, hold on, there are a few users here.
Speaker 3: Let me do list last four messages. There are a
Speaker 3: few people. And that was my commitment to I told
Speaker 3: the guys on buying me a cof At least for
Speaker 3: the buy me a coffee guys, I'm going to give
Speaker 3: away to the members two var licenses every month, and
Speaker 3: I'm buying ten at a time, and this will be
Speaker 3: my tenth license from the first batch. So let me
Speaker 3: list the last three one more time.
Speaker 1: Here we were, we were messing around with var HF
Speaker 1: at winterfield Day, and I think I'm just gonna go
Speaker 1: buy myself a license too. Oh it's worth it, man, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's pretty cool.
Speaker 2: You have the bio license for that.
Speaker 1: You don't have to, but it's it's like it opens
Speaker 1: up a lot of features. It's like, okay, well you
Speaker 1: can use the free version, but.
Speaker 3: You don't get the nag screen, which is really obnoxious
Speaker 3: that it pops up every time you do a connection.
Speaker 3: If you're on a win link connection, it'll drop you
Speaker 3: after five minutes, regardless if it's finished what it's doing.
Speaker 3: The modem just co oh, that's terrible. Oh yeah, I
Speaker 3: found that hard away.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, wait for.
Speaker 3: Do a five minute session. If you get as much
Speaker 3: email as I do on wind Link, you'll find out
Speaker 3: pretty quickly.
Speaker 1: I'm working on it, man, I just yeah, I'm working
Speaker 1: on trying to get more and more on wind Link.
Speaker 1: I got I got your message, A guess done about
Speaker 1: your bag KQ four h z K. I got your
Speaker 1: message on wind Link this evening as well, So thank
Speaker 1: you on that.
Speaker 3: So I've got the screen is tiny, and I haven't
Speaker 3: figured out the scroll lock. We actually have two people
Speaker 3: that came in. Nope, no, three, Okay, guys, let's transition over.
Speaker 3: Let's read all of them. If you got a second
Speaker 3: in here, because I think that might be fun for
Speaker 3: the people.
Speaker 1: Let me all of their wind Link emails.
Speaker 3: No, I've got too many BBS people. I had a
Speaker 3: lot of people connect.
Speaker 1: Oh oh good, okay, good good, good good.
Speaker 3: And the screen is too small because it's not designed
Speaker 3: for this. So we're gonna turn off the UV pro
Speaker 3: turn it back on. We'll share the screen. And now
Speaker 3: we're jumping computers, so we'll share that. We're gonna use
Speaker 3: my okay, we'll do et UV pro connect.
Speaker 1: Come on.
Speaker 3: Well, I think it's gonna work because the way I
Speaker 3: design them comforts that kills everything every single time. It
Speaker 3: just hits it all with the hammer. It doesn't even.
Speaker 1: Huh.
Speaker 3: Okay, yeah, cool, Yeah, we're gonna be fine here. So
Speaker 3: then we'll go in connect to the BBS. We'll go
Speaker 3: right into it. We'll go let's list the last eight messages.
Speaker 3: There were some housekeeping stuff there, so I'm gonna do
Speaker 3: a video on this. But there's a ton of value
Speaker 3: for this, especially if well, okay, yeah, there are a
Speaker 3: few people. Okay, so it looks like there was a
Speaker 3: The winner is Kilo Echo six golf Alpha echoes for
Speaker 3: I'll send him a license. Okay, there was a new user,
Speaker 3: so this is someone who connected k zero w A V.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he's often in the chat on.
Speaker 3: He was number two. You know what, I'm gonna go
Speaker 3: ahead and purchase a bulk license another ten seats. I'll
Speaker 3: send it to these two guys. Yes, I will send
Speaker 3: it to both. So just give me this week and
Speaker 3: I'll arrange it. And the cool thing is we can
Speaker 3: see what they wrote. So on the left hand side
Speaker 3: there you can see the Those are message IDs you
Speaker 3: can type in read and let's take a look at,
Speaker 3: hopefully the first one's PC free license. It's four sixty five,
Speaker 3: and I'm even going to be working on reimagining in
Speaker 3: the BBS with a graphical experiences as a title free license. Hello,
Speaker 3: my name is Dave, and trying this out for the
Speaker 3: first time. Terminal use of var FM and HF for
Speaker 3: a wind link. So yeah, that was his first connection.
Speaker 3: The other cool thing here is if you're in the BBS,
Speaker 3: not only can you leave messages for other people, but
Speaker 3: I've got this area that I'm building to start hosting
Speaker 3: what I'm going to call underground files. These are files
Speaker 3: that maybe what I remember as a kid in the
Speaker 3: mid nineties during the dallup areas. So I've been working
Speaker 3: on writing up articles on how to defeat DRM, and
Speaker 3: I don't want to talk about them on YouTube here,
Speaker 3: I don't want to post in public, but as a
Speaker 3: gift to people that connect, they can type in files
Speaker 3: and they can read or download how to remove audible DRM.
Speaker 3: And I've got stuff on how I did the firmware upgrade.
Speaker 3: So my goal and public keys of a few of
Speaker 3: the guys. We've got our net schedules here. I'm doing
Speaker 3: all of my after action reports. So let's say that
Speaker 3: we want to read how to defeat the DRM. So
Speaker 3: I know it feels old school, but I'm very concerned
Speaker 3: with where we're going with big tech and government oversight
Speaker 3: and all of this. I'm going back thirty years to
Speaker 3: be able to host very small bits of content. I
Speaker 3: want to make it be a place where people come
Speaker 3: and check in daily, and I want to provide value.
Speaker 3: So instead of posting stuff online, I'm posting stuff here
Speaker 3: now over radio, and it can be accessed over packet
Speaker 3: locally here in Arizona, or over HF if we get propagate.
Speaker 3: And it's all written using very simple plain text. So
Speaker 3: I don't know if this is ever going to make comeback,
Speaker 3: but hearing me stop it right there, I walk you
Speaker 3: through the process. So they'll be maybe lock picking articles.
Speaker 3: They'll be how to defeat anything that might be a
Speaker 3: gray area, and written as an academic exercise. How to
Speaker 3: do encryption over radio. I know how to do it,
Speaker 3: and I've done it on my business license, but I'm
Speaker 3: specifically only going to post how to do encrypted image payloads,
Speaker 3: how to use steganography, how to use wind link for encryption,
Speaker 3: which I've already cracked again, I'm not advocating for anybody
Speaker 3: to break the rules. I've done all of this via
Speaker 3: my business license. But I want to incentivize people to
Speaker 3: own their own data, own their own systems. And Google
Speaker 3: can't do anything about this thing. You know, there's nothing
Speaker 3: really illegal. It's just hey, here's an academic exercise on
Speaker 3: this right up side.
Speaker 1: Well, and there's something and we don't have to get
Speaker 1: too deep into this, but there's something something to be
Speaker 1: said for when you purchase something, do you own it
Speaker 1: or not. Recently, recently Amazon stopped allowing you, like just
Speaker 1: this last week, Amazon stopped allowing you to download your
Speaker 1: books that you buy on Amazon, like I mean, in
Speaker 1: other words, yeah, the Kindle books. Yeah, I used to
Speaker 1: be able to download them. And there's some free software
Speaker 1: out there that will transfer them to epub or mobile
Speaker 1: files or a couple other ones, which I used to
Speaker 1: do that all the time. I've got a bunch of
Speaker 1: books that I you know, it'd be like it'd be
Speaker 1: like going to Barnes and Noble buying a book and
Speaker 1: then they come knock on your door a month later
Speaker 1: saying we need that book back, but they're not going
Speaker 1: to refund you for it. You know, it's like or
Speaker 1: the book. You know, this book was self destruct in
Speaker 1: thirty days or whatever.
Speaker 3: So well, so it's kind of the same, that same
Speaker 3: issue that with the e books. I'm like, shoot, I've
Speaker 3: got three hundred and eighty audio books that I've been buying, yeah,
Speaker 3: month since two thousand and seven, and that's why I
Speaker 3: wrote this article. So I started downloading. Well, no, I
Speaker 3: did not do anything, but I wanted to understand how
Speaker 3: it removed. But I didn't a DRM on audiobooks.
Speaker 1: You used to be able to download DRM MP three's
Speaker 1: from Amazon. When you would buy a new audio CD
Speaker 1: from pick your favorite audio artist, you could go on
Speaker 1: on Amazon and download DR. I probably have a thousand
Speaker 1: DRM free MP three files that I bought ten, five, ten,
Speaker 1: fifteen years ago, and I don't know if they still
Speaker 1: do that or not, but it used to be really
Speaker 1: easy to do that. And I'm like, man, I can't
Speaker 1: believe they because because I absolutely loathe the iTunes, not
Speaker 1: because it's Mac, but because iTunes the program. I haven't
Speaker 1: used it in probably like ten or twelve years, but
Speaker 1: the last time I used it was like absolutely corrid
Speaker 1: on iTunes on Windows sucks. Trying to get music off
Speaker 1: of an iPod completely sucks. I hate iTunes.
Speaker 2: That's that's why I stopped buying anything iPhone related. I
Speaker 2: write a couple iPhones. But then this is the experience
Speaker 2: with iTunes, the story.
Speaker 1: Right, exactly. Yeah, but used to be you could get
Speaker 1: DRM free MP three's from Amazon, and I haven't checked
Speaker 1: that in well, I don't know if they still do
Speaker 1: that or not, but I always thought that was a
Speaker 1: cool thing to do with this new thing.
Speaker 2: Well, we also say services. When services go down, you
Speaker 2: can't all your digital content you bought in your own
Speaker 2: you can't get it.
Speaker 1: Yeah right, yeah, right.
Speaker 3: So there's a reason why a goodwill and good old
Speaker 3: DVD or Blu ray player is amazing to have a
Speaker 3: little library for yourself.
Speaker 1: Yes, very true.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but I hear the kids, he says, don't want
Speaker 3: to own anything. I don't know if that's true. Maybe
Speaker 3: I'm just getting older.
Speaker 1: No, I've heard that too. They want to stream everything,
Speaker 1: and then when when the stream when the when the
Speaker 1: stream lags or you get out of we well to
Speaker 1: eat five gen range or something, it stops working and
Speaker 1: they get bad.
Speaker 2: So I agree with that, But however, there's something to
Speaker 2: be said just to buy pay for a library and
Speaker 2: have instant access to everything versus buying everything piecemeal. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and I'm okay once I stop paying that, oh, I
Speaker 2: don't have access to the library anymore. It's just on
Speaker 2: a way.
Speaker 3: Here's the thing, right, Yeah, I have Amazon Prime is
Speaker 3: probably most people do. I originally got it early on
Speaker 3: because you get the free shipping, you get the free
Speaker 3: streaming without ads. That started to change, and I have
Speaker 3: purchased movies over the last i don't know, five six years.
Speaker 3: If I stopped paying that account, I no longer have
Speaker 3: access to that twenty four and ninety nine you know
Speaker 3: copy of Top Gun. It's like this is a BS.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: If I went to the store and purchased that same
Speaker 3: thing for about that price point, I would have it.
Speaker 3: I could let someone else borrow of it. I could,
Speaker 3: you know, use it as long as the Blu ray
Speaker 3: players still working.
Speaker 1: There's a service. There's a free service called Movies Anywhere.
Speaker 1: I ran into that I started researching debt a few
Speaker 1: years back. There's a free service called movies Anywhere. It
Speaker 1: will it will audo. If you go buy a movie
Speaker 1: on Amazon or on Hulu, or on YouTube or Google
Speaker 1: or Apple TV or any of the services. You log
Speaker 1: into Movies Anywhere, you log into all your accounts, and
Speaker 1: when you buy a movie one place, it replicates them everywhere.
Speaker 1: So if I turn if I turned off Amazon tomorrow,
Speaker 1: I would have Now there's every now and then you'll
Speaker 1: find a movie that, oh it's everywhere except on Apple,
Speaker 1: or it's everywhere except on Hulu or something like that.
Speaker 1: So it's not one hundred percent accurate, but it's probably
Speaker 1: like ninety eight percent accurate. But if I turned off
Speaker 1: Amazon tomorrow, all of my movies are still there in
Speaker 1: my YouTube account or my Hulu account.
Speaker 3: So do you want to link that service to all
Speaker 3: of the other accounts?
Speaker 1: Correct? Yeah, you create a free account on Movies Anywhere.
Speaker 1: It's been a year, a few years since I've done this,
Speaker 1: but when I go buy a new movie on Amazon,
Speaker 1: I usually buy movies on Amazon. When I go buy
Speaker 1: a new movie on Amazon, I can log into my
Speaker 1: YouTube account and I can see it. So you create
Speaker 1: an account Movies Anywhere, and then you log into your
Speaker 1: all your services through that new account on Movies Anywhere,
Speaker 1: and it just just auto. It's like cloud service almost
Speaker 1: just auto.
Speaker 3: Interesting, Now, is the price more expensive or is it
Speaker 3: still what you would probably pay for that movie if
Speaker 3: you went directly to Hulu or went directly.
Speaker 1: So you don't buy them. You don't buy them through
Speaker 1: movies anywhere. All that is is a sinking.
Speaker 2: Service somehow sinks the license.
Speaker 1: It sinks some it sinks all your accounts together. You're
Speaker 1: still buying the movie on Amazon or on Hulu or wherever.
Speaker 2: I have to look.
Speaker 1: There's another there's another website out there and I can't
Speaker 1: remember the name of it right now, where you could
Speaker 1: buy movie codes like I went one time and I
Speaker 1: bought all five of the Dirty Harry movies and it
Speaker 1: was like thirty five dollars for all five movies. Where
Speaker 1: you can buy all of the Lord of the Rings
Speaker 1: movies or all of the Star Wars movie or I
Speaker 1: don't know if you can do Star Wars now, but
Speaker 1: you know you can buy packages and whatnot. And there's
Speaker 1: another website that did that and I can't remember where
Speaker 1: that is right now, but yeah, so that's that's But yeah,
Speaker 1: you don't buy anything through movies anywhere. All it does
Speaker 1: is sink all your stuff together.
Speaker 3: Very cool stuff.
Speaker 1: So yeah, YEA.
Speaker 2: On Solar Chip says we have way too much free time.
Speaker 1: Takes away a lot this Well, that's the guy who
Speaker 1: was in there asking what why do we need a
Speaker 1: comms plan? What is comms? And then he comes back
Speaker 1: and he says, oh, I'm already I already do calms.
Speaker 1: And I'm like, well, you kind of answered you question
Speaker 1: in question there, Bud, So I don't know what you're saying.
Speaker 3: So I went out this morning. It was so much
Speaker 3: fun to go out the back country with this guy,
Speaker 3: Jeffrey from School of Survival out of Moab, and him
Speaker 3: and I were talking just about all of these myths
Speaker 3: of why get a radio because you're going to be
Speaker 3: direction found. Uh if stuff goes sideways, uh, FCC doesn't matter.
Speaker 3: And they were all based on training, whether it was firearms, medical,
Speaker 3: blah blah blah, And a lot of these people don't
Speaker 3: realize that training and muscle memory and regular practice are
Speaker 3: are are vital comside.
Speaker 2: Oh go ahead, I'm green with you. Oh with the comms.
Speaker 2: I'm going to add two your answer here. If you
Speaker 2: don't utilize it, you're gonna forget it. If you got
Speaker 2: a new thing and you need to use it now
Speaker 2: for an emergency situation, you don't know how to use
Speaker 2: it if you do not develop The third prong here
Speaker 2: is if you don't develop the relationships with the other
Speaker 2: guy on the radio, especially locally, what's gonna get me
Speaker 2: to leave my house in a situation to deliver you
Speaker 2: water because you can't go and get it if we
Speaker 2: don't have this connection. I'm just gonna laugh, haha. I
Speaker 2: should have bought some last week.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Community is king, And yes, that's why I'm a fan
Speaker 3: of the bulletin board system. Not so much for the
Speaker 3: HF link. That's great to get a little bit farther out.
Speaker 3: But our four, at least four of m comfortables is
Speaker 3: going to have a mode called ETBBS server and it's
Speaker 3: only going to be simple. It's only going to do
Speaker 3: twelve hundred bod packet on either VHF or UHF. And
Speaker 3: the goal is if you get one of those stood
Speaker 3: up in your area, you now can get people to
Speaker 3: just really easily share files or posts.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I like that.
Speaker 3: I like that right, And I guess you could do
Speaker 3: the same thing with meshtastic here. But the problem, at
Speaker 3: least where I'm at is that we're so ruled. There
Speaker 3: isn't one node that's close enough for it to do anything.
Speaker 1: But va mm hmm, yeah, we did. So is your
Speaker 1: BBS running on VHF or HF both?
Speaker 3: You could do multi supports?
Speaker 1: So you could, so, so I could in theory I
Speaker 1: could HF. What band are you on.
Speaker 2: Here?
Speaker 1: What that end?
Speaker 3: This range? Probably just on the outskirts.
Speaker 1: Probably so yeah, I mean I can talk. I usually
Speaker 1: talk to I usually get guys in Arizona. Case seven
Speaker 1: sen Neil, he's out there in Arizona somewhere and he's
Speaker 1: he's a huge PoTA hunter. I probably work him every
Speaker 1: time I activate. Yeah, but it's it's usually a good
Speaker 1: pipeline to Arizona from Texas. But so I could, so
Speaker 1: I could connect to your forty meters BBS over HF
Speaker 1: right now. We ran Rob in the chat Digital Rancher.
Speaker 1: He ran a BBS on Meshtastic at winterfield Day and
Speaker 1: it was just kind of tinkering around in twyin with it.
Speaker 1: We were kind of out in the sticks and we
Speaker 1: put it up and we announced it. We see if
Speaker 1: anybody wanted to connect to it, and they didn't. But
Speaker 1: he had one hacasion also and people were using it there.
Speaker 1: It's awesome, but with Meshtastic and even with VHF. You're
Speaker 1: talking about local comms right there. The cool thing about
Speaker 1: having an HF BBS, that's that's interesting to me. I'm like,
Speaker 1: cause it'd be like Vara HF at that point in time.
Speaker 1: You know, you could connect to a wind link node,
Speaker 1: you know, a couple hundred miles away and still send
Speaker 1: win link packets. So I think that that that part
Speaker 1: for me is interesting.
Speaker 3: So I actually you can run multiple ports, and I
Speaker 3: was experimenting with all of them. I was running five
Speaker 3: ports at one time. I was running and I had
Speaker 3: five radios and five antennas. I was running three hundred
Speaker 3: bod packet over HF on forty meters, so you could
Speaker 3: do that ninety six hundred bod FF on VHF, twelve
Speaker 3: hundred bod on VHF, Vara FM on VHF or yeah,
Speaker 3: and then also the var stuff. And what I found
Speaker 3: was no one used ninety six hundred bods, so I
Speaker 3: was just out a whole radio in a whole antenna.
Speaker 3: So after about a month that I decommissioned it, and
Speaker 3: it also decommissioned Vara FM as well. But it's absolutely
Speaker 3: amazing the amount of pathways in and what's even cooler
Speaker 3: about packet networking. You can node hoop. So let's say
Speaker 3: that you can't get to me, you can do vara
Speaker 3: HF into me, and then you could go out like
Speaker 3: a VHF port to somebody else and you could start
Speaker 3: to bounce around nodes all over and you could build
Speaker 3: your own map.
Speaker 1: That's kind of neat, Okay, it's really slick.
Speaker 3: So we use that. When we were in court Sight,
Speaker 3: we went in through HF and then we went out
Speaker 3: through FM twelve hundred, and then I was bouncing around
Speaker 3: four or five nodes in Arizona.
Speaker 1: I yeah, we're I think Frank and I were talking
Speaker 1: a week or two ago. I think We're going to
Speaker 1: try to come back to Courtsfest next year. We'll see
Speaker 1: what happens.
Speaker 3: I'm not going last year, going next year. This is
Speaker 3: my last one.
Speaker 1: You heard what happened, right, No, I don't guess, so
Speaker 1: huh oh.
Speaker 3: Okay, So if you guys are again, I want to
Speaker 3: be political here. I use the phrase ham nerd, and
Speaker 3: I'm a big nerd and I'm a ham But one
Speaker 3: thing I can't stand is the pedantic hams that just
Speaker 3: want to, I don't know, expound on their wealth of
Speaker 3: knowledge for no reason would not prompted. So I had
Speaker 3: a mcm tool's talk for the first night at eight pm,
Speaker 3: and I had a large outdoor screen. It was at
Speaker 3: night and we had twenty to about thirty mile per
Speaker 3: hour winds through there, and I was parked in Egypt
Speaker 3: with my buddy and we were keeping to ourselves. So
Speaker 3: about two hours before the event, I wanted to go
Speaker 3: check out where the venue was where we or I
Speaker 3: was supposed to present. There was not one soul. There
Speaker 3: was like three hundred RVs, but no people. We go
Speaker 3: to the event and the screen is warped from the wind.
Speaker 3: The speakers are fall had fallen over. So I go
Speaker 3: back to the RV with the guys and I get
Speaker 3: on the simplex frequency for the event and Chris.
Speaker 1: Was k k R seven ss KR one kra one
Speaker 1: ss that's it. Yeah, please in charge of it.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So I said, hey, Chris, this is a KT
Speaker 3: seven R one guest and I'm scheduled to do to
Speaker 3: talk and Chris said, oh, well, it's been canceled because
Speaker 3: of the wind. I said, hey, uh, I've got battery
Speaker 3: backup here, that's what we're running on. I've got starlink,
Speaker 3: and I have a streaming platform, and I think I
Speaker 3: could get everything up and running and I can give
Speaker 3: you over radio the link. So in about thirty minutes
Speaker 3: for putting stuff out through the window, set it up.
Speaker 3: Got a thumbnail going go to KIA on the event
Speaker 3: simplex frequency and there's two guys talking about ten meters
Speaker 3: and I was waiting and waiting. Three minutes go by,
Speaker 3: five minutes go by. They won't shut. They won't even.
Speaker 3: So I was there with a friend, Brian. He's like,
Speaker 3: just say break, damn.
Speaker 1: It, I break, break and nothing.
Speaker 3: I said, Well, at least somebody else should hurt me,
Speaker 3: not the guy that was key down, but the other
Speaker 3: guy should hurt me. So do it again. Break. I
Speaker 3: think someone's trying to break in. And then this third
Speaker 3: unknown party comes in doesn't announce their call. I'm about
Speaker 3: ready to go after saying break three times.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Well, actually in amateur radio it's not procedure to use
Speaker 3: the term break. Perhaps you should throw your call sign
Speaker 3: in And he has no idea what my tracks on
Speaker 3: the event?
Speaker 1: Huh?
Speaker 2: Right, like everything should stop when you say break.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Actually, there's a lot of there's a lot of nets
Speaker 1: that said that their preamble says any emergency traffic should
Speaker 1: be preceded by break break. Yeah, it's very common.
Speaker 3: So anyways, I jumped in and said, you know, I
Speaker 3: put it up Chris's call, signed mine again and said
Speaker 3: here's how to find me. We're ready to go. We'll
Speaker 3: do it live. So anybody who has starlink or internet
Speaker 3: access to welcome go. We ended up having ninety eight
Speaker 3: concurrent people on that last minute one at Courtz Fesco
Speaker 3: and but there was a few other Ham things that
Speaker 3: just drove me crazy. So I can't go again. I'm
Speaker 3: going to do my own thing and just go into
Speaker 3: the field with a bunch of guys, and that's going
Speaker 3: to be the plan.
Speaker 1: So I'm gonna do Yeah, I was. I'm actually gonna
Speaker 1: look at doing my own thing this year too. I
Speaker 1: want to do an overland gas I want to do
Speaker 1: a Ham Radio two point zero gathering and say if
Speaker 1: you are if you enjoy overlanding, I don't care if
Speaker 1: you're in a Honda Civic. If you want to hang
Speaker 1: out and come out and come out to a field.
Speaker 1: National forests are all free to camp and their PoTA spots.
Speaker 1: I'm like, let's pick a national forest. Let's go out
Speaker 1: there and park in a circle and set up an antenna,
Speaker 1: and let's just do a camping thing. Because I enjoyed
Speaker 1: doing that in the vehicle. So yeah, we're gonna.
Speaker 3: Should merge ours. I told the first I did the
Speaker 3: first TTP field exercise with my buddies, and we actually
Speaker 3: did an MCom tools installfest and good food and cook out.
Speaker 3: We even did exercises. We walked everybody through every mode.
Speaker 3: We got not only people hooked up with MCom tools
Speaker 3: at that time, it was the R three release, people
Speaker 3: that had never done wind link, people that had never
Speaker 3: done APRS, and we got guys that were in general
Speaker 3: and their first contact was their first willing session over
Speaker 3: our dop going into a station about twenty miles out
Speaker 3: nice and we got them connected and then we broke
Speaker 3: up and we set up a tactical operations center and
Speaker 3: they ran neck control and we went out four by
Speaker 3: four and got on some ridgelines. We trafficked our positions,
Speaker 3: We did reports a lot of fun. So we'll do
Speaker 3: that again this year. So let me know if you
Speaker 3: want to combine efforts. But it would be fun to
Speaker 3: do something like that where yeah, that's a cool, fun events.
Speaker 3: And to make it more fun, what I'm doing on
Speaker 3: the next one that we're doing in April is a
Speaker 3: scavenger hunt. So I'm going to have a few guys
Speaker 3: come out and I'm I hope they're not on right now,
Speaker 3: but I'm going to leave a radio at the designated
Speaker 3: meeting spots on and I'm going to traffic the coordinates
Speaker 3: to where to find me, and they're going to have
Speaker 3: to move to that location, and I'm going to put
Speaker 3: cases of gear, whether it's radio gear and tendis to
Speaker 3: build like a dipole kit nice, and they're going to
Speaker 3: have to go back. Maybe one of the exercises is
Speaker 3: they go back and do a peer to peer art
Speaker 3: up to my house and it'll give them an set
Speaker 3: of coordinates to find more stuff, like a steak for
Speaker 3: dinner that night or coffee for the morning. So I'm
Speaker 3: gonna game of find the next TTP outing. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: so it should be fun.
Speaker 1: Are you doing that in April?
Speaker 3: If you're around, it's just right now, it's just four
Speaker 3: close guys, but uh, okay, yeah, it's gonna be in
Speaker 3: April if you If if not, we're gonna redo it again.
Speaker 3: A couple of times. You're welcome to come out to that.
Speaker 1: April might be kind of tight. We are. We're going
Speaker 1: to a really fun overland event in Springfield, Missouri, the
Speaker 1: fourth weekend in April. We've gone to last I've gone
Speaker 1: last three years. We had about eight of us that
Speaker 1: all camp together last year. I'm trying to get more
Speaker 1: people out there because and they're those guys, the guys
Speaker 1: who run the event are really excited that we're that
Speaker 1: we come to that. So there's gonna be a big
Speaker 1: group of us there this year. So it'd be really fun. Yeah,
Speaker 1: keeping posted, I would I would love to do some
Speaker 1: kind of joined up for it. That'd be great.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it'd be a lot of fun. What are you
Speaker 3: doing for your overland work these days? Like what's your setup?
Speaker 1: Look? By my it keeps changing my uh, I mean,
Speaker 1: I've just got my Ford F two fifty And the
Speaker 1: guy from Jake from grid Base, I don't know if
Speaker 1: you know him or not. He did he was interviewed
Speaker 1: by another guy and I forget the name of that
Speaker 1: channel about you guys. Yeah, yeah, that guy. Did you
Speaker 1: see his uh A video about his his U F
Speaker 1: three fifty.
Speaker 3: No, no, Okay, I knew what that it came out,
Speaker 3: but I haven't had time. I don't watch YouTube anymore
Speaker 3: of these days.
Speaker 1: Okay, yeah, he did a he did a video about
Speaker 1: his F three fifty and uh, it's it's a few
Speaker 1: years older than mine, but he had some cool stuff
Speaker 1: in it. And I reached out to him and I'm like,
Speaker 1: hey man, uh and he's like, oh, hey, I saw
Speaker 1: you at the Ardmore Hamfest last year, which is a
Speaker 1: local one of these local little ham fests we have here,
Speaker 1: and I'm like, you should have said something. So he
Speaker 1: and I kind of went back and forth and geeked
Speaker 1: out about our Ford F two fifty three fifty trucks.
Speaker 3: But nice.
Speaker 1: That's what I'm doing with mine right now. I've got
Speaker 1: I've got it's it's gonna be a total off grid
Speaker 1: comm's view. I mean it kind of is already, but
Speaker 1: I'm adding more stuff to it. It's not just ham radio.
Speaker 3: It's going to have everything so well, like your sleep system,
Speaker 3: for example, are you in the vehicle or like with
Speaker 3: the customs set up there, or are you're going to
Speaker 3: do a tent outside of its roof.
Speaker 1: Type Traditionally I just installed a rooftop tent. I found
Speaker 1: a good I found a good price on a rooftop
Speaker 1: tent on Facebook marketplace, so I bought one. Used. It
Speaker 1: looks brand new. Traditionally before that, I've been using a
Speaker 1: Gazelle tint. I like to have. I like to have
Speaker 1: a base camp tent if you're going to camp more
Speaker 1: than like a couple nights, like we went out to
Speaker 1: last year, we went to Yellowstone. The year before that,
Speaker 1: we went to Grand Canyon. If you're going to do
Speaker 1: a base camp and take your vehicle out during the day,
Speaker 1: I hate one. I don't want to set up and
Speaker 1: tear down the tent on the on the top of
Speaker 1: the roof every day. So you set up your base
Speaker 1: camp tent and then you come back every day to
Speaker 1: and so you know where base camp is. So I've
Speaker 1: got I've got options for that. But yeah, right now
Speaker 1: I'm doing I did use my when I was driving
Speaker 1: home from Orlando. I did it in two days. So
Speaker 1: the first night that I stopped, I used the rooftop
Speaker 1: tent for the first time. Then really nice, Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: it's it was. It was nice. I got a good
Speaker 1: night sleep that night, so it was all good. But yep. Cool.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you can go down a rabbit hole with like
Speaker 3: the ARB yeah, refrigerators and just the organizational units. I
Speaker 3: mean it's a deep rabbit hole.
Speaker 1: Well, and I've got a I've got one of those
Speaker 1: those Epoch batteries. I've got a four hundred and sixty
Speaker 1: amp hour Epoch battery in a box in the bed
Speaker 1: in my truck that runs refrigerator and all of my radios.
Speaker 1: And it's got a a d C to d C
Speaker 1: charger that connects that. When I start the truck, the
Speaker 1: alternator on my truck charges my secondary battery system. So
Speaker 1: it's like forever power, you know. So it's just it's
Speaker 1: freaking and that battery will last for a week. Like
Speaker 1: I drove to Orlando and I parked my truck and
Speaker 1: I let APRS becon at fifty watts on my YASUFTM
Speaker 1: five hundred for four days, and I think the battery
Speaker 1: was at like seventy percent after that or something like that.
Speaker 1: And it was running my fridge also that time.
Speaker 3: So let me ask you a question. If you got
Speaker 3: a second here, you are the person who put on
Speaker 3: my radar the Ridotto batteries in December of last year, yes,
Speaker 3: I impulse saw the price or Impulse bought based on
Speaker 3: the price at the time. I bought the Giant three
Speaker 3: hundred am power one, okay, and it's still in the box.
Speaker 3: I haven't even oh it's sealed, Okayven had time for
Speaker 3: that project, and I've always gone with the Battleborn batteries
Speaker 3: and mine have been in my RV for the house
Speaker 3: for the last five years. No maintenance have been absolutely amazing.
Speaker 3: I was kind of concerned about quality and of fire.
Speaker 3: Do you have any feedback on what you found with Rodota?
Speaker 3: Are they reliable? Any pros cons?
Speaker 1: I mean, I would not put Rodotto up against battle
Speaker 1: Born or Epoch or even Dacota Lithium. These are companies
Speaker 1: that have eleven year warranting on their batteries. They're they're
Speaker 1: gonna be more targed, more ready, more harsh conditions, whatnot. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but for for radio comms like you and I like,
Speaker 1: like if I was going to build a battery backup
Speaker 1: system for my home, I wouldn't use red Odo but
Speaker 1: for battery cut for a radio comms for what you
Speaker 1: and I do or stuff like that. I've got my
Speaker 1: original red Odo fifty ampower that I had I got
Speaker 1: a year and a half two years ago something like that,
Speaker 1: and it's still running very strong, very very good. They
Speaker 1: are starting to make self heating battery. They just sent
Speaker 1: me one hundred and forty amp battery that's got a
Speaker 1: self heater in it. It's one of their first batteries
Speaker 1: that has They had one hundred amp power battery before
Speaker 1: this one. And uh and they have a one forty
Speaker 1: now that have blue too. They never had Bluetooth before,
Speaker 1: so they've got Bluetooth in the batteries now and now
Speaker 1: they have starting to have self heaters. So they're starting
Speaker 1: to upgrade their game. I think very You send them
Speaker 1: feedback and they're very open to feedback and whatnot, so
Speaker 1: that they seem to will be very easy to work with.
Speaker 1: But you know, but they're not hardened like battle Boy.
Speaker 1: You know, there's they're not battleborn batteries. But for for
Speaker 1: doing stuff that's like every day to day stuff, I
Speaker 1: think they're okay. I think they're fantastic.
Speaker 3: Yeah, because I built the secondary system independent of all
Speaker 3: of the other stuff I had in the RV, because
Speaker 3: I had a room end of the Dornet and I
Speaker 3: had an extra battle Born, but I went all Victron,
Speaker 3: which is also super pricey. The inverter, that pure signed
Speaker 3: inverter is clean, yes, and all of the the Bluetooth
Speaker 3: capabilities they have for the apps, so you have telemetry
Speaker 3: seeing how much is coming out of the battery, how
Speaker 3: much solar is producing. This great, but it's I know,
Speaker 3: people just don't have that type of disposable income to
Speaker 3: spend two grand right, one hundred watt set up or
Speaker 3: one hundred camp hours setup right, and Ridotto comes in.
Speaker 3: I mean I think it was like at least a
Speaker 3: third of the price, right, Yeah, if you're mean that
Speaker 3: pure amp howers capacity alone.
Speaker 1: The true test on them is going to be five
Speaker 1: years from now. How are the batteries working five seven
Speaker 1: years from now? You know the batteries you buy today,
Speaker 1: how are they going to be working five? I meann
Speaker 1: is gonna be solid, I mean for years and years,
Speaker 1: but an epoch too, But that's gonna be the test
Speaker 1: on the and you know who knows. I don't know.
Speaker 1: I don't have a seven year old red Odo, so
Speaker 1: I can't answer that question. But from what I've seen
Speaker 1: so far, they're pretty solid. I do want to a Yeah,
Speaker 1: I put several Victron items in my UH setup as well.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna be adding there are the oh, what's that
Speaker 1: brain called that reports to the Internet.
Speaker 3: Oh, I don't have that one yet. Yeah, so I've
Speaker 3: got an internet built in bus bar that you kind
Speaker 3: of plug everything into.
Speaker 1: No, that's the UH, that's the UH. That's the links distributor.
Speaker 1: I have that, I have the look, I have the
Speaker 1: link shunt and the links distributor. And then there's another
Speaker 1: piece and I can't remember what it's called right now,
Speaker 1: but there's like there's like seventeen pieces that you could
Speaker 1: add to. But yeah, not to get off on a
Speaker 1: big tangent, but I was just thinking the other day
Speaker 1: I was talking to t O a couple of weeks
Speaker 1: ago about doing another r V live stream. Sometimes I'll
Speaker 1: do live streams on my other channel about r V stuff,
Speaker 1: And I was talking to talking to t O about
Speaker 1: that the other day, and I'm like, you know what
Speaker 1: we need to do. I need to get with with
Speaker 1: Kyle and UH and t O. And I was thinking,
Speaker 1: I thought of one other person. Who was it. I
Speaker 1: can't remember whose it was right now, but I was
Speaker 1: like Phil, No, maybe it was. It wasn't Bill, but
Speaker 1: Bill would be a good one to add too. That
Speaker 1: was before myself, t O Kyle and one other person,
Speaker 1: all of us who have RVs that want to, you know,
Speaker 1: get on and start talking about so but Gastone, I
Speaker 1: knew you would be a perfect addition to that show too.
Speaker 1: So I'd love to start getting just do like a
Speaker 1: once a month RV chat live stream or something like that.
Speaker 1: What you know, just talk about whatever the heck and
Speaker 1: we'll come up with a topic or something. So I
Speaker 1: want to do something like that.
Speaker 3: That'd be fun. I pulled out the seventy five coax
Speaker 3: for the TV on the outside and put a fifty
Speaker 3: ome in there. It's so nice having a actual port
Speaker 3: inside the d net for my coats. Yeah, and I
Speaker 3: can run an infed straight off the side of the
Speaker 3: r V and a sloper.
Speaker 1: Oh, that's so freaking.
Speaker 3: It was the small has change. It was a bulkhead
Speaker 3: change on that that unit and just a little bit
Speaker 3: of coax and it was hard fishing everything through. But
Speaker 3: it's it's so nice, especially when you have the Anderson
Speaker 3: power to pole mounts from powerworks also built into your
Speaker 3: right your hardware. My wife's like, what are all these
Speaker 3: little things that are popping up. These are warts popping
Speaker 3: up the wall.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's fun. Victron Serbo, thank you, Jody, Yes you're
Speaker 1: yeah the Serbo. So it's so I have I have
Speaker 1: a LT modem in my truck with a Verizon SIM
Speaker 1: card in it. But I'm about I'm about to put
Speaker 1: my ster Link many I've got a ster Link Mini
Speaker 1: mount for my truck now, so I'm about to put
Speaker 1: the STERLNK Mini in the in the truck and and
Speaker 1: then the Serbo will connect via Wi Fi or Ethernet.
Speaker 1: I think I probably run Ethernet and report like you'll
Speaker 1: be able to open your app and look and see
Speaker 1: what your vehicle is doing from anywhere, and it reports
Speaker 1: it to the cloud and whatnot. So it may not
Speaker 1: be for everybody, but I thought that was a neat feature.
Speaker 3: So yeah, these are just it's a good time to
Speaker 3: be alive right now.
Speaker 1: Yes, yeah, it is, yeah for sure. All right, guys,
Speaker 1: we've been going for two hours and I haven't had
Speaker 1: my dinner yet. Someone go in and eat some dinner.
Speaker 1: But gas Stone thanks a lot, man, appreciate that. Frank Put,
Speaker 1: I know you shared his channel link in there earlier.
Speaker 1: If you would share his channel link in there, again
Speaker 1: Yeah in the chat you guys, go check out Gastone's channel.
Speaker 1: A lot of good uh more, a lot more technical
Speaker 1: stuff than what I do, and I mean in a
Speaker 1: good way about off grade communications and Linux based stuff
Speaker 1: and staying you know, keeping big brother at bay, that
Speaker 1: kind of thing.
Speaker 3: So it's all in back country stuff. So if you
Speaker 3: just want some nostalished, some good scenery, like the next
Speaker 3: video that's dropping was a lot of fun out in
Speaker 3: the back.
Speaker 1: Cool for nice, nice cool. Well, thanks a lot, guys.
Speaker 1: Once again. One week from tonight, we're gonna give away
Speaker 1: the IC seven O five. It goes sign up with
Speaker 1: the link I shared earlier. I'll put a link in
Speaker 1: the description for those of you on Team Replay and
Speaker 1: we'll catch it next time. So everyone have a good evening.
Speaker 1: We goodbye, good bye later bye guys,