@mcdanlj@social.makerforums.info

Michael K Johnson @mcdanlj@social.makerforums.info · Jul 04, 2026

Replying to @mcdanlj@social.makerforums.info

@ai6yr@m.ai6yr.org It wasn't terrible in the early morning, but it got pretty brutal; 97°F with high humidity is punishing. A lot of bikes SAGged when people just ran out of juice in the heat. There were a few early starts on this ride, but the mass starts (staggered by distance) went off on time, I think. I brought my wife to the mid-ride rest stop to be ham comms there, while I patrolled the outside of the long loop. On many rides, I'm OK if slower riders who wave the sweep past them are just out for a relaxing ride and say they don't actually need support. Not today. I counted heads coming into the final rest stop, and one was missing. I argued with another comms SAG who insisted that the route was clean, and my wife and I went back and found the missing rider. Then we counted heads between the final rest stop and start/finish, and again we were off by one. My wife gets all the credit for seeing the missing rider sitting down under a tree. Riders kept saying "no, I'm OK, thanks, I have enough water" but I remembered to ask three times, and that changed the answer several times. "Well actually if you have some electrolytes..." ☺ There's real value in having folks out on the route who know comms run a network keeping track of the big picture. This is true even when the weather is benign. Today that was even more valuable. There are never any guarantees.

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Michael K Johnson @mcdanlj@social.makerforums.info · Jul 04, 2026

Replying to @ai6yr@m.ai6yr.org

@ai6yr@m.ai6yr.org I'm in one of those black dots... My son and I went out for him to learn how to throw a line into a tree to put up a ham radio HF antenna, and to cut his throw line to the length he wants to carry with him into parks. Then we sat out under the shade of the tree holding the antenna to try to make a few QSOs. He's still learning morse code, and the pile-ups for the 13 colonies stations running SSB were too deep for 5 watts on a QMX to get through, so we gave up and went back inside. Tomorrow is hotter, and he plans to take his radio out into a park to active tomorrow so he can be the hunted instead of the hunter. 😀 Water and shade. What's even crazier is that tomorrow, my wife and I are providing ham radio support for a bike ride. The longest loop is a metric century. It's supposed to be a mass start at 8AM when the temperature is supposed to be 81°F. By noon, it is supposed to reach 97°F. It's a ride not a race, so I won't be shocked if some riders just head out at 7AM, and maybe some of us ham and non-ham SAGs will just get out on the course well in advance of the official start. I'm bringing powerade, water, nuun, and a cooler. This is brutal...

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Michael K Johnson @mcdanlj@social.makerforums.info · Jun 28, 2026

Replying to @mattblaze@federate.social

@mattblaze@federate.social I was once told at the dentist office that they would delay my panoramic X-rays until my next visit because the machine wasn't working. One "have you tried turning it off and back on again?" later, I had my X-rays...

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Michael K Johnson @mcdanlj@social.makerforums.info · Jun 10, 2026

Replying to @ariadne@social.treehouse.systems

@ariadne@social.treehouse.systems Declarative packaging! ❤️ I wish more people had experienced what it was like to maintain packages with Conary. Using Python to build a declarative DSL was not the best choice we made, and I wouldn't make it again, but declarative packaging reduced overall effort so much, and made it so much easier to have reproducible builds. There are a lot of design decisions I would make differently the second time around, but among them I would have made the declarative approach explicit and not reused Python (2...) to build the declaration. I would have cleanly separated the declaration from additional actions that needed to be declared, instead of smooshing them together into Python objects obscuring the declarative nature of packaging.

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Michael K Johnson @mcdanlj@social.makerforums.info · May 15, 2026

Replying to @oseiler@mastodon.nz

@oseiler@mastodon.nz It's not an obligation in any case! ☺ I am guessing that if Google had not rug-pulled and moved the decommissioning date earlier on short notice, we could have done a better job of getting the word out and getting more folks to keep the community going in a new location, maybe making some new friends along the way. But I (reasonably, rationally, correctly) did not then and do not now have email addresses associated with all those google accounts, just random number public identifiers that allow me to assert ownership if they ever do use Google login, so I could never do outreach to help rebuild community.

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Michael K Johnson @mcdanlj@social.makerforums.info · May 14, 2026

Replying to @oseiler@mastodon.nz

@oseiler@mastodon.nz Yeah it was sad when Google stopped caring about G+, long before they put it out to pasture. I even cleaned out a lot of the spam that Google gave up on enabling community owners to manage when they gave up on G+ and I imported all those posts over to Maker Forums... As I think you know from joining us on Maker Forums, but bears repeating if other folks who were there see this, I did get things set up so that even today, if someone who had G+ content that was imported logs in using google login, they own their old posts. ☺

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Michael K Johnson @mcdanlj@social.makerforums.info · May 14, 2026

I wish this weren't on xitter; calling out bad behavior on that platform feels ironic. But @josefprusa@mas.to seems to me to be sanely connecting dots:

https://xcancel.com/i/status/2054602354851254330

Don't recommend Bambu.

#3DPrinting

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Michael K Johnson @mcdanlj@social.makerforums.info · May 14, 2026

From AD0WE's QRZ page, I found The Art and Skill of Radio-Telegraphy by N0HFF, which is the first Morse Code learning resource I've read that recommends a practice that I started doing naturally: vividly imagining morse as a learning technique.

Sit quietly in a chair, close your eyes, relax, and imagine you are hearing each letter sound (just as you heard it), taking them one at a time, and immediately recognizing it or writing it down with a pencil. Make the picture as realistic and vivid as you can, even to imagining the "feeling" the pencil writing on the paper. Feel a sense of satisfaction of doing it right. Three to five minutes practice this way at any one time is probably enough. You can then repeat this kind of mental practice with each new group of characters as you learn them, and it will greatly strengthen the habit you are trying to build.

I practice both sending and receiving code with vivid imagination. To this day, I have trouble with D/B and B/6, and I have improved by vividly imagining hearing them and speaking (rather than writing) them, but I do this practice with all symbols. I also vividly imagine sending. I'll use memorized text, and imagine sending the whole thing, down to imagining feeling the particular key I'm imagining that I'm using between my thumb and fingers.

I have found this practice helpful.

#HamRadio #MorseCode #CW

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Michael K Johnson @mcdanlj@social.makerforums.info · May 13, 2026

In case you are wondering whether NCVEC listens to quality feedback on the #HamRadio question pool, this forum post shows that yes they definitely do!

https://forum.openhamprep.com/t/g3c02-what-is-meant-by-the-term-critical-frequency-at-a-given-incidence-angle/542?u=mcdanlj

So if you've had constructive thoughts for improvements to the General pool, now is a much better time to surface them than after the next version of the pool is announced.

For example, I've heard complaints like why do the tests cover so many proprietary modes vs. open modes? "Here are some example questions about open modes that could replace some of questions X, Y, and/or Z about proprietary modes" might be really helpful. Coming up with test questions (and good distractors!) is generally a thankless and unloved task. But the committee members are hams who want to promote the art and science in ham radio. 🙂

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Michael K Johnson @mcdanlj@social.makerforums.info · May 11, 2026

#HamRadio #MorseCode operators, get ready for #CW on ARRL/RAC Field Day! Use my version of Morse Walker to prepare to key (or keyboard!) your way to successful QSOs.

Choose "Field Day" at the top.
Set your Section and Class under "Your Station Settings" (and adjust "Responding Station Settings" and "Effects Settings" as desired).
Press return in the "Response" or click "CQ".
Copy a call as usual in Morse Walker, and press return to send. As usual, when you copy correctly, it moves to the next entry when you press enter.
Copy Class (which currently won't be above 20 in this simulation, even though a few real station are) and press tab (not enter) to move to the next box.
Copy Section in the final box and press enter to send TU and your call sign for the next caller.

This is not hyper-realistic, but it's good enough practice to set you up for success. It's a trainer not a simulator. A couple things that you might notice:

It sends more higher class numbers than you will see in practice. That's on purpose, so that you won't get thrown when you hear "18A" over the air.
I did not add any mapping between section and call area. There's no weighting in my simulation that makes 4-calls likelier to be in the eastern seaboard. There's not even a mapping from Canadian call areas to sections, even though that's a requirement in Canada. Roll with it.
You can't send "CLS?" or "SEC?" to ask for fills. Class and section are one-shot, just like RST and state in Morse Walker's POTA mode.

The other change I made is that it shows how many stations were in the pileup, which seemed important information to me to put against how many attempts it took to pull a correct call out of the pileup.

Thanks to W6NYC Henry for creating Morse Walker and making it open source, so that I could implement this. (I made a pull request so he can add this to the official version if he wants.)

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Michael K Johnson @mcdanlj@social.makerforums.info · May 10, 2026

As of today, I'm accredited by Laurel VEC as a Volunteer Examiner. I've been encouraging folks to try #HamRadio so much, it's only fair that I volunteer to help administer tests too. 😁

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Michael K Johnson @mcdanlj@social.makerforums.info · May 10, 2026

Today I had a successful POTA activation, logging zero QSOs.

How did I do that?

As a control operator of a club station, I supervised two new hams with Technician privileges making successful SSB QSOs on 20m, giving them a taste of what they'll be able to do on their own, once they get their General (or Amateur Extra) upgrades as each of them plans to do.

Also, I helped one of them work on CW.

I'll get my own 10 again another time.

#HamRadio

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Michael K Johnson @mcdanlj@social.makerforums.info · May 06, 2026

Replying to @ai6yr@m.ai6yr.org

@ai6yr @MLE_online @alienghic I do. Almost always. I use S-C-D when I expressly want to disable it. I love that I can get rich text converted into good markdown when I paste it into Discourse, for example. ...You did ask.

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Michael K Johnson @mcdanlj@social.makerforums.info · May 05, 2026

Replying to @MLE_online@social.afront.org

@MLE_online Love that you even added labels! Looking forward to the video of it blinking. ❤️

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Michael K Johnson @mcdanlj@social.makerforums.info · May 05, 2026

Replying to @ai6yr@m.ai6yr.org

@ai6yr @msbellows @sarae @ChuckMcManis @rombat It's wrapped in foam so that I don't damage myself if it goes straight up and comes straight down, and the foam has bright electrical tape around it. In an earlier iteration, I managed to sling it right off the string and it landed under forest litter beyond my line of sight, and the orange electrical tape gave it away. This is part of my "QSO in a kilogram" so I have to use each gram carefully. Potential for an occasional $25 loss is a tradeoff for EDC weight for the whole kit, which lives in my backpack that I typically have with me.

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Michael K Johnson @mcdanlj@social.makerforums.info · May 05, 2026

Replying to @ai6yr@m.ai6yr.org

@ai6yr @msbellows @sarae @ChuckMcManis @rombat Ultra-High Molecular Weight PolyEthylene, the generic name for spectra or dyneema.

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Michael K Johnson @mcdanlj@social.makerforums.info · May 05, 2026

Replying to @msbellows@c.im

@msbellows @sarae @ai6yr @ChuckMcManis @rombat I have no idea, I haven't fished since I was so young I didn't need a license! That's been a long time. Thinking about this, actually it gets worse, I use UHMWPE braided fishing line as my throw line for my lightweight QRP rig. 😮

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Michael K Johnson @mcdanlj@social.makerforums.info · May 05, 2026

Replying to @sarae@ecoevo.social

@sarae @msbellows @ai6yr @ChuckMcManis @rombat Speaking of getting stuck in the weeds, you should see my QRP EDC throw weight for putting a wire in a tree: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08258RRZ7 Activating POTA QRP by trying to hunt P2P QRP is so much like fishing that maybe I really should have a fishing license! 🤣

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Michael K Johnson @mcdanlj@social.makerforums.info · May 04, 2026

Replying to @CliffsEsport@mastodon.social

@CliffsEsport @msbellows @ai6yr @ChuckMcManis @rombat That's correct. They are tapered so when they are extended, they lock with a taper fit. I twist them slightly to ensure a strong lock. To collapse, just hold the second section and tap the bottom on the ground. Rinse and repeat. You can just tap the bottom without holding, but sometimes some joints don't collapse and then it's a little fiddly to get them nested again. I prefer slow and steady which still takes only like 10 seconds...

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Michael K Johnson @mcdanlj@social.makerforums.info · May 04, 2026

Replying to @msbellows@c.im

@msbellows @ai6yr @ChuckMcManis @rombat I apologize, but only a little bit, for the youtube rabbit fishing hole you are about to find yourself in. 🤣

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Michael K Johnson @mcdanlj@social.makerforums.info · May 04, 2026

Replying to @msbellows@c.im

@msbellows @ai6yr @ChuckMcManis @rombat You may know this, but since plenty of hams don't yet, I'll "be that guy" with some trepidation... 😬 Tenkara fishing poles have no ferrules, just a fixed line, and the carbon fiber push-up masts we have generally are rebranded tenkara poles. I own two SOTA-6 masts, and they have exactly the same tie at the end as the much larger poles that I bought branded as fishing poles. (The POTA33H might be an exception to this rule, and that might be related to it being significantly more expensive — fewer economies of scale...) I've "taken the bait" and talked enthusiastically to the ranger for 30 minutes about ham radio and POTA and how it is getting more people out into the parks to use, enjoy, and celebrate them. Though, so far, not about a fishing license. Just "I may have to ask you to leave," and so far successfully... 🤞

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Michael K Johnson @mcdanlj@social.makerforums.info · May 02, 2026

Replying to @GarretSidzaka@mastodon.social

@GarretSidzaka You have crossed the line from annoyance to malevolence. I disagree with the decision, and think that it could have been more humanely argued and executed. But turning it into a life goal to attack people? Seriously not ok.

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Michael K Johnson @mcdanlj@social.makerforums.info · May 02, 2026

Replying to @prokoudine@mastodon.social

@prokoudine @GIMP @GraphiteEditor @kdenlive @freecad @Blender 3D sketcher! So excited, cannot wait to see this! https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/programs/2026/projects/Ls1lJhGB

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Michael K Johnson @mcdanlj@social.makerforums.info · Apr 29, 2026

Replying to @i@toot.pouyan.net

@i Yeah, that works if you have GNOME Tweaks installed. I forgot to look there, honestly. But AFAIK Fedora doesn't install it by default, whereas gsettings is always available, so it's still valuable to know the supported-everywhere solution to the new problem.

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