Virtual Insanity

Sad thing is there is no way to securely communicate via ham radio.

But I’d be fully open to going pirate!

And with regard to unlocked bootloaders, I think it’s the manufactures wanting to lock away choice and options that is the issue more than the government.

Yeah, is a Pico… $5

This is already happening with smart phones.

Still using the buds I got with my galaxy S4. They’ve outlasted 4 sets of BT buds.

LoL… Really?

1 number apart, but considerably different. Sure.

Difference between x5 and x7 maybe. To pass x6 a device must be submerged to a depth of 1m for 30 minutes.

IPx7 is for a device intended to operate permanently submerged. So not a phone.

That fact your picking the difference shows you don’t know the difference.

IP67 is just a marketing gimmick. I’d be impressed if a phone with this rating would endure 12 months submerged and still function. Who needs this anyway?

Galaxy S5 was IP67 with a headphone socket, removable battery and dedicated microSD card slot. Others have also existed. Taking like adding a headphone socket costs more than 5 cents is stupid.

I’m a Bluetooth buds convert now, but I’d still like the choice.

Have had this issue myself asking with other DD card related issues.

I can’t understand why the pi foundation persist with using SD as the only physically practical storage option.

They’re looking post the point of needing a way to snap on reliable EMMC storage, as a default, in a way that doesn’t leave a cable or something permanently plugged into a USB port.

Sure, USB is a fine option, but I hate that it’s only an option and not a designed default.

Most of us only need 8GB or so for the OS, 8GB or good quality durable EMMC should hardly cost anything.

Other tiny computers and even economy notebooks and Chromebooks already use this.

So you’d need 10,000 of them to generate 1 watt.

Sounds useless.

Don’t know why I could not see this repply until today. It’s been ascertained that chirp is not in the repo for Raspian Linux, so indeed that option never worked.

My first attempt was apt-get install. I’m fairly comfortable with Linux as a server (basic lamp setup) though I make no claims if being an expert.

It’s clearly not in the default repos for Raspian (at least not when I tried), and that could be half my issue, my hardware while popular is not x86 or x86-64.

I’m no bash wizard, but I grew up with computers through the 80’s and am comfortable with using a cli, doesn’t bother me at all.

My OP got messed up with the Lemmy app I’m using and thus a large chunk went missing.

I’m actually using Raspian on a raspberry pi, and I don’t think there is a binary for armhf available through the more typical means.

For everything else I just apt-get install xxx.

I’ll revisit later.

I appreciate the effort in your post.

Neither do I. If the errors made sense or the tutorials were more current I suspect I’d have no issue.

Great, you can accomplish the bare essentials with Linux.

Now how do I install a program called chirp for programming 2 way radios?

Searched for a week and gave up as each set of instructions lead down a broken, redundant dependency rabbit hole with no solution in sight, Flatpack this, snap that, no explanation or even a searchable clue that could begin me a solution.

In windows I just unzip the nightly build to a directory of my choice, run the executable and it works.

Sure… Not everyone knows or needs to know about these edge case applications, but point stands, it works in windows, and everyone encounters an edge case sooner or later.

I’m keen to ditch the Microsoft hole, and I have no issue with making an effort to learn, but I can’t afford to or my life in hold for hours or days at a time in order to accomplish things that already work in seconds.

I think my simple issue here is… I’m not incompetent. I can comfortably navigate a fine system in a shell, can mount and unmount, can tar -xvzf a tarball, can do most things up to writing a shell script from scratch (could cobble something

I’d disagree with this.

VPS is opposed to a dedicated server, and actually is a kind of shared hosting because as a VPS user you a allocated a ‘share’ of resources on a machine where others also have a ‘share’ of resources.

Shared housing more typically refers to simpler web hosting where multiple users have their website servers from shared hardware.

So what is the standard fast charging solution they’ve choosen?

The site doesn’t say.

Are we going to see USB-PD in more phones now?

I’d love to see all the different manufacturers standards bugger off.

I know waterproof Type C ports exist as electrical components. So the test is up to the manufacturer to correctly implement it.

Ultimately, Type C is no worse an option to other ports.

Can it make phone calls?

Wooooosh

s; most are limited to less than 1m. Even with aerial whip antennas

Wavelength varies from 2.7 to 3.4 metres. Just because that is the size of the wave doesn’t meant that a good antenna has to be that size. A very good basic antenna is a 1/4 wave vertical, and we see them pretty often as telescopic antennas on radios and cars. A 1/4 wave FM broadcast antenna will perform excellently, and will be 68cm to 85cm in length. More modern cars have antennas printed into a window similar to a demister strip. They are actually NOT smaller, some can be quite larve, but also very stealth. But the point remains is that they are NOT small as you suggest. Much shorter antennas exist, but there is a gain penalty, and that penalty gets more extreme the smaller the antenna gets. I have such a small antenna on my car and it IS an issue. In physics nothing is free, yes, you can make an antenna small and still have it be resonant, but you’ll pay a price on effective gain.

This is a problem that technology has not solved. Sure, clever designs have helped a little, but there is always a price to pay if you try to cheat the physics.

A compromised antenna can work in a very very stong signal area, but it will easily be the difference between a clear solid recieve and no recieve at all in a fringe area.

AM Broadcast is an example of this, with antennas sometimes 2 inches / 50mm long or even less and hidden inside the radio. Buy as a ham myself with a HF setup, even my HF setup, which is a poor compromise on MF broadcast gets me stations from all over Australia. That isn’t going to happen with a regular AM receiver.

Ultimately, sure you can have a mobile with no external antenna receive FM broadcast… but only in a VERY VERY strong signal area, within a few miles of the transmitter, while a propper antenna will work at 10x the distance.

Given that the proposal requires a minor redesign of the cellphones to incorporate the broadcast receiving radio, adding a small antenna, or simply using the chassis of the phone as an antenna, would not only be possible but it should be fairly trivial to accommodate for. by no means am I saying it would be the worlds greatest FM antenna system, most certainly it would not be, but it should be sufficient to differentiate the signal from the noise

This would work at very short distance only, it really would be that limited. Would it be useful for the people in those short distances? Maybe. Buy while a regular ordinary transistor radio with a telescopic antenna would work 10-30x further away, comparing those 2 really shows how much of a compromise is going on.

The point I’m dancing around is software-defined radios. The big cost of SDRs is mainly regarding transmission, since they don’t put out a very strong signal This is true for any radio type ever, it’s not an SDR specific thing. EVERY radio that puts out more than a few dbm needs some level of amplification. This is NOT and SDR specific thing. It might appear that way because fo how many affordable SDRs just come with a low output. This is just a normal Monday for any radio system from a $50 CB to a broadcast station, SDR or not.

SDR’s are not magic. In fact they actually have some drawbacks compared to conventional designs with regards dynamic rage, over loading etc… Pulling the ‘SDR’ card and not knowing this i think shows your lack of understanding of the topic (not trying to diss, just an observation). SDR’s are a great tool, i have 4 of them in front of me as i type this, so I’m no stranger. Icom IC-705, Icom IC-7300, HackRF and an RTL-SDR. You could also maybe count the University of Twente webSDR i have open in another tab, and an MMDVM at a stretch to make it 6. http://websdr.ewi.utwente.nl:8901/

This is all exciting stuff… but none of it has revolutionised RF physics for human portable commodity radios, nor even come close to an adjacent technology that could be adopted / adapted.

My ~ AUD$1900 IC-705 can go from picking up stations all over the state of Victoria, Australia with it’s non optimal antenna tuned for 146MHz, to picking up literally nothing if i hook up a few hundred mm of wire to it’s antenna socket on the bench here. And I can engage pass band filtering, up to 2 pre-amp stages, and a variety of Digital Signal Processing features and sill get… nothing.

I appreciate your passiona nd interest, but… physics.

We can look at other technologies that are great… WiFi… it’s great, but the transmitter location is in your home and still struggles to cover some larger homes… from inside your home itself. Cellular… again, great, but again, as the name implies it;s made up of ‘cells’, physics is a massive issue with cellular, each individual cell tower consists of tens or sometimes hundreds of transceivers, each connected to phased arrays of hundreds to thousands of antenna elements… and that’s just a single site, many towns will need multiple of these for coverage. Cell is not immune to the limitations of physics, and it has to brute force the situation from the tower end so as we can have small devices in out pockets… and even with all that i get no coverage int he middle of my local supermarket. Do an image search for ‘cell panel antenna inside’ and see if you can find a picture fo the actual antenna elements, my results mostly got the rear so you might have to scroll a bit.

A lot of the modernisation you refer to is just that given the value we place on connectivity while remaining portable the effort has shifted to needing to bring the signals closer to the user. Looking at that broadly, while some gains have been made what’s really happened is that the signal has been bought closer to you, making you think magic has happened.

Yes, antennas are important, but not nearly as important as they were even 10-15 years ago. I couldn’t disagree more. The antenna is the single most significant component of any system. I think the best demonstration of this is modern cellular as it shows what has been needed to be done to bring connectivity top the masses and proves there is no way around.

I think FM Broadcast is great, but with regard to phones aren’t we missing something here? For a phone to even receive FM broadcast headphones have to be plugged in, it’s been a requirement for any FM RX capable phone I’ve ever had, for antenna purposes. So with regard to the argument for mobiles to have FMrx if such functionality were to become common place we’d need to see the return of headphone jacks and people would need to be carrying corded headphones for it to function.

I think this capability is a great idea, but the limitations forced on us by losing the headphones socket as well as societys fascination with making everything wireless at any cost is a little concerning.

I’ve always considered average to good quality wired buds to be great, but it seems they really are on their way out.