I’ve quit Twitter/X, and am now part of the Fediverse. There are quite a few radio amateurs in the Fediverse, and if you’d like to follow me there, you can follow @kb6nu@mastodon.radio. Mastodon.radio is a space for radio amateurs and SWLs, but it’s not the only radio-focused Fediverse server. It connects with the servers listed on fediverse.radio, including mastodon.hams.social, a server here in the U.S.

Mastodon seems to have a much higher signal-to-noise ratio than Twitter. Here’s a few links I found and things I learned on Mastodon last night:

K8CX Ham Gallery. K8CX has an interesting collection of photos from Dayton, DX sound clips, and a QSL card museum. I’ve submitted a couple photos of me and the ICQ Podcast crew at Dayton 2024.

M17 Users mailing list. The  home page for this mailing list says, “The primary assumption of this mailing list is that M17 is (in June, 2024) in usable (enough) form for actual deployment and use in amateur radio.” They believe that all the pieces are there now.  Typically, to use M17, you’ll have to be “somewhat of an experimenter” to work around the inevitable glitches in using M17, but in the opinion of this list founder, “all the pieces are there now”.

44-foot doublet. Last night, there was some discussion of portable antennas, mainly the 44-ft. doublet antenna. This is the antenna that L. B. Cebik describes on the web page, “1 Wire, 7 Bands, 2 Directions, or The 44′ Doublet as a 40-10 Meter Antenna.” There’s a similar antenna out there called the NorCal Doublet. The NorCal Doublet uses ribbon cable as the feedline to reduce weight. These two antennas look like they’d be worth experimenting with.

See you in the Fediverse!