The Ripple Effects of making change ...

Foundations of Amateur Radio

During the week a new piece of software was born. It's not going to solve world hunger or address man-made climate change, but it will help some contesters who want to get on air and make noise without actually making noise. From my vk6flab github page you can get yourself a copy of a tiny little bash script with the catchy name of ssbdaemon and use it to launch your very own remote-controlled voice-keyer.

After making the announcement I received several emails from excited contesters who wanted to thank me for my efforts and I have to tell you, making something that others find useful is very rewarding.

My announcement also sparked some discussion around using voice-keyers including some who consider that this isn't a useful addition to the hobby.

More on that in a moment.

After the code was written, I had to actually, you know, use it. So I hooked up my radio, launched ssbdaemon and fired up my current contest logger of choice, TLF, and attempted to make noise. Unfortunately I wasn't so lucky as to make it all work on the first try. TLF needs to be in CW mode for ssbdaemon to work and someone, somewhere at some point, decided that when you change band, the mode needs to be set, so despite me setting my radio to either Lower or Upper Side Band, TLF would helpfully change it to CW, which actively prevented me from making noise.

Since TLF is Open Source, I was able to download its source-code and after some trial and error, including discussion with the TLF developer community, I added my own little flavour to my copy of TLF to make it always use sideband. My fix isn't useful long-term, but right now it will make it possible for me to operate my voice-keyer. An alternative would have been to turn off rig control.

This also sparked discussion on the TLF mailing list about how we might implement this kind of functionality long-term. Those two things, the fact that I could hack my own copy of TLF and discuss long-term updates is why I think that Open Source and Amateur Radio are an obvious match.

I released my ssbdaemon script as Open Source too, so I immediately benefited from other people looking at it and giving me feedback. As a direct result my code improved, my tool became more useful and those changes were published for anyone to use, immediately.

At this point I should mention that although I'm using TLF, ssbdaemon is a drop-in replacement for cwdaemon and should work anywhere as a direct replacement, so tools like CQRLOG, Xlog and others can use it with no changes to their code.

Back to the discussion about the usefulness of this tool in relation to our hobby.

I think that a tool like mine does a number of things. It achieves the direct purpose that it was built for, making it possible to create a more universal voice-keyer, but it also does other things.

I set out to make TLF do callsign voice-keying, but in solving the problem, I managed to build a tool that was universal to any station using an external Morse-keyer, regardless of whether or not they were using TLF.

Several emails commented on the way that I'd come to this solution and observed that this opened opportunities beyond my script, including operating Single Side Band contests remotely.

As a direct result of my release there's now a discussion underway in relation to how TLF manages band changes. It's not finished, likely it'll go through several iterations and might not be implemented immediately, but the fact that this discussion is happening comes as a side-effect of my script.

This little script, truthfully almost trivial script, is causing change to happen in unexpected places.

It did make me wonder if there are little things like this that we can do to bring awareness and activity to other areas, things like man-made climate change and how we might achieve that in tiny unexpected ways.

As for running a contest with my new voice-keyer, propagation permitting, keep an ear out and let me know how it goes.

I'm Onno VK6FLAB