Luckily for me, my connections allowed me to be part of the organizing committee. I ended up helping with the foxhunt in lieu of Dan Meyer, N0PUF, who was unable to attend for health reasons. Dan was kind enough to loan his equipment to me, including a matched set of five fox transmitters consisting of Alinco DJ-S11 HTs with homemade FoxMox controllers designed by Larry Benko, W0QE. Also in the kit were several hides like a hollow landscaping rock and a pet cleanup bag dispenser.

I ended up driving up on Thursday afternoon, which gave me time to help set up the venue and get the lay of the land. We were based at the DoubleTree by Hilton Grand Junction, which was a very nice hotel with plenty of room for the event. I spent much of Friday programming a replacement for Indico, the presentation management system we used, since nobody really liked it (too complex for what we need). It wasn’t strictly necessary to start this during the convention, but I felt I had the necessary focus time to make major progress.

Most of Saturday was dedicated to the foxhunt. I was up early to set up the five foxes around the hotel property. Four of them I considered between easy and moderate, with hides like the landscaping rock and the pet bag dispenser, and one behind a bush. The fifth fox was the “evil” one, which I placed on the eighth floor of the hotel near the ice machine. They could hear it all around the property, but would have to realize there was a vertical component to the hunt to find it. Many of my participants ended up being relative newcomers to foxhunting, and on average found three of the foxes in an hour or two. Only one impromptu team found all five! Most of the participants agreed that it was fun and that foxhunts should be held more often by more groups.

Unfortunately, there was a small tragedy when I was collecting the foxes after the hunt. The fox on the eighth floor was missing! After a thorough search of the area and foxhunting for my own fox, I tracked it down to the hotel’s main compacting dumpster. It appears that a hotel staff member had mistaken it for trash and thrown it away. Given that the dumpster was potentially dangerous to access, I concluded it wasn’t worth the risk to retrieve it. So I had to break the news to Dan that his fox was lost. I’m going to have to build him a new one.

Sunday was mostly taken up with tear-down and travel. I had a great time at HamCon Colorado and look forward to attending again in the future!

Enter Home Assistant, an open-source home automation platform that focuses on local control and privacy. I have several work friends that have rave reviews of Home Assistant, so I decided to give it a try. This has required revamping a lot of my basic home IT infrastructure: I picked up a used workstation from The Server Store to use as a home lab server (for more than just HA), and have replaced my Google WiFi mesh network with a Unifi setup. To add communication options, I also picked up a GoControl HUSBZB-1 USB stick that supports both Zigbee and Z-Wave.

From there, I’ve been setting up Home Assistant on the server, adding integrations for existing devices and services, and adding new devices. Most things have been wonderfully easy. Considering it’s open source, Home Assistant is really well polished in terms of usability and seamless integration. I’ve added quite a few ThirdReality Zigbee devices like motion, door, and temperature sensors, wall plugs, and some Innr color light bulbs. I was even pleasantly surprised to see that my OctoPi 3D printer server popped right in!

I have some overriding goals for my smart home:

1. Value add. Walking into a room turns on the lights, saving effort; the lights turn off when no one is there, saving energy. Notifications let us know when the garage door is left open or when the girls have dance class. The thermostat prioritizes rooms that are actually in use.
2. Spouse-approved. I don’t want to make things more complicated for my family or guests. Everything should be intuitive and reliable.
3. Fail-open operation. I don’t want to have to worry about my home being unusable if a sensor, the internet, WiFi or local HA server are down. Wall switches and the thermostat still need to do their basic job. Everything needs to revert to a dumb appliance in the absence of smart control.

I wonder how hard it would be to add ham radio info to Home Assistant? “There’s DX on 20m…”

Yesterday, RMHAM hosted their first big ARDF foxhunt in a while. I’ve run two foxhunts for high school students before, but this is the first city-scale foxhunt I’ve participated in.

In addition to the traditional tools of the trade, an HT, yagi and offset attenuator, I was using something special: a KrakenSDR. The receiver consists essentially of five RTL-SDR dongles (five sets of R820T2 and RTL2832U chips) tied to a signle clock source, which lets it calculate the direction of arrival (DOA) of signals. Instead of jumping out of the car and spinning around with the yagi, I can just drive around and let the Kraken sample every few seconds. Even if each sample is not quite as accurate, the Kraken can take many more samples and average them to get a more accurate result.

Yesterday morning as the event started, I felt good about my chances of being successful. When the fox started transmitting, I was able to get some pings and start driving generally towards it. I wish I’d had a separeate driver with me so I could focus on the Kraken, but as it was, I sort of noticed the Kraken’s predicted target was jumping around a little bit as the samples came in. After a couple of miles of driving I turned on the turn-by-turn navigation in the Kraken app and started following it. The pings kept getting stronger, and I was getting closer. Eventually I turned into a suburban neighborhood that was a rabbit-warren of criss-crossing roads; if I had been using the yagi I would have had a very hard time. But the Kraken knew where the fox was and the navigation was spot-on.

The fox was located at a house that was only obvious because of the antennas on the roof. I parked, rang the doorbell, and sure enough, this was the place! I was the first one to find the fox. John W0VG and Mark N0OHJ hadn’t even finished getting their coffee yet. I was pretty proud of myself.

Admittedly, this was designed to be an easy foxhunt. The fox was transmitting at 20W from a pretty high location, without any tricky terrain. Robert N0CFM talked about some of the foxhunts he’s run, and one in particular where he was transmitting from a low canyon and the signal was bouncing off a rock formation outside the search boundary. That would be a lot harder to find even with the Kraken. Still, have to start somewhere!

I’m beginning a project with Willem AC0KQ to build an AllMon replacement for the Colorado Connection. The Colorado Connection is a network of AllStarLink linked analog repeaters spanning across the state of Colorado. It’s a great resource for hams in the state, but the AllMon web interface is a bit dated. We’re calling our replacement ColMon, and it will be customized to our needs.

Willem built a working prototype before I joined the project. We’ve worked together a little bit in the past, and I respect him a lot, so I’m excited to be working with him on this project. That said, we come from different generations of programming. Willem’s systems are usually written in C or Perl, using Apache CGI for dynamic web pages and hand-rolled HTML, CSS and JavaScript, and plaintext protocols with tab-separated fields and newline record separators. I’m more comfortable using Angular TypeScript and Golang, with a preference for REST APIs and JSON.

The analogy I’ve landed on is that he’s used to hand-crafting beautiful log cabins, while I’m ready to bring in the house-sized 3D printer. Is either approach better or worse? No, they both have pros and cons, but we’ll both have to get out of our comfort zones and work together to find a middle ground where we can both be productive.

With some luck, our skills together will come up with a beautiful and innovative fusion like the Cornell Ashen Cabin.

Way back in 2019 I got an introduction to AMSAT, and have been interested in making contacts ever since. I picked up an Arrow antenna, collected some telemetry, and even tried making QSOs once, but the extreme level of multitasking was overwhelming. The one thing I’ve been really keen to automate has been tracking: keeping the antenna pointed at the satellite throughout its pass. Automating that part requires an azimuth-elevation (az/el) rotator. The most well-known option for that is the Yaesu G-5500 rotator which retails new for about $700, too expensive to justify using once or twice while I see if I enjoy working AMSAT regularly. I’ve kept my eyes open for lighter-weight options, and one that stuck out was SATRAN by Daniel Nikolajsen, SM7YSA. For a while, it was sold as a kit, but mainly in Europe and explicitly not to the US or Canada.

Well, it seems SATRAN is no longer being sold as a kit, but the plans to build it are available, so I’ve finally decided to build my own. Daniel published pretty much everything necessary to get it going: STL files to 3D print the enclosure, Gerber files to order PCBs, scale drawings to cut sheet metal parts, and firmware code. I’ve spent some time reverse-engineering which electrical components need to go on the PCBs, as well as started prepping and 3D printing the housing. For the two sheet metal parts, there’s a service called OSH Cut that I think I’ll try. They seem to be tangentially related to OSH Park who I’ve used in the past for PCBs. However, Daniel only published PDF printable templates, not DXF CAD drawings, so I’ll have to redraw those in CAD to be able to send them off.

It might take a while to gather all of the different bits and pieces of this project, but I think it will be rewarding to put together, especially if it gives me a workable AMSAT tool in the end!

There was meant to be a Very Large Array tour the Friday before the event, but unfortunately that was cancelled due to a power outage. Instead, many of the RMHAM Colorado folks and I travelled a short way to Los Alamos to experience the Bradbury Museum and the Fuller Lodge.

After that, the event proper was underway.

This was my family’s first RV trip, so we rented from Cruise America and had a wonderful time. This was also my first time taking the entire clan up to Field Day. I got all of them on the Get On The Air (GOTA) station to make a few contacts, and my older daughter is seriously hooked! She made almost 30 QSOs and probably would have kept going if there had been time.

Edit: John W0VG posted a video, check it out!

For the database, I started out with Postgres using the Prisma library. I experimented at first with writing my own Next.JS server-side API, then using Next-CRUD to generate the API. Ultimately, I abandoned this whole line of development because I realized that Postgres was costing me too much money for a scale-to-zero project. Since then, I switched the Next.JS app to use MongoDB via the Mongoose library.

The app’s core functionality has been coming along. I’ve imported the ICS 217s from Ben’s spreadsheets into the database and can display those, both in nice web tables as well as a printable view that closely matches the printed forms. Still, I can’t help but feel like my progress has been much slower trying to learn React than if I’d stayed in my comfort zone with Angular. React just hasn’t “clicked” for me yet.

At this point, we’re really trying to narrow down exactly what we’re trying to build in the first place. Willem AC0KQ pitched this project to me as somthing to fill out complete Incident Action Plans with many ICS forms, but Joe and Randy’s vision for this as a catalog is quite different. I think we’ll start with the bare minimum, just publishe ICS 217s organized by ARES group, and then build from there.