Amateur Radio has a security problem As someone who works in information security, I do threat modeling every day, I can’t help but notice that the state of security in amateur radio, both radio systems and internet-based systems used by amateur operators is a total disaster. Some of this is the result of the law–it is not permissable to obscure the meaning of a digital transmission–and some of it is of a more practical nature.

I have been using NixOS as my daily driver Linux distro for a couple of years now. The biggest downside I have run into is the available amateur radio packages are lacking. I’ve been learning how to package stuff slowly, and have been using (or making) flatpaks or docker containers for some of the other software I need. NixOS’s declarative configuration and immutable nature make it the perfect OS for systems that just have to work, like packet nodes for instance.

This post is an article I submitted to the Hamgram, my local Winona Amateur Radio Club newsletter. It is meant as a brief overview on re-using Li-Ion and LiFePo4 cells, and is not an in-depth technical article. Li-Ion and LiFePo4 batteries have many advantages in weight and power density over traditional lead-acid batteries. For example, I have assembled several 7S3P (21 cells total, with 3 series-wired banks of 7 cells in parallel) that fit in the same space as a typical 8AH SLAB battery, but provide 25AH of energy storage.

About a month ago I started a new site for my professional pursuits. The first post is a little project I did to keep an eye on a frequent packet user who behaves suspiciously. Many other local sysops have blocked this particular user from connecting, but I did not want to block him without concrete evidence of bad behavior. I put on my tinfoil hat and tried to imagine some scenarios where this user’s activity would be considered malicious, debunked them, and finally created an alert in my logging system and sent the log to a little Python listener that updates the bottom of the post.

My friend Sam, KF0ACN has been bugging me about Hugo and static site generators lately, and convinced me to switch back to a static site from Wordpress. He even took the trouble to convert my existing content for me. So anyway, after some touch-ups, here it is, back in markdown rendered to HTML once again. This site has also been an interesting learning experience in some mild CI/CD. The site updates automatically when I commit changes to my git repo which I think is really cool.