A More Self-Reliant Approach to Ham Radio

As passionate advocates of self-reliance and innovation, we’ve noticed an increasing reliance on centralized internet platforms within the amateur radio community. While these platforms have undeniably advanced the hobby into the 21st century, fostering increased exposure and engagement, we believe there’s still room for us to reclaim some of the “do-it-yourself” spirit that’s always been at the core of ham radio. This is why we’re developing a suite of applications, add-ons, and user-friendly ports to make self-hosting digital ham radio services more accessible.

By hosting our own digital ham radio garden, we can exercise the principles we espouse and enhance our resilience in times of need. Inspired by projects like Build-A-Pi, we aim to streamline complex tasks and transform raw data into useful tools for the amateur radio community.

Our focus isn’t just on emergency applications, but a comprehensive toolkit that can be utilized in daily ham radio activities. This includes:

  1. The Genini Project A protocol akin to the original World Wide Web, perfect for low bandwidth situations. We’re currently modifying it to use a static keypair, making it compliant for use in the ham radio community.

  2. Hugo A Static Site Generator that offers several advantages, including low resource server infrastructure, easy extensibility, and integration. It can be used to create a variety of web content, from wikis to blogs.

  3. Ergo IRC Server A lightweight IRC server application that’s easy to configure and includes a services framework and an IRC Bouncer. This could serve as a testing ground for long haul IP Over Amateur Radio (IPoAR) to maintain communications over large areas.

We’re also developing new tools:

  1. PrettyLog Gen A tool that generates a webpage equivalent to the “Log Search tool” in QRZ or ClubLog from N3FJP’s database file. Future updates will include other logging programs and potentially electronic QSL’ing for fun.

  2. PrettyLog Profile: A customizable profile page tool, based on Hugo or another Static Site Generator, that facilitates communication with other operators.

  3. HighIQRecorder: An application for recording and time-aligning simultaneous IQ streams for later listening.

With the right hardware - a computer, modem, and a radio-to-computer control and audio interface - we can embrace the full potential of ham radio, making the hobby more robust and resilient.