29th January 2006, 10:43 am
I discovered another useful amateur radio blog-related resource today. Ben Sutton has created Planet Ham, a web site which aggregates various radio-related blogs. This brings the content of multiple blogs to you in one place, rather than you visiting multiple websites. In my case, though, I use news aggregation software running on my computer so the content comes to me rather than me having to go out and visit it. I do this by making use of Planet Ham’s RSS feed to get the best of both worlds.
PlanetPlanet is the home base for the software that Ben uses. It lists a subset of like-minded, aggregated blogs. Others that I read include Planet Linux Australia and TextPlanet.
Planet Ham can be found at http://www.planetham.com/
27th January 2006, 06:38 pm
Living in “the bush” (rural Australia), we make do without facilities expected as givens by most townies. We don’t have reticulated water (we collect water from the roof), no sewer connection (we have a septic tank), no garbage collection (I make a monthly trip to the recycling depot and landfill transfer station). We do have power (albeit installed at no small cost with our very own 11 kV line and 16 kVA transformer).
We don’t have a copper-based telephone connection (we have three 32 kbit/s radio channels via a microwave link to the microwave hub 19 kms distant). The latter gives a decent 46 kbit/s dialup modem connection - but that’s it. We could pay for a kilometre or so of copper to connect the the telco copper (they’d have to lay 6 km themselves). Even so, the nearest exchange doesn’t do ISDN or ADSL.
The only reasonable way of achieving a high-speed connection to the ‘net is with a 2-way satellite service. And today, after weighing the pros and cons for about 12 months, I ordered such a service. The one I’ve gone for has 512 kbit/s downlink / 64 kbit/s uplink. I’ve also ordered a public IP address (to give VPN access to work from home, and access to my home server from work or elsewhere).
I expect to see this installed within the next 4 weeks.
I just hope that there’s no interference into my ham radio receivers - then I’d be sorry!
I’ll keep you posted.
25th January 2006, 08:01 pm
Chris, DL6KAC, has created a directory of ham radio blogs. In his own blog, he comments that there is a sadly out-of-date blog in VK. That’d be me 
As I’ve commented before, there just aren’t enough hours in the day to be able to do everything that I might like to do (and have a day job too).
At least my photoblog is has had daily posts for several months now. It’s worth checking out, even if I do say so myself
Chris’ directory of ham radio blogs is here, please add your blog to it if it’s not already there.
