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Hacktoberfest 2021 is here!

It’s been one year since the spammageddon of Hacktoberfest requests and issues with contributing to only accepted opted-in repositories – but this year there are some good changes:

You can now use Gitlab for PRs.

Monetary donations are also encouraged for open source projects.

You can either get a shirt or plant a tree, for completing 4 PRs with improvements to participating open source projects.

Also, of course if you have a project yourself you maintain, you can add “Hacktoberfest” tag to get participants to find your repo. 🙂 What are some of the projects you might consider helping?

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Government publication shows practical ways you can prep for an EMP

Chances are you have seen a movie or book recently covering the topic of an EMP – an Electro-magnetic pulse from a faraway nuke that could cause outages and damage. While most of what you hear will either be dismissive of the possibility, or a horror story of years of electronic wasteland, the reality could be more in the middle and is something folks can prepare for, according to a US government publication linked in the documents section of the SHARES site.

The SHARES system is a HF long range ham radio service but there are several recommendations in the document that just about any civilian should be considering, not just radio maintainers and organizations:

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Introducing the new EMP-proof Ham Radio Repeater Listing

If you have been using Amateur radio for some time you may know about the app connected to hearham.live repeater listing, which lets you keep an offline record of radio repeaters and a topo-map, on your Linux computer, tablet, phone, or even Android phone. But what would you do during an EMP or solar event causing extended downtime and damage of all computer devices?

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Listening for a callsign on DMR with Hearham.live

These past few weeks have certainly been trying for some communities with power outages, winter weather and utility failures. Ham radio is a very good way to communicate in your local community, but what if lots of other people are on the local repeater? What if you want a notification if your child or buddy is calling you, but not every other kerchunk or distracting story on the local repeater? If you have a DMR digital radio and id and digital repeater nearby, the tools on Hearham.live may help – and help save your battery leaving a radio on all day 🙂

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New Zealand repeaters are up! and an intro to csv importing with fgetcsv()

This week, the New Zealand amateur radios on vhf.nz were added to the worldwide Hearham.com repeater listing. These are pulled in with permission and this now allows offline listing of the ham radio repeaters to work for folks in the Android or Linux version of Repeater-START (Showing The Amateur-radio Repeaters Tool):

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