In the past weeks, I have noticed hearham.com repeater listing gets many requests from Android devices. Furthermore, many ham radio people already have an Android phone and are still waiting on their Librem Phone to ship. So I started an Android port of the Linux open-data repeater app, Repeater-START.
Continue reading “Announcing Repeater-START Amateur radio app for Android”What3Words API in Laravel: Integrating geolocation finder in your web app
What3words is an interesting alternative to sharing around long latitude/longitude numbers, instead share just a few words!
The first step to integrating the api is signing up for a free API key. Then require the library using composer – in the main project folder run:
Continue reading “What3Words API in Laravel: Integrating geolocation finder in your web app”New England Repeaters added to Hearham.live Repeater Listing and Repeater-START
The Repeater-START app now includes repeaters imported from the New England Repeater Directory. This makes the app and repeater listing much more useful to those in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont, Rhode Island, New Hampshire and Maine! This expands the repeater-START app and any other applications needing an offline, fairly complete listing of amateur radio repeaters worldwide.
Continue reading “New England Repeaters added to Hearham.live Repeater Listing and Repeater-START”Things to do while distancing or quarantined at home
With the recent increased cases of covid-19, many are staying home or quarantined. Here are a few ideas to productively spend some time…
Continue reading “Things to do while distancing or quarantined at home”Announcing Hearham live repeater listing
The new Hearham live repeater listing has been up for one week and now has hundreds of repeater listings up! If you’ve been looking for a database to use for your offline app, this may be it! Unlike other repeater listings this aims to be up to date and allow for timely comments to go out to all users of the repeaters to know about any outages or changes.
Continue reading “Announcing Hearham live repeater listing”Building a Linux App part 7: Building an Installer File
There’s a big difference between having that quick python script set up with a GUI, and having a full desktop or mobile app ready to click install. In this post I’ll show the steps to build a Python script into an installable application.
Continue reading “Building a Linux App part 7: Building an Installer File”Building a Linux App with Python – Part 6, connecting to the repeater listing!
It’s easy to start a Python project in one file, and then add class after class and function after function in the same file – as i have in the repeater-start project. This can get unwieldy after awhile. As I am adding a type for the open-source Hearham Live Repeater Listing, I will make a new node creator that will get the repeaters out of the api. So from what I had before, just one repeater code:
Continue reading “Building a Linux App with Python – Part 6, connecting to the repeater listing!”Building a repeater app for Linux, part 5: Subprocess for listening to the radio
With the number of cheap RTLSDR devices that let you listen to radio or ham radio, it’s only natural to want to check out each of the repeaters and their use when you go to a new area. In fact, once you have a device set up correctly it is easy to integrate that (or any other command line features) into your project.
To start with I set up a class based on what I added for Hearham uploader – this will make the command run in a separate thread, continuing the process until it is killed. An ongoing process must not be on the same thread as the GUI (in any interface, Java, Android, or GTK…) This is going to use subprocess module as it can make it easier to use an existing utility (rlt_fm command in this case), rather than doing the whole signal processing in Python.
Continue reading “Building a repeater app for Linux, part 5: Subprocess for listening to the radio”Building a mobile app for Linux, part 4: GPS/mobile tracking
Another important part of many mobile apps is location tracking – there is, fortunately, there is a built in api for most Linux systems called Geoclue that should work… There is even a Python-geoclue package, but after some digging I found that this package does not work in Python3. In fact it’s hard to find examples or documentation, if you look at the files of the package you can see there are some basic docs:
Continue reading “Building a mobile app for Linux, part 4: GPS/mobile tracking”Winlink setup on Linux in three easy steps!
One common misnomer about the amateur radio email network Winlink is that Winlink is just for Windows. Here is how to set up an account on Linux:
Continue reading “Winlink setup on Linux in three easy steps!”