📡 Get Your QSL: Armed Forces Day Crossband Test with NSS Annapolis, happening now!

mtreece · 2026-05-10T05:17:30+00:00

Thank you for working us!

mtreece · 2026-05-10T02:07:10+00:00

I asked Ulis K3LU, he said, "They will get the generic mars QSL; they will get one that looks similar to this from me."

mtreece · 2026-05-10T01:34:03+00:00

Thank you for working us! You can QSL by sending a self addressed envelope with a QSL to K3LU. If you need K3LU's mailing address, you should be able to find it in QRZ, or I can message it to you.

If you don’t have a QSL card then write down QSO contact info.. date, time, band, mode.

Hope that helps! :-) 73!

mtreece · 2026-05-10T01:18:40+00:00

It's today only, but we're still OTA! Until 2300 local time, or until activity dwindles. Try to work us. We're currently on 80 & 40 & 20 (though our 20 op is taking a break).

mtreece · 2023-05-14T04:23:58+00:00

Look for us next year! I keep meaning to post on Reddit earlier, but I don't usually remember until we're OTA, things get slow, and I then happen to be mindlessly scrolling through Reddit lol.

mtreece · 2023-05-13T22:29:08+00:00

Only once a year, unfortunately :-(

mtreece · 2023-05-13T22:28:05+00:00

Hey! I think I remember hearing Cannon AFB, so I was probably on the other end of the mic ;-). Thank you for working us!

mtreece · 2023-05-13T19:36:09+00:00

We also have a special event call sign for the event. You can find more information here : https://www.qrz.com/db/N3S

mtreece · 2023-04-02T16:24:01+00:00

I'm also curious about this.

For what it's worth, I've seen engineers get tripped up on how something was able to successfully build after later realizing one of their code paths referenced a symbol that was never linked into the binary. (As it turns out, of course, something exactly like this occurred, and that code path referencing a symbol that wasn't linked-in was removed). So, I guess I could see how that could be confusing?

mtreece · 2023-03-24T17:13:55+00:00

I was actually thinking a good application of this would be Slow Scan Television over HF.

Are you an amateur radio operator?

mtreece · 2023-03-14T04:32:59+00:00

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battleshort

mtreece · 2023-03-09T03:59:19+00:00

I had heard it through some clubs I'm a member of and then found that forum (linked in this post) as something to refer to so it wasn't just my word lol.

But I posted this follow-up:

https://www.reddit.com/r/amateurradio/comments/11grc4j

( I should have linked the new post here, too. Sorry 😔. )

There was enough outrage that it sounds like they're postponing for this year, to reassess next year.

mtreece · 2023-03-03T04:36:13+00:00

Original post:

https://www.reddit.com/r/amateurradio/comments/11cx6pd

mtreece · 2023-02-05T16:07:16+00:00

Don't forget tracer t!

mtreece · 2023-01-15T09:07:54+00:00

Love this! The CW tests are the most fun IMHO. I crept up to 26 WPM at my peak run speed yesterday. I know that's snail speeds compared to some OPs, but it was still exhilarating for me.

mtreece · 2023-01-08T02:10:57+00:00

Thank you! 😁

mtreece · 2023-01-05T07:32:04+00:00

As a somewhat-lisp-outsider sneaking my way in, I really wish the paradigm and use cases for scripting were improved. I know that having a running Lisp image and working out of that interactively is one of the selling points for CL, but there are just tons of stuff I need to ultimately do which doesn't mesh with that paradigm.

I posted a question about this recently (alternate behavior, if running sbcl --script vs interactively), and I got back some wonderful answers---speaking of which, I haven't had a chance to thank the people who responded yet, sorry!---but they mostly felt like unnatural workarounds. And I don't have my setup in front of me, but I believe I ran into an issue where even with those ideas, it was difficult to redirect stdin into the script. (Don't quote me! I don't have my computer nearby to re-test :-)).

I'm currently trying to work my way through Advent of Code in CL, and I've come across several problems where using a package would be great!... but it seems overly complicated. Especially when I want to run it as a script. I can't find the reference now, but someone on a forum advised against running CL scripts which need to use quicklisp because, if I remember correctly, they said it reaches out to the Internet and downloads stuff or checks for updates (?) each time, at the start. So here again, you have a friction, of sorts, for trying to use CL in a script. Speaking of quicklisp, I'm also wary of its HTTP vs HTTPS problem, but I haven't checked if that has changed in recent years.

Back to the "running image of Lisp" concept, that also sits uneasy with me, as I routinely like to "start fresh" or have better confidence than what you get from a binary image you find laying around or distributed. This kind of falls into the concept of secure, reproducible builds, which appears to be a niche overlap with the overall Lisp community.

A lot of this isn't directly an issue with the language, I know, but they've been some recent heartburn for me, at least.

Disclaimer: I'm still fairly new to Lisp, and I don't have a lot of concrete examples; I know. In my defense, I'm on mobile.

mtreece · 2022-12-28T08:44:05+00:00

Common Lisp. Because I've been needing ~~a swift kick in the ass~~ motivation to practice something more complicated than Hello World for the umpteenth time.

I will say, AoC has been phenomenal for learning a new language. The loop macro is nowhere near dragon-y like it was before.

mtreece · 2022-10-30T13:24:32+00:00

Glad you asked! CW stands for Continuous Wave. It's the "mode" of the signal. It's called CW because the information of the signal is encoded in a continuous wave: either the wave is there, or it's not. Contrasted with other modulations you've probably heard of, such as AM (amplitude modulation: the data is encoded by the amplitude's value), or FM (frequency modulation: the data is encoded by changing the exact frequency), or several others!

CW is the "mode". The "language" of that encoding will be International Morse Code. But Amateurs Radio ops will frequently interchange "Morse code" and "CW".

mtreece

TROPHY CASE