Re: Thoughts on forming a GNU Radio Amateur Radio monthly meeting group

[Barry Duggan]

Hi kristoff,

Thank you for your thoughts. I am curious about your saying that "I have 
been hesitant to post here in the GR list as it's more about 
signal-process then about GNU Radio." Have you tried and not gotten good 
responses, or have you just assumed it was not the appropriate place? I 
hope we have not discouraged people from asking valid questions here.

As an alternate to creating another mailing list, we have a Ham Radio 
chat room which grew out of a GRCon20 Breakout session. It can be 
accessed by Matrix using the Element (previously Riot) desktop or phone app.

server: gnuradio.matrix.ungleich.cloud
room: #HamRadio:gnuradio.org

you also can join the #gnuradio:gnuradio.org room for the more specific 
GR questions.

I will soon be posting a news item here and on the gnuradio.org home 
page about our first video meeting.

73,
---
Barry Duggan KV4FV
https://github.com/duggabe

On Tue, 22 Sep 2020 22:24:49 +0200, kristoff wrote:

Hi Barry,

Concerning the separate GR-ham mailing-list, I don't know if it really 
needs to be a "GR ham-radio" list,  but what I think would be useful is 
a separate mailing-list to discuss signal-processing (that happen to use 
GNU Radio), separate of the 'discuss-gnuradio' list that is more related 
to questions on GNU Radio itself.

I am also still learning SDR, and I have a number of question on how to 
decode signals (e.g. "I want to decode RTTY with 1.5 stop-bits, what's 
the best way to handle that half a bit at the end without impacting the 
clock-recovery block?") here I have been hesitant to post here in the GR 
list as it's more about signal-process then about GNU Radio. When 
talking to fellow hams who tried GNU Radio, a lot of them have the same 
problem: how to create a working flowgraph? What blocks to use? What do 
all the parameters of that block really do and what do I value should I 
put in there?

So, yes, a separate list would be nice. .. but I don't know if a "GR Ham 
Radio"  is  the best combination.

- Why only Ham radio?

SDR and GNU Radio seams to me one of the best tools to promotion 
amateur-radio, especially if you target people from the open-source / 
hackerspace / maker scene. Focussing to much on amateur-radio will -I 
think- might mean you lose this opportunity.

- For the amateur-radio community, focussing to much on GNU Radio might 
not be ideal neither. For me, the main topic here is SDR, 
signal-processing, DSP and data-communication, ... GNU Radio is only 
part (be it, a very big and important part) of that. Most hams start out 
with a simple RTL-SDR dongle and just *use* it for some project: APRS 
receiver, beacon receiver, to track HABs to listen to 
weather-satellites, listen to QO100, ... It's usually only in a later 
stage that they move to GNU Radio, when they are comfortable with using 
SDR and are interesting going the next step: learn how SDR works 
internally and develop SDR applications themselves.

73
kristoff - ON1ARF