and only for very small values of the number 2

Just stop sending us plastic shit and fresh food, once all the walmarts fold in the rural areas, the red wave will come to dc to protest emasse

Crushing our economy and cutting trade is the real weapons that should be used

Just stop trade, we don’t make anything here we use directly. If we do try to make things here, you end up with smarter every day’s $100 grill scraper.

In a couple of weeks target/walmart will be empty

immediately all fruit/veggies in the winter will increase in price 10 fold.

We’re already on the edge of a recession.

It’s likely why the hobby is dying.

That said, ham equipment is generally able to be operated in a way that could interfere with police, fire, and air traffic. If you’re operating bigger stuff, you can end up with RF exposure or even exposing your neighbors. It’s all fun and games till you burn out Mrs. Johnsons pacemaker :)

I’d say they should make some safer HT’s that don’t step on emergency bands and do a scouts honor web test, but those bands are so poorly defined, and GMRS/FRS is already in that headspace.

But you lose encryption.

Meshtastic has some store-and-forward stuff that’s damn nice but someone has to set it up.

Meshcore has routers, repeaters and mailboxes.

It it could be pushed up to a few watts it would be far more useful.

The question pool is so small you can memorize it :)

9/10 of the tech test is common sense or courtesy, and the bare minimum to make contact

All the low-frequency free stuff that has range is severely limited in bandwidth. It’s good for sending 100 characters at a time. More like text messaging.

Now, they made boards with more power that operated and crossed at several different frequency bands,

Some nodes have up to 5 watts, but you have to put them in ham mode with your license, it also disables encryption (ham requirement)

You can stitch together several different cheap radios in different frequencies using MQTT.

TBF, I’d be super happy just to move back to APRS, (i’m a ham) but the equipment is stupid expensive.

If you can get one up high, they can reach hundreds of kilometers.

They’re all over the West Coast of the US because of all the hills, and there are generally decent nets in cities with high rises.

There are some, there are probably more than are in the picture, map access is opt-in

Welp, I guess I’m biting…

On the up side, you can get a Heltec V3 for ~$20

On the down side, since everything is super low power, you absolutley need line of site to get our of your neighborhood

No US license required ISM band 915mhz < 1w

So, I setup meshtastic.

Put an antenna on my roof.

Have a decent number of mesh radios. Put one in each car in relay mode.

Setup a locally run LLM and made an interface to it.

Working on setting up a BBS.

I’m in the high density suburbs, I can, when the weather is just right, reach a single node that doesn’t seem to be able to reach any other nodes.

If I go on a drive, I can see 5-10 nodes.

Adoption in the mid-Atlantic US is just so damn low, it’s not really usable.

We need some antennas up high, but there aren’t any reasonable options around me.

Ubuntu is just Debian with some closer to bleeding edge stuff installed then PPA and Snaps. Debian is more stable, you just have to wait a bit for the latest DM. I consider not having Snaps an advantage :)

I tried it out with Bookworm, Had KDE Plasma, Steam and everything else I wanted up without a lick of terminal work.

Mint is fine, though, honestly, all derivatives are fine. Cannocial is the one stand out that has their head of their ass, but they’re still better than windows.

Why not straight up Debian?

surprised he didn’t golden parachute out and reload with another company/

Because it had nothing to do with AI

It was an excuse to slash the workforce with relatively little backlash.

I dunno, letting the him stay in the media for saying pedophole comments seems like a reasonable thing to do, least someone might not know what his stance is.

Ubuntu has kind of fallen out of favor with a lot of people, myself included. It used to be my go to, then I went mint, now I run fedora Bluefin.

IMO, if they want to Ubuntu, let them. We all have our favorite flavors, but whatever they’re comfortable with is a fine point to start with.