W0CHP.net

Greetings gracious hams! As some of you know, I operate the XLX493 Reflector. Currently, it supports both DMR and YSF protocols. However, I do not posses the necessary hardware for trans-coding the D-Star protocol.

And since my reflector has been getting more traffic lately, I’m putting a feeler out there to other hams who run a D-Star-enabled reflector to see if they’d be gracious enough to peer with reflector (more specifically, Module E, since it’s the busiest module.

I see people on various Pi-Star forums/groups/etc., showing off how they display the dashboard on a monitor via an HDMI cable.

Neat. 🙄 🤦

Fuck your HDMI cables; get with the times, bitches…

I keep/use a hotspot in my truck, and I’ve always wanted a way to manage/switch/connect/disconnect from reflectors, talkgroups, etc., hands-free; using only my voice.

I’ve begun work on a small project to allow me to do just that. And no, this is not an April Fool’s joke. 😆

Check it out…

For some time now, I’ve yearned for a way to quickly link to various XLX reflectors and modules on DMR, as well as unlink from modules to “mute” a busy reflector/module.

I abandoned ShitHub (GitHub) back in 2018 when they sold out to shitty-ass fucking Microsoft. I (preemptively) migrated all my code to my own self-hosted environment (oh and by the way, self-hosting seems to have made quite a comeback, since so many companies and their solutions have lately been sucking goat ballz).

Recently, I’ve witnessed two networks suffer from loops, caused by mis-configured hotspots. Now while Pi-Star has some rudimentary checks in place (simply a warning message for hotspots configured as “Public Nodes”), I’ve improved W0CHP-PiStar-Dash to help prevent these loops even further.

Update 2/28/2022:

Looks like this article lit a fire; they fixed their invalid SSL certificate 24 hours after I posted it. 😆

QuadNet, we all know your website(s) is shitty and ugly as fuck, but some of the services you provide, we hams can certainly appreciate; and I’m one of them.

A very nice gentleman from India, Bejoy (VU3BOJ), had contacted me recently; informing me that he was unable to access my various web resources. The poor guy was attempting to install my W0CHP-PiStar-Dash software, but to no avail.

Moreover, Bejoy mentioned that his local friends with different ISPs were also unable to access my resources. This bothered me, so I investigated.

The original Pi-Star (still) uses myriad HTML tables for layout (non-tabular) data. That’s a Bad Thing^™ And since my W0CHP-PiStar-Dash software is a fork, it inherited lots of that legacy garbage. However, I’ve begun the conversion from HTML tables for layout, to proper HTML(5) and CSS.

This is a UI/UX project that will be completed in phases as I get to them.

I thoroughly warn people: break the rules and publicly cry about your broken shit, and I’ll rip you apart publicly. This is deliberate: it’s an attempt to filter out the clueless (for their own good). I’ll also rip apart other “experts” because, they are equally as clueless and are, more accurately, experts at misinformation and poor advice.

So, let’s have some fun, and see first-hand as to why I prefer to work alone, rebel against the (mostly-clueless) ham masses, and just do my own thing.