Hi! and greetings to all hams new and experienced.

As this is suppose to be an introduction as in many forums around let me get my 5 minutes spotlight to talk about myself :)

First, I am a computer professional with experience that spans a long time that it becomes shameful to quote. Let say I am working with computers since dawn of computer era. This means I may be opinionated on some subjects...

Second, I consider myself newbie in HAM terms. Not that I was ignorant of HAM, but it was not my primary interest but it never ceased to be an interest. I know for ham for a quite a long time (surely more than 30 or 40 years). I have well established and experienced ham friends (as friends in real life not as 'friends' i have thru HAM, who I am sure did a lot of wonderful things with ham and some still do). I used to hang in some radio clubs here and there in my youth. But I never caught a HAM bug. Answer to question why it is so, is complex and out of scope of this spot light. If you wish to talk about it I am willing to participate in some tech discussion.

Radio on its own never ceased to be an interest of mine. Over a long period of time I have been bouncing around some subjects that encompass radio. But my primary interest is computer related so ham comes as a sort of a hobby when I have time to spend on it.

HamSphere came to my interest as it crossed a gap that would make me participate in some way. Unfortunately things are far from perfect. In fact I have found more trouble than solutions.

Hence my participation here is an attempt to possibly change some things in following areas (kind of a mission statement):

- newbies - how to start doing things with HAM and computer with primary aim of doing it with points below but not limited to that - there is huge problem of starting with HAM which is somewhat overlooked ('somewhat' being pretty mild description). It is kind of assumed that everything works. But... unfortunately my experience says - it is not, and it is more not working than working. And the problems are not only technical. I am seeing elephants with no address...

- Linux and hamSphere ( I am on debian variants ) - this I found very difficult - I used to run HS on Mac (worked well for some time), I tried Android too (quite good but limited) but linux ... never managed to setup so it is stable. Why? I hope to figure out. Please do not quote me 'windows' solutions of any kind (told you already that I could be opinionated on some things - i find this kind of workarounds insulting and I wish not to be insulting in return) - what I would like to see is PURE LINUX STABLE HAM RADIO (no workarounds). Especially next one (below)... (on this point I can also say that we may have WAY BETTER workarounds than usually suggested - but lets try NOT to kill the mosquito with a cannon ).

- making tiny HAM setup - currently attempting to make HAM station on Raspberry PI - I believe this SHALL be one of main venues of interest for HS future and to a certain extent HAM future in general. If you do not see why - talk to me.

Let see where we are going to arrive, and if this is going to make any impact - spotlight off now.

how CW hams would say...

73

Lj
Malta

(wasn't there some 6x code used before??? perhaps now lost in time and space long away from planet Earth)