I spent some time over the last couple of weeks attempting to get APRS working on my radios. And I found that Lawrence did not have a working digipeater or igate. I asked on the W0UK Radio club email list, and a couple of people were able to verify that we did not have one working anymore.

So, I put it on my workbench. I was going to build a digipeater.

I spent some time talking to Claude.ai, and we came up with a plan to use some of the equipment that I already had laying around:

• A Lenovo ThinkCentre M700 tiny computer
• A Baofeng UV-5R Mini
• Ubuntu Linux server 24.04 LTS
• Direwolf software

I started out getting the ThinkCentre set up wtih Ubuntu Server. I installed 24.04 LTS. LTS stands for “Long Term Service”, and is great because it is supported for five years. The kernel and packages don’t get major changes that could break some applications.

The ThinkCentre has 12Gig of RAM, and a 256 Gig Samsung SSD. Plenty of space for the project.

Once the server was installed and fully patched, there were some applications and packages to install.

’ sudo apt update && sudo apt install -y git gcc g++ make cmake libasound2-dev libhamlib-dev libgps-dev portaudio19-dev'

Direwolf was installed by pulling the code from Github, and compiling. While there is a package in the Ubuntu repositories, it is sometimes and older version.

’ cd ~

git clone https://www.github.com/wb2osz/direwolf

cd direwolf

mkdir build && cd build

cmake ..

make -j$(nproc)

sudo make install'

I had to have the GPS coordinates of my house, due to the fact that I didn’t have a GPS dongle for the server. Easy to find.

The Baofeng UV5Rmini needed to be set up so that it was on APRS: 144.39 MHz. Initially, I had it on the wrong frequency, and it wasn’t hearing anything. Easy fix though.

Once on the correct frequency, Direwolf was able to hear my Anytone 890 radio that was beaconing on APRS!

I decided to take a break, and take my dog out to Clinton Lake for a run on the hill. I took my Anytone 890 with me to see how far I could get away from the igate and still get picked up.

It turns out…not very far. The UV5Rmini with a stock antenna, indoors, would not pick up the radio once I got out of the neighborhood.

But..the Digipeater is working. A different antennal will help. And, maybe we find a new home for this set up so that it can benefit all of Lawrence.

I was pretty late to the AI party. I occasionally tried to use it for some projects that I was doing around the house, or with computer software. But I found that it (ChatGPT) rarely had the updated information about new versions of software, or open source projects. But I found that was getting better.

So I got a monthly license for ChatGPT, and started using it. Pretty quickly I found that I was asking it questions about how things work. Ham Radio. Science Projects. Weather. I was having fun. I also started using it to give me ideas on subjects that I had projects to do for work. I found it was pretty good for that purpose also.

As I had some health issues, ChatGPT was able to answer questions for me about health issues, medication, or when to seek medical advice from my doctor. I was pretty happy with the results.

But I started finding that I was taking some computer, science, or radio projects to Claude or Google Gemini to help with. ChatGPT might get me about 90% of the way there, but then started having issues. It couldn’t finish the job. Even the free models for Claude and Gemini were able to take that work and see it through the completion.

One day I just started projects with Claude. And I found that with the free version, I was able to make much faster progress on software projects. And it was terrific at Vibe Coding some small utilities that I use around the office and ham shack. I was really starting to enjoy it.

Then Anthropic was in the news for its public spat with the United States military, and how the Pentagon wanted to use the AI models. That caught my attention.

I’m not naive. I realize that there are plenty of things that Anthropic’s systems are doing or being used for in other government entities: both the US and foreign countries. I know that privacy is not absolute. But the stand they were taking still resonated.

I was already using Claude for the majority of my work. And I was prepared to cancel my ChatGPT account anyway. But this pushed me to do it now.

I downloaded all my ChatGPT data from OpenAI. I cancelled my account. And I shared the reason why in my App Store review. I have no idea if OpenAI will ever see it. But I did feel better.

Claude.AI is now my go to AI model for chat, coding, and assistance. Perplexity (which I have a free, 1 year license for) is used for a lot of search, and basic questions also.

Nothing is forever, and we are in the infancy stage of AI. Will I change my mind on models? I’m sure that I will. But I’m enjoying the workflow right now, and I’m voting with my dollars and usage.

Just like I am supposed to.

I run OPNsense at home for my firewall, directly behind my AT&T fiber router. It has been rock solid for several years now.

Well… rock solid as a firewall. As an internal DNS server, it has left something to be desired. I’m sure that has a lot to do with the fact that I’ve never really sat down and dug into how ISC DHCP interacted with Unbound—or how Unbound interacted with AdGuard Home.

A few days ago, I updated OPNsense to the latest version (26.1.1). Knowing that ISC DHCP was going away, I decided to spend a little time with Sparky (ChatGPT) to understand how easy it might be to move to KEA DHCP.

My Sunday morning coffee time was spent preparing for the migration. I wanted to change the configuration of my internal subnet to better lay out switches, servers, access points, and lab equipment. Sparky was very good at walking me through some planning, and that planning also included fixing my internal IPv6 configuration.

Right now, I’m feeling a little silly that an IT Architect would need that kind of help in his home lab—but here we are.

I was happily surprised that Sparky was fairly well-versed in the configuration of KEA DHCP. In less than two hours, we were able to:

• Design the IP configuration for the home network
• Set reservations for devices that I wanted to be static, but did not need to survive a DHCP failure
• Lay out the DHCP scope
• Turn on KEA DHCP and turn off ISC DHCP
• Perform some troubleshooting for a few devices that were a bit sticky with their old IP addresses

I mentioned using AdGuard Home on the network. I run a couple of blocklists that help address privacy issues and advertising on websites. But since AdGuard Home was only being used for DNS (not DHCP), and I wasn’t constantly tuning the DNS settings, I decided to get rid of it. I was able to load my blocklists directly into Unbound DNS instead.

So far, DNS has been rock solid—and it’s working well for both internet lookups and my home and lab environments.

Not bad for a Sunday morning!

One of the first projects that I worked on was an All Star Node. I had heard about it from the Zero Retries Newsletter by Steve Stroh.

Zero Retries and Steve has turned out to be the Elmer that I don’t have locally for the type of projects I was interested in. We have an active club here in Lawrence, KS. But the members of the club are very much into HF and working the upper bands. They just don’t do a lot of work in VHF and UHF. Which is fine: I’m used to solo projects. And the two projects that I thought I wanted to do first: hot spots. DMR and AllStar.

I ordered the equipment for a DMR hotspot, and actually have it built. But I don’t have a DMR radio yet. So while I am waiting, I was going to pivot and use the equipment for AllStar. And it was then that I found that my radio topper for the Raspberry Pi was digital, and not really usable for analog and All Star. Learning experience.

I stared watching some Youtube videos (Thanks Ham Crusader!). That is when I found that I could build an All Star Node without a radio. I spent quite a bit more time researching which equipment was right for the job. Then waiting for the equipment to arrive.

When it arrived, it was very quick to build. Less than an hour.

The node is a Raspberry Pi 5 running the ALS 3 image from https://www.allstarlink.org. ALS is based on the Astrisk PBX system.

The sound interface is a Allscan UCI120, USB interface that is made by David Gleason in California. He is the also the creater of the Allscan web application for AllStar. The sound interface allows you to add a microphone and speaker to the Raspberry Pi, and makes it very similar to using a radio for your communications.

I have to admit, I had a bit of mic fright when the node was actually ready and usable. There is something about being able to talk on Simplex or the local repeater with your HT. That is enough to scare some people. But when you are connecting to nodes that could be anywhere around the world, its even worse!

So before I keyed the mic, I decided to add some additional softare to the system.

Supermon is a simple web interface (similar to Allscan) that allows you to easily control your Allstar Node. After watching Youtube videos, I installed the software. Easy peasy!

Skywarn Plus is software that can work in conjunction with Supermon and the Allstar Node to provide weather alerts and information on the radio system. And that was right up my alley with the Skywarn volunteering that I do for Douglas County. It wasn’t until I got it installed, but not working, that I found that it was no longer being updated by its creator.

Not to be determined, I found that a new version…a rebuild of the Skywarn Plus system that is named Skywarn Plus NG. But it really wanted to be installed with a rebuild of Supermon: Supermon2 NG. I could not really find any youtube videos on the installation of the software.

Claude AI to the rescue. Claude and I investigated the software, and began the installation. It took about two hours.

I started looking around at AllStar nodes to find some that were busy, and I somehow stumbled upon the Puget Sound Repeater Group. They have a calendar that showed three radio nets…every day! So the very next morning, I connected by node to their net, and started listening. I spent about an hour listening to the cadence of the net, and all of the people who were involved. And decided to try it. They asked for another group of people to list their call signs, and I did. It wasn’t long and I had the mic in my hand and was sharing that I was in Lawrence Kansas, a new Technician licensed ham, and working my first AllStar connection. The response was positive and I was hooked!

Now my mornings are spent listening to different locations around the US. I have some favorites. I’m enjoying the morning drive conversation on the FM38 Repeater group in Wisconsin. Then I can switch to a net from Northern California. I finish the morning with the PSR group in Seattle.

My local club members are very quick to tell me that repeaters are dead. That no one is there. I’m finding that OUR repeater is dead. But there is a very vibrant repeater community in plenty of locations around the US.

And now the world is my oyster. An All Star Oyster.

2025 was a great great year for family, health, hobbies, volunteering!

• Oldest Daughter was married!
• Started volunteering with county Emergency Management team
• Skywarn Weather Spotting for EM & NWS.
• Completion of FEMA classes for EM Emergency Operations Center assistance
• Passed my Technicians license test for Amateur Radio

And all of that was on top of family, work, HOA Treasurer, and health changes!

So what are my goals for 2026?

• Two new grandchildren, for a total 9!
• Continue volunteering with County Emergency Management team * CERT * Skywarn * EOC * Auxilary Communications
• Achieve my General license for Amateur Radio
• Work on my radio hobby projects - including antennas, digital, etc.

2026 is going to be a very good, and very busy year!