On Wednesday 10 September 2025 21:22:55 Andrew Randrianasulu via tde-users wrote:

чт, 11 сент. 2025 г., 06:12 William Morder via tde-users <

users@trinitydesktop.org>:

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On Wednesday 10 September 2025 18:47:24 dep via tde-users wrote:

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A long day and night with Commodore OS, in case anyone's interested.

https://ofb.biz/safari/article/1350.html

dep Pictures: http://www.ipernity.com/doc/depscribe/album Column: https://ofb.biz/author/dep/

Commodore Amiga 64 was my very first desktop computer. My son tried to break it by playing games like "Defender of the Crown", using the keyboard and mouse were actual lances and swords.

It occurs to me that, if data can be deliverered via shortwave, why not internet? Also why not internet over the radio / televison spectrum?

I do have a shortwave radio receiver, though I don't use it much. I wonder if I could hack it to receive data over shortwave, then somehow transfer it to my laptop? I do have a patch cord, but that's just for sound ... I think.

Maybe somebody else out there who knows more about these things (thinking of you, Gene!) might be able to tell me why this cannot possibly work.

https://github.com/Rhizomatica/mercury

I searched for "radio modem"

I think it works, just at speed like 7-8 kilo *bits* per second, not even close to practical speeds of infamous last of its kind "56k" analog phone line modems.

At some point it was supposedly possible to catch and decrypt satellite internet transmissions, but for now stronger encryption made such "fishing" impractical? Only heard about it from friend, never had any satellite receiver.

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Bill

Yes, this is sort of on the right path of what I am wondering.

I do already know that smartphones, for example, already have a radio chip, just that in most cases they are deactivated somewhere along the food chain, because providers want us to use radio apps to receive radio over wifi, rather than just to be able to pick up local broadcasts.

Also, wifi is itself a kind of radio broadcast, of sorts, right? but not the same, different part of the spectrum.

But that's not quite what I am after. I wanted to know if it is possible, for example, to hack old radios, radio parts, the radio / televison spectrum, whatever, to be able to send and receive data; that is; to create a sort of backup internet, or alternate access ... for example, if one is caught in an emergency situation, or is, like myself, fond of remote places far from the amenities of civilization.

I don't imagine streaming videos, or downloading huge files; I only meant, maybe it is possible to send and receive emails or text messages, or to access internet with a plaintext browser such as lynx (or links2, or similar variations). This could be useful in some situations, even possibly a lifesaver in extreme circumstances.

Bill

On Wednesday 10 September 2025 22:11:16 gene heskett via tde-users wrote:

On 9/10/25 23:12, William Morder via tde-users wrote:

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On Wednesday 10 September 2025 18:47:24 dep via tde-users wrote:

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A long day and night with Commodore OS, in case anyone's interested.

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Maybe somebody else out there who knows more about these things (thinking of you, Gene!) might be able to tell me why this cannot possibly work.

Bill

Yes it /could/ work, Bill, but introducing the noisy world of broadcast does entail an attention to detail involving frequency accuracy and some sort of an error correcting algorithm where sufficient redundancy exits in the code format to make self correcting code practical. Fire coding comes to mind, but even that requires sufficient redundancy to fix multi bit errors created by a leaky crossbar on a power pole. A pole originally equipt with 2400 volt rated glass insulators, up-graded to carry 7200 volts w/o replacing the insulators, compounded by the diagonal steel braces holding the crossbar level but with the center bolt into the pole not having been re torqued since it was originally bolted up in 2400 volt REA days. There does not exist in this scenario, a method to demand a re-transmission of corrupted data. All the common methods today, rzsz, tcp, probably a dozen other's, all work because its a 2 way path. Corruption detection is easily done with a crc on each sectors (256/512) worth of data, but w/o the on demand retransmission, is hellishly difficult. Yes, that case IS 2 way. But the speed of light time delay doesn't make it easily done. Our voyager satellites are delivering only femtowatts of signal at goldstone, so I expect half of the available bandwidth is devoted to error detection & correction. At that power level, I'd be amazed if they are functioning at over 1 bit per second. Their plutonium thermally generated power is nearing the end, and it will take electronic magic to get data from them in another decade. And one hell of a budget item for boiling helium to maintain the half degree kelvin the electronics at the focal point of the goldstone dishes need to be able to hear the voyagers in the face of that half degree of thermal noise. It's all we got in this case.

Cheers, Gene Heskett, CET.

I knew you would be able to give me the long answer with technical details about radio's limitations. I will have to read this again later, when I am more awake. (This email is one of those "woke up in the middle of the night" replies.)

Also, as I said, I have a shortwave receiver, and the idea of transmitting data over shortwave is what got my attention. If shortwave, why not other parts of the spectrum? Why not radio itself?

Anyway, I will have to look into this a bit more. As I said in another reply to Andrew, just a few minutes before, I conceive of this as a kind of backup plan for internet access, in emergency situations, for example, or when one finds onself in a remote place without the usual ways of connecting; just to be able to send and receive emails or text, or to use a text-only browser, could be a lifesaver in extreme circumstances.

Bill

said E. Liddell via tde-users: | On Thu, 11 Sep 2025 05:30:58 -0700 | | William Morder via tde-users users@trinitydesktop.org wrote: | > Also, as I said, I have a shortwave receiver, and the idea of | > transmitting data over shortwave is what got my attention. If | > shortwave, why not other parts of the spectrum? Why not radio itself? | > | > Anyway, I will have to look into this a bit more. As I said in another | > reply to Andrew, just a few minutes before, I conceive of this as a | > kind of backup plan for internet access, in emergency situations, for | > example, or when one finds onself in a remote place without the usual | > ways of connecting; just to be able to send and receive emails or | > text, or to use a text-only browser, could be a lifesaver in extreme | > circumstances. | | The key search term you want is "Internet over ham radio". It's | feasible, and there are some implementations out there that can carry | email, telnet, and other text-based protocols. The issues have more to | do with legal limitations on radio spectrum use—most sections of | spectrum are pretty specific on what you can do with them.

Also the method employed. Amplitude modulation -- AM -- is generally pretty poor at it, while frequency modulation is good for its limited range, because you either get it or you don't. We do send all kinds of data, after all, over cellular telephones, but we don't do it a hundred miles from the tower.

said William Morder via tde-users:

| Sorry there, didn't mean to hijack your thread.

No problem -- my thread was OT to begin with!

| The mention of Commodore and Commodore Amiga, and using shortwave to | transmit data got me off on a tangent, a combination of nostalgia for a | simpler, stone-tools past, and a vision of future possibilities, how to | use stone tools in new and interesting ways. | | That was my reason for interest in using some small part of the radio | spectrum for internet: maybe limited in speed, only able to transmit | plaintext, email or text messages, but also its range is much greater | than wifi. AM radio signals at night, for example, in remote places, | without much interference, can be picked up many hundreds of miles | farther away than usual in daytime. Even FM transmission can travel over | pretty far distances, in the right conditons. | | Aside from ham radio and shortwave, I wondered what else might be | possible. | | E.Liddell's recommendation of ham radio seems the most viable way to | purse, at present. It's also a fun hobby all on its own, aside from the | potential of using it for internet. | | We might someday find ourselves in a situation where this could come in | very handy.

Not only could but does. Where I live, out in the woods, the power goes off fairly freqently, as it did for about four hours the day before yesterday. Which is why many of us have generators wired in to the house circuitry in a way that doesn't energize the power lines -- the power company sends a blast down the line to kill any generators in the circuit, because they're tired of getting killed by improperly attached generators. So there is a neighborhood radio network, which is a short-range class of broadcasting. I have a ham friend who is after me all the time to join it, which I've so far resisted out of fear and self knowledge: I might get into it and spend more money than I should cooking up an amazing rig. But I can see its utility, especially on those occasions when the power has gone out because of 18 inches of snow.

Of course, nowadays when the power goes out the first thing to do is turn on a broadcast radio to find out if it's The End Of The World As We Know It. (Assuming, without evidence, that it would be broadcast: many stations now get their canned programming over the internet and have automatic generators and would be on the air a week after the extinction of all life on earth, entirely oblivious. In the way that the robot voice in Commodore OS keeps chattering away long after the machine has otherwise locked up solid.)

On Thursday, September 11, 2025 4:25:59 PM Central Daylight Time dep via tde- users wrote:

Not only could but does. Where I live, out in the woods, the power goes off fairly freqently, as it did for about four hours the day before yesterday. Which is why many of us have generators wired in to the house circuitry in a way that doesn't energize the power lines -- the power company sends a blast down the line to kill any generators in the circuit, because they're tired of getting killed by improperly attached generators. So there is a neighborhood radio network, which is a short-range class of broadcasting. I have a ham friend who is after me all the time to join it, which I've so far resisted out of fear and self knowledge: I might get into it and spend more money than I should cooking up an amazing rig. But I can see its utility, especially on those occasions when the power has gone out because of 18 inches of snow.

HF has been used together with UUCP before, and that provides a means for store-and-forward email at least. Here's some discussion that I found:

https://groups.io/g/BITX20/message/108630

I recall that HF UUCP was pressed into service in Africa to replace UUCP via hard drive. A drive with the UUCP spool would be physically delivered containing emails for the site. The site would then send outbound email via physically delivered hard drives. Talk about store and forward.

To do UUCP over HF, you would have to find someone on the other end to peer your UUCP connection with though. You also have to get an amateur radio license. Oh, and by the way encrypting over amateur radio is illegal in most circumstances, though there are some carve-outs for space operations.

I'm an amateur radio operator, but I've never done UUCP over HF. I can't tell you much more about it. I did run UUCP mail back in the 1990s over 2400 baud modems. That's the closest I ever got.

On Thursday 11 September 2025 10:28:49 gene heskett via tde-users wrote:

On 9/11/25 08:33, William Morder via tde-users wrote:

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I have a shortwave receiver, and the idea of transmitting data over shortwave is what got my attention. If shortwave, why not other parts of the spectrum? Why not radio itself?

<snip>

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I will have to look into this a bit more.... I conceive of this as a kind

of backup plan for internet access, in emergency situations, for example, or when one finds onself in a remote place without the usual ways of connecting; just to be able to send and receive emails or text, or to use a text-only browser, could be a lifesaver in extreme circumstances.

In those circumstances, Bill with the chaos that goes with it, will you have electricity to run your computer?

I am planning at some point to get a solar setup, panels, power station, etc.. At the moment, they make the power station about the size of a small guitar amplifier, and it can power a whole 4-bedroom house for a few days. Or something like that. And the solar panels fit into a case the size of about a briefcase, or maybe an artist's portfolio. Not too unwieldy.

An electric vehicle seems a good idea, too, if the used ones ever come down far enough in price, and have at least a 200-mile range; then I can go to and from the city on a single charge. And electric vehicles are low-maintenance, compared to the fossil-fuel burning beasts.

Sunlight is still free, for now, as long as we still have sunlight. In a pinch, I will ride a bicycle to power a generator, if need be, but I hope to get enough bicycle and walking exercise without going to such extremes. I need to save some of that exercise for later; I don't know how much I have left to give.

I might if nat gas is still flowing as I had a 20kw standby installed to run the wifes oxygen machine decades ago.  And I have other facility's to protect the homestead by permanently removing the threat with the triple S protocol.  Under those chaotic conditions, each of us will be the undisputed king of our own little piece of dirt. My piece of dirt (usin the term dirt loosely, it only grows weeds despite 20 lbs of good grass seed) was paid for 27 years ago, not much but it is mine as long as I pay the taxes. I'll be 91 in about 3 weeks, what can they do to me that time has not already done?

Take care of #1 Bill. In the end, no one else will.

Cheers, Gene Heskett, CET.

It won't happen all at once, but at least I feel like it's the right direction for me.

Bill

On Thursday 11 September 2025 13:58:58 dep via tde-users wrote:

said William Morder via tde-users: | I am planning at some point to get a solar setup, panels, power station, | etc.. At the moment, they make the power station about the size of a | small guitar amplifier, and it can power a whole 4-bedroom house for a | few days. Or something like that. And the solar panels fit into a case | the size of about a briefcase, or maybe an artist's portfolio. Not too | unwieldy.

The cost is the small nuclear device necessary to get enough light into a dinky solar panel to power much of anything. Ask someone who has a big solar array on the roof -- a *big* solar array -- if they've been able to either drop commercial electricity or actually balance things out by selling power back to the utility.

Problem is, solar is astoundingly inefficient (except for solar water heaters) because we don't have photovoltaic efficiency. There is work in Japan on a technology that under some circumstances gets 25 percent efficiency, which is an order of magnitude better than the stuff in use now, and that draws power from pretty much any light. But . . . even then, solar panels reduce their efficiency over time, leaving you with a bunch of useless, toxic junk. Likewise the electricity storage methods.

| An electric vehicle seems a good idea, too, if the used ones ever come | down far enough in price, and have at least a 200-mile range; then I can | go to and from the city on a single charge. And electric vehicles are | low-maintenance, compared to the fossil-fuel burning beasts.

Except when you have to replace the batteries, which you'll soon have to do with most used ones, which costs more than the electric car itself. And the old battery disposal fees are very high.

It ain't soup yet. And were we even to come up with 100 percent efficiency photovoltaic cells, which we can't and won't because it's impossible, the issues of storage remain.

Well, I don't actually plan to go entirely off-grid just yet; just want to have a good backup for emergencies.

Also, for the power station itself, I want it to be big enough and dependable enough to power the equipment for a band, a group of say 3-6 persons, depending on the gig, and their instruments, amplifiers, etc.

I have seen that work before, for others, and they were using a smaller power station than what I have in mind. If it can do that, keep everybody on for a few hours, and serve as my backup power in emergencies, then I am satisfied.

Yeah, on the EVs, I hear good and bad things. Good things, if one has enough money to buy one of them new, then it "never needs maintenance"; bad things, if it's a used one, because, as you point out, the battery must be replaced.

I may try attaching sails to a car. Otherwise, our train and bus systems to and from the city are pretty good, just that they don't always run at the most convenient times, and require more planning.

Bill

On 9/11/25 17:40, dep via tde-users wrote:

said William Morder via tde-users:

| I may try attaching sails to a car.

Would be tough. You could, though, replace the wheels with a rounded surface, put in a fin keel to keep it stable, add a motor for when there's no wind, and use streams, lakes, oceans, and rivers instead of roads.

Though, seriously, I know of a couple of things I've actually seen that people I have done, successgfully, not for transportation but for power. One is a small paddlewheel-driven generator in a stream at their house. It's mounted on a float to account for variations in water depth, and is held in place by long piles, in the fashion of floating docks.

The other, and I think that this is cool, is a vertical windmill: Cut a 50-gallon barrel in half longwise and weld it back together offset, so that the halves overlap. Mount it on a shaft vertically, and put a plain old automotive generator at one end of the shaft, then put the whole thing on the windiest part of the property. The beauty of it is that it collects wind from every direction. Problem is, it takes a decent breeze to spin it at all.

In both cases the power was stored in banks of car batteries. Though I understand that the popular choice nowadays is golf cart batteries, probably because they're sealed and fairly easilt replaced when one goes bad. (There are gadgets that detect this, which is better than the usual way of determining that lithium-ion batteries have gone bad: your house burns down.)

LA batteries if properly charged, will last for generations. And it does not matter if its liquid acid or gell cells. Properly treated in terms of charging, I've had 220AH 12 volt batteries switched to series by the starter relays but charged by parallel from a 12 volt alternator, and a battery charger whose limiting resistor put less than 8 milliamps into them.  Original resistor put about 2 amps into them which kept them gassing steadily. Destroyed those batteries in under a year. I replaced them but reduced the trickle charge to stop the gassing. 8 years later when I went down the road for more money, and the first where my office door had a Chief Engineer placard on it, those batteries were still turning a 335 cumalong with a 150kw pot on it, wrong side out, first cylinder to hit tdc fired and 1 second later the lights were on again. And that transmitter was down to 50% power as it normally used around 250kwh. Klystron powered tx;s are hungry.  I used a 6 volt gell cell that had failed in the burglar alarm, as a standby on an rca 1802 powered computer I built to do commercial prep work for an early station break sequencer. That only had 4k of static ram but it was enough to serve as a backup for 17 years. It just floated across the 5 volt line that fed it.  So you could say I know a thing about LA batteries.

Cheers, Gene Heskett, CET.