When I was first drawn to social media, at least in the form we think of it today, I swore to myself that I’d never post a photo of food or of a meal.
Fast forward about a decade and my vow no longer holds up.
Last year, as retirement took hold, I began enjoying daily breakfast on the front porch at a very small round patio table. However, it was more than breakfast. That small table has become central to an ongoing series of social media posts referred to as “Breakfast in the Porch Office.”
Using Twitter, and occasionally Instagram and Facebook, these posts, which consist mostly of a single photograph and a descriptive paragraph, have begun to take on a life of their own. The posts aren’t so much about breakfast as they are about technology, often featuring projects I am working on, and hence technology I am working with at that time.
A typical breakfast on the porch has several key ingredients besides the food component: one or more computers, one or more radios, and a real newspaper. The latter often provokes tongue-in-cheek derisive comments (e.g. “What is that white paper with words on it?”), while the technology drives questions about applications being showcased or about frequencies to which the radios are tuned.
My newspaper of choice is the Vancouver Sun. I’ve been a subscriber for 40 years, and I’ll readily admit that I question that subscription frequently nowadays. The monthly rate has increased several hundred per cent over the past decade or so, the paper has become dramatically thinner (and smaller in format), and some sections carry only canned content from other markets. Yet the paper still retains columnists who carry out crucial investigative work that benefits society as a whole.
Featuring the daily newspaper in the series has served to provide an anchor, a reminder that news stories are written by real people, and not, at least not yet, by artificial intelligence. And often I find an item in the paper around which I will develop a tweet to add to my stream (which has around 8,000 followers).
Key technology items on that little patio table are a Chromebook, usually two handheld transceivers, often a small Android tablet computer, and, although it doesn’t appear in the photos as it’s used to take the photo, my smartphone.
The Chromebook (and I’ve been a dedicated Chromebook user since 2012) is a slightly aging Acer R11 series C738. It is usually featured in the photos displaying either my own Pacific Northwest flight tracking data (I run a Raspberry Pi computer that manages data from a specialized antenna and feeds that data to aviation services provider FlightAware). However it may sometimes appear featuring images from my own weather satellite data system.
As for the tablet, in recent months it has been featuring a Spanish language radio station, WURA 880, from Quantico, Va., and I’ve used it to promote the notion of web-based software defined radio (SDR). As a ham radio operator I want to listen to real radio signals, not sanitized streamed content with a time delay. That’s where WebSDR comes in. Radio operators across the world have set up centralized stations that capture a broad range of radio signals. People around the world can tune into these WebSDRs.
My real radios are usually tuned to VHF bands. One is always monitoring 146.940 MHz, the frequency of the most prominent repeater used by amateur radio operators in the Vancouver area. This repeater, also known as VE7RPT, is used to conduct the biggest daily network “meeting” of operators in this area, reaching as far south as Orcas Island and up into the Sunshine Coast, and sometimes farther afield through the magic of something called the Internet Relay Linking Project.
A second radio is usually monitoring either the local airport’s ATIS, air traffic information service, for weather, or a control tower frequency for Vancouver airport. A third radio is sometimes pressed into service to pull in specialized signals from the International Space Station.
By the way, in these COVID-19 times, many radio clubs across the Vancouver area are holding daily health and wellness nets for their members. These have proven to be a source of comfort and support for older members in particular.
Satellite communication is an aspect of amateur radio that also greatly interests. The porch office is ideal as it gives me a view of the western sky. As satellites move toward me in an eastward direction I can bounce signals off them to other amateur operators
My porch office is hampered a little by spotty internet coverage. The location is on the periphery of my home Wi-Fi feed and I am considering adding an outlet for a permanent, wired ethernet connection. The location has also always suffered from poor accessibility to the Telus cellular network. Move a metre one way or the other and calls are dropped or briefly lose their connection, resulting in missing parts of conversations.
As it is, my porch office has become a haven of sorts for an hour or so each day. I reach people through radio. I listen to radio from the other side of the continent. I watch airplane traffic. I read the newspaper. And of course I enjoy my breakfast.
In subsequent columns I will cover in some detail how you too can track aircraft or pull down images from weather satellites with very inexpensive equipment.
Hum To Search
Google has quietly added a hum or tap feature to let you find the title of that song that is stuck in your head. It currently works on iOS and Android versions of the Google Search app, and in the Google Assistant. It is offered in 20 languages at the moment on Android and is limited to English for now on iOS.
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