When you say it like that, it sounds really mundane.

Ignoring the how of it all, here’s how I imagine it working subjectively. They have a much wider visible spectrum compared to humans, but they can’t perceive the whole thing all at once. They have four pairs of nictitating membranes that act like bandpass filters. Between the bandpass membranes and signal processing in the brain, they “tune” to different spectra, and can even narrow the bandwidth of the received signal. They can sense light polarization by aligning or misaligning their eyes to the direction of polarization, and because their eyes don’t rely on focusing a light to a point, they can stare at the sun without harm or discomfort.

Subjectively, they have no fixed concept of color, as objects appear different depending on how their eyes are tuned. Their languages lack simple color words, and must rely on analogies to objects that are similarly colored, much like most (Western) languages have no simple terms to describe odors beyond relating them to their sources (“earthy”, “fruity”, “floral”, etc).

The low-end of their eyes’ frequency range isn’t set, but they can at least see thermal radiation emitted by living bodies, and the high end is set at the threshold of ionizing radiation. Because their eyes work equally well during the day and at night, they and other species in their clade that share the same eye structure are neither nocturnal nor diurnal, and have active and rest periods that do not sync with the day-night cycle. Upon achieving sapience and developing a structured society with the concept of timekeeping, they do not use different time zones.

This would be a receive-only biological system evolved by a species of alien critters to serve as eyes, so not for any IRL project.

Does fldigi do SSTV now or am I not getting the joke?

At the time of the OP I was testing federating two nodeBB instances. ActivityPub requires HTTPS AFAIK.

an ARES group in a neighboring county set up an AREDN network. They said it worked very well, with two caveats.

First was a jurisdiction issue. They couldn’t send climbers up to replace or repair equipment on their own, they had to wait for another entity to do it, this lead to things going unrepaired for a long time, which leads to…

Second, WISP equipment, even outdoor-rated stuff, isn’t as weatherproof as one would hope. Where I live (gulf coast US) we get a lot of wind and rain, so things broke down often. Combine this with the inability to replace and repair equipment as needed and you get a perpetually flaky network. I think it’s no accident that the most active AREDN mesh is in SoCal where the weather is perpetually clement.

This is all second hand, of course, though I can vouch for the WISP gear not being exactly Ragnarok proof. It seems when it worked, it worked very well, but it often didn’t work for the reasons above. If you can locate equipment in places you have access to, I think it’ll be fine.

I went all in with AREDN but couldn’t get people interested.

Interesting. My AC fan has a noise pattern that revs up as the AC or heater starts. I can hear it on the radio before I hear the fan itself.

I’m attempting to run a NodeBB forum. I’m only assuming that web sockets was the issue because the first search result I came up with that matched my symptoms mentioned it.

Cool. Follow up question: Do I generate the cert once and distribute the same private key to all the servers I’m running? I’m guessing not, but does that mean I run the certbot command on every server?

I looked up Cloudflare tunnels and tried setting one up. Some things future readers may want to know:

1. You have to set Cloudflare as your domain’s authoritative nameservers.
2. You need to set up an account (not a problem) but also have to register a payment method, even for the free tier (no me gusta).
3. Regarding NodeBB specifically, if you set up a tunnel, you can access the forum, even over HTTPS, but it fails when you try to log in. A few minutes of searching leads me to believe it has something to do with web sockets, and the solution requires you to partially expose your IP address, defeating the principle purpose for me to use cloudflare in the first place.

If it exists, a ham will try to bounce radio waves off it, or use it as an antenna.

That’s what I warned everyone about during our weekly net. We’re tiny fish compared to the telecom giants. Everything above 6 meters is in jeopardy.

The name means nothing to today’s youth

Story time: When I was a kid in the late 90s, there was a fad for toy walkie-talkies at my school. I was obsessed with seeing how far I could get my signal, which wasn’t very far given the likely minuscule power.

The teachers decided to capitalize on this trend by inviting a representative of a local ham club to speak at our school. I was absolutely floored when I learned you could talk around the world. Two things kept me from pursuing my license at the time. There was still a code requirement, and nobody for the life of me could tell me what lunch meat had to do with wireless communication.

While I can appreciate the desire to maintain order in the midst of chaos, and I can certainly see why radio is essential for that, I’ll never understand the people who say they’re into ham radio because they don’t want to be censored or intercepted in a time of crisis. Ham radio is insecure by design. Your dox yourself every time you give your call sign.

Oh this screenshot was taken years ago. I got my extra ticket in 2021 (first licensed in 2019). I just keep coming back to it because of how on the nose it is.

I’ve actually been away from the hobby for the most part for about 2 years, and am trying to find ways to get back into it.

I wish I could find the quote, but I believe it was an old issue of QST (1914 I think). The writer spoke in almost religious terms of his experience tuning around looking for other stations, comparing it to disembodied souls floating through the ether searching for others to commune with. I wish I could feel the way he felt, but I’m too habituated to casual intercontinental communication.

The closest thing I can think of is my experience of the early web, where I was able to see the weather conditions at my grandparents’ house thousands of miles away.