I have just finished building up my first OpenTracker. Since I am now the Australian Distributor of this device I thought I had better build one so that I could see what they are like. I am quite impressed. They have a lot in them, and are not too hard to put together. I think they have more parts than the TinyTrak II, but it is actually cheaper thanks to some competition. Soldering the board is a bit harder thanks to the ground plane that has been used, but its presence probably improves the performance if anything.

The other reason I was building one is that I had just got a nice order for a number of tracking units and I have one less of that model in stock than I need so I thought I would ask the client what they wanted. On the basis that either this client or one on the future will want a built unit I soldered some up.

Last night I got a strange email from a colleague… What makes this strange was that it was a virus, and it was supposed to be from Phil Karn who is a former board member of TAPR. But I know it did not come from him or anyone I know since this email address stopped getting used a few years ago by Phil because it was being used to send Virii. You see, he wrote some of the dialup networking code used in Windows, and provided it for free provided he was acknowledged. And the acknowledgement included his email on every windows PC… and there are virus programs that seach for email messages on someones HDD… And I got sent one of those…