Travel Diary – USA – Digital Comms Conference
Thursday morning I woke up about 6:30… About 7:00 I went down and started work on my presentations and checked email. Sure, I could have done this from my room, but it was more social to go down to the café and work. A bit later John Ackerman came down and we had breakdfast. John had got in overnight, and had actually got the room next to me. Steve Bible with John and Laura Koster arrived a little later.
Board meeting started about 9:00.., Sort of. Since the secretary was not able to be there, I took the minutes. As much as you can with an all day meeting. There were lots of little things – kits, project and finances.
At one stage we heard a few planes above and also a police siren. By planes, I mean loud planes that we could hear inside a meeting room in the hotel. Planes that were moving much faster than you would normally expect at an airport when coming into land, or even on a missed approach. Late I found out that John Kerry, the US Presidential Candidate decided to drop by Des Moines. The aircraft were actually fighters. That night the TAPR board had a dinner in the hotel which was good.
Following the board meeting we all congregated under the Holidome. For the unitiated, like me, the holidome is a 1960’s or 1970’s concept where the hotel is built around a courtyard, and they build a round roof on the dome, and have the swimming pool semi in doors.
Oh, And just at the start of the Board Meeting, we found out that Roger Barker, G4IDE had died. This was rather sad, but was certainly not unexpected. Just the timing.
Following the board meeting the board met for dinner. The restraunt had a deal where it was cheaper before 6:0. So that is what we did. It was really good for us all to catch up in an informal session.
After dinner we adjourned to the Holidome where we talked and played computers. This was a good informal time. Basically we talked about computer animation, graphics, ham radio, wireless access and just about anything else. I got to meet scott miller who I had been in discussions with about his tracking hardware and protocol. During this time I got a phone call from Jack in Australia from his mobile talking about some work stuff. It was amazing how the world has changed in the last few years.
After a while I went to my room and did some more work on my presentations which I had to have done by the next day. Friday morning I went down for breakfast nice and early and did more work on the presentation. Once I had done a bit of work I was joined by a few other people and we continued to discuss just about anything. I think it was mainly TAPR board.
After breakfast I registered for the conference, and then went into the main venue and scouted out a desk. The important thing was power, and I found an outlet, although the outlet was full. Scrounging I found a TAPR extension cord which worked for a few of us later.
Sitting in there I did some more work on my presentation. An hour or so later it was my turn to present my first talk. Presenting it went well, and I stuck to the time. Phil Karn asked some interesting questions, and despite what I thought, he had changed his views in the last ten years.
One of the reasons I wrote the paper was that he had made a statement about power control and spread spectrum many years ago, and then made comments to the contrary later. I disagreed with these later statements, and I needed to say why. Phil and a couple of others gave me some ideas where I should extend my paper. They were in the areas of
a) Suggesting the use of Forward Error Correction
b) Looking at routing in a mesh where there is a large concentration in the centre of the mesh causing significant interference.
I really was shocked since I have a great respect for Phil and believed he was wrong. I was afraid of hurting his feelings. I don’t think I did.
I get on so well with Phil. He is someone who I would imagine would be so intimidating in a relationship. Someone comments that he thinks about three levels above anyone else. It does not matter on the subject. Phil finally got married three or four years back to the surprise of many people. He is an ex-TAPR board member… More on Phil later…
Then came lunch. My idea for lunch at these things is to find a table with no-one I know sitting at it. Or even better find an empty table. You get to meet some very interesting people that way. After a short lunch I went back to the room to finish my second talk. This one was a general update on some tracking technology in general. The way it was structured was as a whole lot of five minute segments .
My concern with this talk was that it was going to be too commercial, and too much self-promotion. I don’t think I did too much of that. It is a fine balance and I think I won.
Friday night was time for the DCC Social. This is an excuse for people to gossip eating finger food and the like. Lasted for a couple of hours or so. Seems that the conference people do not drink much as a rule, and there was a $100 minimum if we had a bar. We decided on soft drinks, and that worked well.
I had a great talk with Phil Karn. We actually decide to write a paper on using IPV6 with Ham Radio. This will not only be cool but might end up getting my name on one of the RFC’s – and Internet Standard. Discussing this Phil noted that he had finally got one published after many years, and I referred to one where he was mentioned. Surprisingly he had not heard about this one.
One of the things he showed me was the incoming mail to his old email address of karn at ka9q.ampr.org
He actually just did a tail of the incoming mail log. He warned me that I would be shocked… I was. He was getting about one attempt per second to send mail to the ka9q.ampr.org address. And this has been going on for the last 18 months or so.
Assuming 3600 per hour. This is about 50,000,000 emails that people have tried to send to him…
Strangely most are not spam, but virii… Microsoft put his email address in the Release Notes to Windows XP, and some virii look for email addresses in files. And his email address is on every Windows PC. We also discussed the movie “The Dish” which we both loved.
I went up to my room early since I had a talk to finish writing the next day.
The Saturday was another full day. Slightly earlier start, but it was not too bad. I got to see about 75% of the first talk before I needed to leave for my session – Since it is always a good sign when the speaker is there BEFORE anyone else. I put on a slideshow of some APRS photos that I had collected doing consulting work. And the audience was impressed. I had used this morning session to finish my talk.
Steve Bible suggested I be careful using the mic. Aparently what I try to do is to throw my voice even if I am using a mic. Point taken. The talk was an introduction to APRS, and started off with some cool uses I had put it to, and then worked through the basics. Some of this I admit was a bit out of order, but it was good. People were asking the right questions. Having internet access there was cute. I could demo some of the Internet services available. The entire session of ninety minutes went very well.
One of the standout sessions was from my friend John Ackerman, N8UR. He is the president of TAPR, and very high up in the legal department of NCR. His presentation was on some of the legal situation with software, and particularly Open Source. Basically he gave a talk to us poor uneducated hams that he normally gives as a continuing education seminar and to internal NCR lawyers. I would suspect though that as a rule we got the legal implications better as a group than the people he normally speaks to.
Lets just ignore for the moment the fact that we were here on a weekend listening to a talk about the legal situation of free software, and just assume we really do have a life. Following the talks we had a TAPR membership meeting.
Then quickly followed the DCC Dinner. This was interesting. Before the sit-down part I got to speak to Pete Lovel and discussed the state of airports in the USA. He told of the Chicago minor airport [which I had already heard about] where a federal restriction on closing the airport expired. The mayor brought in the earth moving equipment at midnight and destroyed the runways with huge crosses. But not the taxiways. The taxiways were fine and could be used to get the planes out with special FAA permission.
The dinner talk was given by the guy who wrote the OS/9 operating system many moons ago, and was not the greatest DCC talk I had ever heard. I found it repetitive, having suggested the same thing for many years in the past.
Near the end of the evening, John Ackerman, TAPR president took the opportunity to talk to those assembled about the award for Roger. John read out the text of the award, which appears below.
After reading the citation, and showing the award to those assembled, those in attendance held a moments silence for Roger and his work. During the evening there were conversations on Roger’s legacy to the hobby which were always wonderful to listen to.
Roger’s family have sent out an invitation to any Amateur operators to attend his service if they wish to. Due to some quirk of fate, I will be arriving in London for the first time in my life on Tuesday morning, and will be attending the funeral on Wednesday, representing the international APRS community and TAPR.
You may view the plaque (at the moment) on http://www.radio-active.net.au/tapr/roger.jpg
The plaque reads
“TAPR Lifetime Achievement Award for contributions made to the Radio Art by Roger Barker, G4IDE, Lincolnshire, UK. Awarded September 11th, 2004 at the 23rd ARRL & TAPR Digital Communications Conference. Des Moines, Iowa”
The text of the parchment is
“TAPR Lifetime Achievement Award
TAPR is pleased to award a Lifetime Achievement Award to Roger Barker G4IDE, of Lincolnshire, UK.
Roger has worked tirelessly for many years to provide quality software for Amateur Radio operators, allowing them to operate advanced digital modes without the difficulties once associated with these operations.
The UI-View software is the benchmark by which all other APRS Raster Mapping software is compared to.
Whilst writing excellent software, Roger has also ensured that users are able to experiment with his software by allowing access to the internal features of his software through an extensive API. Once the software was written, he ensured that the software was extensively supported, starting mailing lists to support his software. To date one of these lists has had 35,000 messages, with Roger reading each one and replying to a significant number of them.
These are just some of the reasons that TAPR is proud to present a Lifetime Achievement Award to Roger Barker, G4IDE, for his services to Digital Communications”
After the dinner there were a huge number of little groups talking and gossiping. Who is doing what. You know the sort of thing. Reminicing. Some people see each other only twice a year. Others see each other every few months. With this in mind it should not surprise you that Saturday was a late night.
Sunday was had to be early but not too early. No talk but there was a session from 8:00 AM to Midday on DSP. This was really interesting. Not much to say apart from the fact that I did some emailing during this time. Other people were speaking through instant messaging…
One thing I forgot to say was that one of my friends IM’ed me and asked about what laptop he should get. My reply was along the lines of “I use a dell, but really since Bdale Garbee is sitting next to me my reply must be a HP running Debian Linux”. What you need to understand is that Bdale is head of Linux for HP, and he is a former head of Debian.
After the session finished everyone quickly went their own ways, until five or six of us went to an Italian restraunt for lunch. Quite nice but I am sure that things will be better when I am in Italy itself though. They tried to give some weird concoction to one of the people with us when he ordered ginger ale. They gave him a pepsi and bitter and something else mix without telling him. Since he did not want to have caffeine, he was not impressed. Not at all.
At the airport I made the mistake of not taking my laptop out of my bag. After all there were no signs. This was not a good move as they did the treatment on the bag including bomb scanning.
John and Tim (From Boston) with John and Laura Koster were the ones left at the Hotel. Then John and Tim left, although Tim did return when he realized that he had left the radio he had won the previous night. Tim, by the way, is mentioned in some of the articles about the Internet Worm since he happened to be at work early the day the Worm was let loose.
The flight to Chicago from Des Moines was pleasant enough.
In Chicago I used the Admirals Club lounge. This is a place that is slightly better than the one in LAX, but not much. Power outlets are hard to find, but I did find the bar even if I didn’t use it. The phone was good enough for me to ring Oz with a support issue I needed to fix.