Continuing with my SOTA exploits. This time my target was W6/NC-150, Black Mountain located in Rancho San Antonio county park near Cupertino, CA. The summit is accessible via 11.2 mile out and back PG&E trail. Elevation gain is 3146 feet. Beware of poison oak, ticks, rattlesnakes, mountain lions and feral software engineers wandering into the park from Silicon Valley.

I have already tried to activate Black Mountain few months ago but was not able to copy call signs fast enough. Was fairly optimistic about the activation this time as I expected quite a few folks to participate in the Field Day contest. Also I can copy a tad better now.

Welcome back folks. One thing I never mentioned before is my master’s degree in Radioengineering. Weirdly enough despite being fascinated with wireless communications from the very early age I didn’t get into amateur radio until recently. Just always thought passing exams is not quite worth it. Plus while learning to copy Morse code had been always on the list of things to do before pegging out I just ‘never had time for it’.

About a year ago, I was looking for a new walkie-talkie to take on hiking trips so our group had some means of communicating in no cell phone reception areas. While researching available options I realized it makes sense to get licensed to get access to amateur radio frequencies.

Hello friends, as I promised in my previous post I’m going to tell you about configuring GoogleWiFi router with a Raspberry Pi server acting as DHCP and DNS server / VPN gateway. While part related to NordVPN is vendor specific I feel it would not be too hard to use similar setup with any VPN provider. Feel free to skip VPN related part.

I’m not sponsored by NordVPN, instructions provided as is and as any information from the Internet should be used carefully.

With lot of time spent home during stay-at-home order active in my area I decided it’s a time to overhaul my home network setup.

I think I’ll get into details in the following posts but at this time I want to tell about an issue with DHCP leases I was able to track down using tcpdump.

Hey-hey kids it has been a while, right? Ok, I’m planning to blow the dust off this blog.

Don’t expect anything grandiose yet but I did some homework and moved the blog from Octopress to Hugo so this tin lizzy has a heart of a fighter jet now.

See you soon.