It's a neat idea, but could be implemented entirely in software with a RTLSDR. Not my cup of tea, but I'm all for absolutely ANYTHING that gets more activity on V/UHF.

A longer term project goal for me would be a SBC and a couple RTLSDRs with a good antenna that simultaneously does APRS igating, streaming audio of all the local repeaters and a few simplex channels, and notifications like this project, and like the "adventure radio" project that uses CTCSS tones to trigger alerts. I think it would be a nice service to provide for locals. The only "trick" is that RTLSDRs can only simultaneously decode within a 2.5mhz window, so it would probably require a little scanning to cover everything, or too many sticks. Doing a project cheaply, but effectively, encourages copy-cats.

50 meters is enough for a 80m 1/2w dipole. And yes, google a "fan dipole" - you can hang multiple dipoles below each other with as little as a few inches of separation. However, the dipoles interact with each other, and getting it right gets more troublesome the more you do.

It mirrored the contemporary idea of the "End of History", where all the existational crises were done with, the federation (was basically moving into a time of refinement rather than having to worry that the experiment might still utterly and completely fail. TNG was basically one long, slow lesson of why that was a flawed notion. You don't build a cruise liner, fill it with families, and then intentionally send it into the kind of peril that regularly befitted the Enterprise D. In retrospect, it was completely ridiculous.

Agreed. This isn't a responsible use of spectrum, unlike, say commercial shortwave broadcasting. This practice is purely about gaining a pay-for-play advantage in high frequency stock trading over traders that can "only" communicate across the country via fiber internet links. No net benefit, even for the stock traders, who will be hurt by this more often than they can take advantage of it. Sure, sell HF licenses to commercial users, but this is a bad idea.

fyi, nearly everyone that succeeds in achieving morse proficiency recommend strongly against any sort of visual cues like this. It's an auditory "language" and adding visual interpretation steps just adds cognitive load and hurts in the long run. It may be fine if your goal is to learn max 5 words per minute or something extremely slow.

Yes. This is a setting in the menu. Audio source is selectable separately for -D and non-D, so one of them can use the mic and one can use the aux, or whatever you want. I believe it also recalls the various DSP settings as well, so you can set things up how you like for phone, and for digi and easily toggle back and forth.

It's not about a pre-set per-se, but about having 2 custom U/LSB profiles.

That manual is written by Jordan, but the key point is not the manual, it's the software and protocol.

JS8Call has a few bits it can devote to "special" group calls that save a lot of bandwidth, and saving bandwidth improves how much you can send in a single cycle, improving both communication speed AND fidelity. But there are only a few of them because they are limited by the protocol design, so Jordan necessarily has to be selective. He chose to devote one of those to a group with christofascist and insurrection ties. That is an implied endorsement, or special assistance rendered to that group that turns off a LOT of hams. It's quite literally baked in to the software. If that doesn't bother you, fine, but I hope you can see why many of us would rather just stay clear of something like that.

The relaying is also a problem. Though most people don't automatically relay, it's worth being aware that if you turn that feature on, you could be carrying water for AMRRON. It could also be illegal at a point. Without the network features of JS8Call, it doesn't actually bring a while lot of fancy features beyond existing digimodes.

Star Trek discussion /usually/ tends toward anything new being bad, and always has. SNW and lower decks are exceptions because they do so much fan service and return to a more classic Trek format. Discovery was groundbreaking in a way that I'm sure Roddenberry would have enjoyed, but groundbreaking also implies jarring change and throwing away things that work for experiments that sometimes don't.

The great thing about the fediverse is that you can rage-quit 100 different instances!

I've played around with this before, and it does indeed seem to work quite well via audio coupling, which makes me think it's probably a little more robust than typical packet. Glad to see the various new digital modes being developed for on FM. Some people just have an HT and need more toys to play with than just APRS.

It's about being able to watch transactions on, say the west coast, then buy or sell in NYSE before those transactions can traverse the Internet across the continent and change the price. It would be very simple "buy now" commands, used to essentially cheat less resource rich traders. They have used dedicated fiber lines try to do the same thing, but this would be quicker sometimes. There's absolutely no public value to it, but money to be extracted.

You can check what the current state of the radios on the ISS are here: https://www.ariss.org/current-status-of-iss-stations.html

Packet will make a "braaap"? sound. (Idk, it sounds like that too me), and voice modes, you will likely hear people calling. Nearly every pass people are trying to get in. Remember to adjust frequency for doppler, and open your squelch because the signals will start out weak. More info here: https://amsat-uk.org/beginners/how-to-hear-the-iss/