syslinx.org

Trip Planner for SOTA

Fri, 10 Apr 2026 12:46:02 +0200

My home QTH is in Duisburg, NRW. There are no mountains nearby. The Sauerland is about an hour away, the nearest 10-point summit over two hours. If you want several high-pointers close enough together for a multi-activation day, you are looking at the Thuringian Forest, the Black Forest, or the Alps, all of which are four to six hours of driving.

That makes trip planning an optimisation problem. Straight-line distance on a map is not a reliable guide to drive time, and a cluster of summits that looks useful may contain mostly expired references. So I put together a script to do the maths properly. It was written with help from Claude (Anthropic), mostly as a way to iterate quickly on the data pipeline and routing logic. The code is on Codeberg.

Optimize Video Playback in Firefox on Linux

Mon, 01 Sep 2025 12:59:09 +0200

In between re-installing Arch on my Thinkpad T14s, I noticed some issues when using Firefox to watch videos on YouTube: After just a few minutes, my fans would spin up to an extent that quickly became very annoying.

Upon researching a solution, I came across RapidFox, which is a guide that explains some helpful parameters for Firefox tweaking. There, I found dom.media.webcodecs.h265.enabled, which was set to false. Turning it on enables hardware-accelerated H.265 decoding which seems to result in a much lower CPU usage, helping to keep the fans quiet.

Summer SOTA trip

Fri, 22 Aug 2025 21:23:08 +0200

At the beginning of August, I took some time to activate a few SOTA summits in southeastern Germany and in the northern part of France. Conveniently, all of the peaks were also located in one or more POTA parks.

Rather than providing a detailed log for each activation, I wanted to share a few personal impressions and memories from these summits.

DM/BW-640 – Blößling (1310m)

I parked near the quarry in Bernau-Wacht and began my ascent along a rather monotonous mountain road. Aside from the final stretch — where the path narrows and winds through fields of blueberries — the hike was fairly uneventful.

Fixing the sound on my ThinkPad T14s Gen2

Thu, 31 Jul 2025 11:58:45 +0200

Speakers on most ThinkPads are not known for their audiophile quality. However, the sound on my ThinkPad T14s Gen 2 was really terrible on Linux; much more so than on Windows.

The issue here is that the settings and drivers for Dolby Audio are not available as open source. Your best bet is to try and recreate the sound using certain equalizer settings. I have spent some time researching the best program for that and even more time on finding the best settings for my ThinkPad.

SOTA cluster notifications on Mac OS and Linux

Tue, 03 Jun 2025 12:44:27 +0200

I wrote a small Python script that fetches data from the SOTA API and sends notifications once a new SOTA activator is spotted on the cluster.

Thanks to Ullrich (DF5WC) for helping me get this script running on Linux as well!

import requests
import time
import os
import platform

API_URL = "https://api2.sota.org.uk/api/spots/10/all"
CHECK_INTERVAL = 60  # seconds

# List the modes you want to be notified about (case-insensitive)
modes = ["SSB"]  # Example: ["SSB", "CW"]

def fetch_spots():
    """Fetch the latest spots from the SOTA API."""
    try:
        resp = requests.get(API_URL)
        resp.raise_for_status()
        return resp.json()
    except Exception as e:
        print("Error fetching spots:", e)
        return []

def notify(title, message):
    """Send a notification using the appropriate system command."""
    current_os = platform.system()
    if current_os == "Darwin":
        # macOS notification
        os.system(f'''osascript -e 'display notification "{message}" with title "{title}"' ''')
    elif current_os == "Linux":
        # Linux notification (requires notify-send)
        os.system(f'''notify-send "{title}" "{message}"''')
    else:
        print(f"Notification: {title} - {message}")

def main():
    seen = set()
    desired_modes = [m.upper() for m in modes]
    while True:
        spots = fetch_spots()
        for spot in spots:
            mode = spot.get("mode", "").upper()
            if mode in desired_modes:
                # Create a unique spot ID to avoid duplicate notifications
                spot_id = f"{spot.get('timeStamp')}_{spot.get('activatorCallsign')}_{spot.get('summitCode')}"
                if spot_id not in seen:
                    callsign = spot.get("activatorCallsign", "Unknown")
                    freq = spot.get("frequency", "Unknown")
                    summit = spot.get("summitCode", "")
                    comment = spot.get("comments", "")
                    # Avoid showing 'None' or empty comments in the notification
                    if comment is None:
                        comment = ""
                    msg = f"{callsign} on {freq} kHz ({summit})"
                    if comment:
                        msg += f" {comment}"
                    notify(f"New {mode} station in SOTA Cluster", msg)
                    seen.add(spot_id)
        # Limit memory usage by keeping only the last 1000 spot IDs
        if len(seen) > 1000:
            seen = set(list(seen)[-1000:])
        time.sleep(CHECK_INTERVAL)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

About

Tue, 15 Apr 2025 12:28:26 +0200

I began my ham radio journey in August 2024, when I received my novice license.

Initially, I had planned to study for Germany’s newly introduced N-class license, which is similar to the US Technician license and restricts operation to the 10m, 2m, and 70cm bands with a maximum of 10W EIRP. However, I soon realized that it would be more worthwhile to go straight for the proper novice class license (Class E). I continued my studies and passed the exam in August 2024. With my callsign DO8PHK, I was then able to operate on 160m, 80m, 15m, 10m, as well as VHF (2m) and UHF (70cm).

Contact

Tue, 15 Apr 2025 12:28:26 +0200

For details on how to contact me, see my QRZ.com page.

SOTA in neutral territory

Tue, 15 Apr 2025 09:04:19 +0200

On Easter Monday I used a short trip to Belgium as an excuse to activate ON/ON-026 (Le Mont d’Henri-Chapelle). Similar to my previous activation I had to fight against bad HF conditions. The ionosphere had been in a terrible state over the last few weeks, even leading to visible auroras in northern Germany, and today was no exception.

I brought my beloved Elecraft KX-2 with the bigger, higher voltage battery, so I could boost the total power to 12W instead of the regular 10W the KX-2 delivers with my smaller batteries. Joking aside, I even had my Yaesu FL-110 PA as a backup in case conditions got even worse than expected. In the end, I didn’t need the PA and I got a total of 5 QSOs in just over 30 minutes, one more than the 4 required to activate a summit. (2x EA, 2x OH, 1x YO).

Springtime POTA

Fri, 11 Apr 2025 09:04:19 +0200

On 11th April 2025 I decided to activate three new parks in my area. Contrary to my usual preferred mode of transportation, I took the car to carry along my heavy but trustworthy Yaesu FT-710. With a K-Index of 3.7 I decided it would be best to bring work with 100 instead of 10W power.

My first park was DE-0999 Latumer Bruch mit Buersbach, Stadtgräben und Wasserwerk Flora and Fauna Reserve which turned out to be crossed by DE-0602 ( Nordrheinische Jakobswege National Historic Trail) at different corners of the park. Finding a suitable location both accessible by car and offering the possibility of a 2fer wasn’t so easy after all. I ended up close to a highway right at the border of the park which produced annyoing QRM on the 40m band.