Another SOTA hike yesterday. This one was relatively easy for being a 4-pointer: not steep, not even terribly long, just a bit of a drive to get there, and I paid a lot of road tolls through Eggedal, to have a look. https://sotl.as/summits/LA/BU-062 Such a stiff breeze that not only was I a bit cold, but even the #zbitx managed to stay cool. I used the /P suffix this time: maybe I always should have. The software handled it fine. Had to start separate logbooks on LOTW and QRZ.

I finally got back to SOTA activation of Gyrihaugen yesterday https://sotl.as/summits/LA/BU-027 after trying last spring and failing to get the #zbitx battery polarity right that time (fried a PCB trace, had to fix it). Much better results this time: pskreporter said I was also heard in Australia and North America, just didn't have any QSOs with them. Not bad for 3-4 watts. But it's a rather tiring hike for a mere 2 points. I doubt that I will repeat that one very often.

At the Chicken meetup I showed https://github.com/ec1oud/sbitx/tree/sbitxd on #zbitx with both clients: Plan 9 https://git.sr.ht/~ecloud/sbitx-9p-client and Qt on Linux (not pushed anywhere yet). Both immature and off-topic: not using Chicken (yet). But tangentially related to the 9sg project that sortof does use Chicken in some cases. Instead of describing a UI with a 9p filesystem, I just expose the radio's functionality as a 9p filesystem that the UI "discovers". Realized afterwards: my first IOTA contact was HG8LXL on FT8 😀

A couple of #zbitx related thingies: a battery holder for 3 LiFePO4 cells https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:7123780 And my fan https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:7015499 is smaller now. So it's surviving for portable use. Still a power hog though: I get around an hour from the 3 cells, if I'm transmitting the usual amount to get some FT8 QSOs. FT4 would be more efficient; and ft8_lib can do it; so, some day...

I set up the #zbitx on the beach in Jūrmala (my wife's favorite vacay spot) a couple of weeks ago with a telescoping 5M vertical whip from AE, on two different mornings, and had a few QSOs. It was a chance to test the support for prefixed callsigns in ft8_lib (I was YL/LB2JK). The original author lives in Riga, and I had a meeting with him while I was there to discuss those changes, which he's just integrated upstream: https://github.com/kgoba/ft8_lib/commit/9fec6ca39886edbf96f4f5e71edc76da5074e871 (I didn't mean to squash all those patches though)

After the SOTA activation I felt the need to make log exporting easier from the #zbitx. Lately I've been using a daemon version of the application: https://github.com/ec1oud/sbitx/tree/sbitxd (look ma, 9p and no GTK). So I added the logbook/all.adif virtual file to the 9p server: it reads one record at a time from sqlite and formats ADI records on the fly. Now export is as easy as mounting it and then `grep 20250824 /mnt/zbitx/logbook/all.adif > 20250824.adi` Which got me thinking about arbitrary queries somehow…

Activated another SOTA peak yesterday with the #zbitx: Høgevard https://sotl.as/summits/LA/BU-031 I took the JPC-12 antenna and nanovna; figured I'd try 10 meters first, but ended up on 15 (it seemed easier to tune there), and got a few decent DX contacts (farthest was K4MPM in Georgia, USA) with less than 5W.