[PLUG] Sad News

[Walt Mankowski via plug <plug@lists.phillylinux.org>]

I have some sad news to share -- Jim Fisher, aka jedijf, passed away
suddenly on Tuesday. Some more recent members of PLUG may know Jim
best because he was the person who supplied FOSSCON with bagels every
year. Aside from that Jim wasn't directly involved much in PLUG in
recent years but was one of our core members in the early years. Many
of us who met Jim back then remained friends with him all these
years. He was a enthusiastic support of Linux, open source, and
tinkering in general.

One reason Jim's involvement in PLUG lessened is that he became
involved in the Philadelphia area amateur radio community, and served
as the president of the Phil-Mont Mobile Radio Club for many years
until his death. He brought the same sense of camaraderie and
enthusiasm to that group as he did to PLUG. It was through Jim and a
few other folks in PLUG that I started looking into ham radio. I
passed my tech and general exams in June (callsign KC3WHU) and there's
absolutely no way I'd have done it without Jim's encouragement to
"play radio".

Jim's funeral is Tuesday morning. PLUG North is scheduled for Tuesday
night. Since we don't have anything else scheduled, I thought we could
honor Jim's memory by doing a presentation on open source for ham
radio. I'm still learning all this myself, so anything I put into the
presentation will be definition be for novices. I'm going to announce
it on the philmont mailing list too, so some folks from that group
might be on the Jitsi call too.

Then if anyone's interested, every Tuesday night at 8 PM philmont does
something called "Digital Education Net for newbies" (DENn). I've only
attended a few so far, and they've all been about using radios as
"modems" to transfer data between computers. You'll need a radio and a
license to transmit anything, but they also have a Zoom channel where
you can watch how the instructor is using the programs. And to be
honest the radios aren't doing much work. All the fancy signal
processing is happening inside an open source program called "fldigi",
and it works off of any audio signal. I've gotten it to work by
holding my radio up to my webcam speaker. It's kind of cool, in a "I
can't believe this actually works!" kind of way.

So anyway, I'll aim to finish my presentation before 8, then anyone
who's still interested can hop over to the DENn zoom feed. That
usually lasts about 9 or 9:15.

Jim was an amazing person, and all of us who knew him were devastated
when we heard the news yesterday. I hope Tuesday's meeting will help
carry on his legacy of introducing new users to the world of ham
radio.

Walt
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