2023-12-29 - 1200+ Subscribers!, Print and the Digital World, Amateur Radio & Satellite Communication Promoted in MAPCON 2023 at Ahmedabad (Gujarat) INDIA
I think the CQ story hits the solution right on the head. I know if this model were implemented I would read it. I don't read it now, mostly because I haven't invested in a subscription to see if it's something I would like, and I didn't know about the free versions on the website until just now.
My one strong suggestion about this model would be to avoid PDF and use HTML instead. PDF is a great format for some things, but it is really designed around the idea of a printed page, and that's what we are trying to get away from. The reason for this suggestion is that reading PDFs on mobile is akin to reading a newspaper with a magnifying glass. The fact that horizontal scrolling is a bad user experience has been recognized for decades and is the origin of the tradition that text email and BBS posts don't exceed 80 columns.
Other major general-interest newspapers and magazines don't publish their content in PDFs, they use HTML sites that can be rendered appropriately for the size of the display in use. I have tried reading QST in their mobile app. It's fine in a tablet, but on a phone it's a mess of manually scrolling up and down each page 2 or 3 times to get to the content. I think the user experience is pretty terrible all the way around.
Dec 30, 2023·edited Dec 30, 2023Liked by Steve Stroh N8GNJ
Speaking of Hamclock... I run a persistent instance on one of my small Dell Wyse 3040 thin clients that also hosts an AllStarLink node (# 588411). I found that after starting Hamclock in an SSH terminal, and then closing the SSH connection, the Hamclock instance would die. To make it persistent, install tmux, then run tmux before starting Hamclock. When you close your SSH connection, tmux is still running and the Hamclock instance remains "up."
On my LAN, this Hamclock runs at http://192.168.1.147:8081/live.html. I just have a bookmark on the desktop and open up the running Hamclock whenever I want it on my screen. One of the beautiful things about this method is the Hamclock will generally resize whenever you resize the window Hamclock is running in.
If you wanted to run Hamclock in a kiosk mode (say, at a ham club meeting), then you may not want people changing things on your instance. You can run it without allowing others to monkey with it by initiating Hamclock with ./hamclock -c &
In closing, my non-ham spouse loves the Hamclock because she sees the day-night line on whatever globe projection I'm showing, plus I have the moon up so she can tell the phase of the moon. We also track the ISS just because. "That is so cool!" she says :-)
I don't know what got into me--since I'm a dyed-in-the-wool CW guy--but I downloaded fldigi and made my first Olivia contact less than an hour before reading this issue of Zero Retries. My initial impression is that it's PSK-31 with error correction. That is to say it's pretty slow. Of course, I was using the basic 8/250 mode. There are modes with faster data rates. At any rate, it was a nice change of pace, and I'll probably try it again.
As far as CQ goes, I hate to say it, but I think it's a lost cause. I just don't see how CQ can compete with all the online content that's out there for free. CQ would have to offer something really unique to get enough people to pay for it.
I wonder about the economics of a $6/year subscription model. Virtually every subscription publisher wants that or more PER MONTH. I read things from so many sources, I could never justify subscribing to them all at that kind of rate. It could easily be hundreds of dollars per month. If any of them were down around $6 a year, it would be easy to justify, but I suspect that they don't because it doesn't work as a business case. Happy to be wrong on that.
I think the CQ story hits the solution right on the head. I know if this model were implemented I would read it. I don't read it now, mostly because I haven't invested in a subscription to see if it's something I would like, and I didn't know about the free versions on the website until just now.
My one strong suggestion about this model would be to avoid PDF and use HTML instead. PDF is a great format for some things, but it is really designed around the idea of a printed page, and that's what we are trying to get away from. The reason for this suggestion is that reading PDFs on mobile is akin to reading a newspaper with a magnifying glass. The fact that horizontal scrolling is a bad user experience has been recognized for decades and is the origin of the tradition that text email and BBS posts don't exceed 80 columns.
Other major general-interest newspapers and magazines don't publish their content in PDFs, they use HTML sites that can be rendered appropriately for the size of the display in use. I have tried reading QST in their mobile app. It's fine in a tablet, but on a phone it's a mess of manually scrolling up and down each page 2 or 3 times to get to the content. I think the user experience is pretty terrible all the way around.
Speaking of Hamclock... I run a persistent instance on one of my small Dell Wyse 3040 thin clients that also hosts an AllStarLink node (# 588411). I found that after starting Hamclock in an SSH terminal, and then closing the SSH connection, the Hamclock instance would die. To make it persistent, install tmux, then run tmux before starting Hamclock. When you close your SSH connection, tmux is still running and the Hamclock instance remains "up."
On my LAN, this Hamclock runs at http://192.168.1.147:8081/live.html. I just have a bookmark on the desktop and open up the running Hamclock whenever I want it on my screen. One of the beautiful things about this method is the Hamclock will generally resize whenever you resize the window Hamclock is running in.
If you wanted to run Hamclock in a kiosk mode (say, at a ham club meeting), then you may not want people changing things on your instance. You can run it without allowing others to monkey with it by initiating Hamclock with ./hamclock -c &
In closing, my non-ham spouse loves the Hamclock because she sees the day-night line on whatever globe projection I'm showing, plus I have the moon up so she can tell the phase of the moon. We also track the ISS just because. "That is so cool!" she says :-)
I don't know what got into me--since I'm a dyed-in-the-wool CW guy--but I downloaded fldigi and made my first Olivia contact less than an hour before reading this issue of Zero Retries. My initial impression is that it's PSK-31 with error correction. That is to say it's pretty slow. Of course, I was using the basic 8/250 mode. There are modes with faster data rates. At any rate, it was a nice change of pace, and I'll probably try it again.
As far as CQ goes, I hate to say it, but I think it's a lost cause. I just don't see how CQ can compete with all the online content that's out there for free. CQ would have to offer something really unique to get enough people to pay for it.
Hey, please note that it was not M0LTE that wrote freedvtnc2 - it was @xssfox - https://github.com/xssfox
Great article and I agree with your analysis and proposed solution.
I wonder about the economics of a $6/year subscription model. Virtually every subscription publisher wants that or more PER MONTH. I read things from so many sources, I could never justify subscribing to them all at that kind of rate. It could easily be hundreds of dollars per month. If any of them were down around $6 a year, it would be easy to justify, but I suspect that they don't because it doesn't work as a business case. Happy to be wrong on that.