I have a gift – or a curse, I’m not sure.  As a software engineer, it is my job to simplify tasks and provide efficient solutions to what I like to call “real world problems”.   I am not a technical person and many can’t understand this.  Let me explain.

Whether it is electricity, gas, cars, or anything along those lines, I tend to battle a lot more than people would expect.  Until I explain that I live in a world where anything is possible – if it does not already exist, I make it.  So when I ask if a penlight battery can power an HF rig for a 24 hour field station people just laugh.  In my mind I can’t understand why they simply don’t just make a penlight battery with that capability – I would if you could code it!

So you can’t code batteries and other “real world problems” but several decades of “inventive engineering” can make you expect things 🙂

Ok, so what does this have to do with a national Hamnet exercise?  Well I wrote a small web application on one of our test servers at the salt mine and with that managed to keep 11 teams around the country busy sending messages on HF and VHF for a full 24 hours period.  The script is available to anyone who would like to run a similar event – just yell and I’ll help where I can.

Basically it involved generating a bunch of messages (I needed about 357, but shortened it to 342 final tally).  The desired message rate was “2-3 message per hour, with about the same coming in“.  So I kept the teams in order for outbound messages, but randomised the message destination team so there was no pattern to make it boring.  I then sent a message off every 4 minutes.  This meant a team would get an out bound message every 44 minutes and this seemes to have done the trick.

Generating 350 messages also sounds like a hugh task – but being fundamentally lazy I found an easy way – a sort of “mail merge” so you can make a missing persons report where the detail such as race, gender, age, height, weight, and when/where they went missing is all pulled in from random text files.  Super easy to use and once again – available for free to anyone who would like to use it.

So, in short, running someting like this is not a big deal.  But it was fun and inspiring – hearing the people, 23 and a half hours into the event asking if we could carry on since they were still having fun – priceless!  Radio hams are all nice friendly people and the underlying courtesy and professionalism came shining through.

Some of the challenges included battery power, lighting, and heating!  While the Limpopo was mild, the Free State was freezing!  I would like to be a part of something like this again in the future and wonder if I could stand the cold like they did?

The basic plan

Teams were tasked with setting up a VHF team with internet access (to get messages to send and to log the messages received) and a HF team with good comms to relay messages.  This meant that each message followed at least a VHF->HF->VHF path but a large number needed to be relayed so even more hands were involved.  A great deal of message sending and good practice.