What Are Radios Used For?

Radio is all around you. Your cell phone, wifi, gps, microwave, walkie talkies, car radios, bluetooth speakers, etc. If your device doesn't have to be connected with a wire then you are using radio.

The Radio Spectrum

The radio spectrum refers to a set of frequencies from down near 1khz all the way up to 300ghz. On the low end you find things such as military, AM, and amateur radio. These radio frequencies are known as ELF (extremely low frequency), LF (low frequency), and HF (high frequency). These frequencies reflect off the upper atmosphere and return to earth allowing worldwide communication. The section above HF is called VHF (very high frequency). Here you will find your favorite music station for your drive to work, aircraft, amateur radio, railroads, businesses , boats, and TV. you read that right, your TV is nothing more than pictures sent over the radio. Above VHF comes UHF (ultra high frequency). Here you will find amateur radio, more businesses, cell phones, emergency services (think fire and EMS), etc. Above this point you get gps, wifi, satellite TV, microwaves, etc.

How Does My Microwave Cook Food Without Hurting me?

Good question. Your microwave uses nearly the same frequency as your home wifi. The difference is in power and shielding. Your microwave runs at ~700 watts of power. Your wifi router on the other hand runs at 1 watt or less. The microwave also traps the generated radio waves inside the compartment where your food is placed.

Modes, RDF And DX

radio modes are pretty simple. AM, FM, CW (morse code) and SSB (single side band) are all examples of radio modes. RDF (radio direction finding), also known as fox hunting, is trying to find where a radio signal is coming from. RDF can be used to find downed aircraft, locate someone in the woods, track down interference, or just for fun. Radio DX or simply DX is listening for a far away station to see if you can hear something. If you live in the US and hear a station from Europe, that's DX. getting antenna TV channels from far away is DX. Even hearing a weak signal in your car on a channel that is normally static is DX.

Analog, Digital, Scanners and the Future

Digital radio is here like it or not. Tv is digital, emergency services are going digital, amateur radio ops are going digital, even the radio stations you listen to in your car are going digital. A big reason is that digital takes up less spectrum. Think of beach front homes. There are only so many to go around. Once those are all full there are no more left for others. Digital radio makes every property a bit smaller but not to small and allows new homes to be built on the same beach. Digital radio also allows for encryption of radio signals. Analog radios can see a signal there but are unable to decrypt it to listen to the voice data. This is a source of argument between the public and cops for example.

Customer Service

I don't know about you, but i hate calling customer service. They are usually slow to answer, hard to understand, bounce you from department to department, adhere to a script even after you tell them what you've tried, etc. Not Ting. The longest i have ever had to wait for help was 5 minutes. That is extremely uncommon. I have called and gotten a person within 10 seconds of hitting the dial button as well. The agents are helpful, easy to understand, knoledgeable, and I have never had to be transfered (unless I asked).

No Contracts Ever

Most companies have eliminated the two year “contract”. It has been replaced by a “service agreement” or other such nonsense. Different name, same result. Ting doesn't do business that way. You pay for your phone in full (more on that later) or bring your own device. You then pay for only the service each month. Since you are not financing the phone from them, you may leave at any time. No more early termination fees or surprise bills when switching.

Coverage, Coverage, Coverage

Coverage and price is what most people care about with their cell service. Since Ting uses three of the four major networks they have coverage most everywhere. I think they suggest the network that has the best coverage during signup based on your address. If you wish to change networks in the future just give customer service a call.

The Price Is Right

Ting doesn't have plans like most people are used to. They have adopted a “pay for what you use” model. This means that most people save big money. Your bill changes from month to month based on your usage. You can set limits on minutes, texting, and data to control what you will pay at maximum. You want to spend no more than $40? That's possible. Here are my bills from June 2019 until February 2020. They were $26.30, $26.18, $32.24, $40.24, $25.23, $33.38, $26.17, $39.23, and $41.70. These numbers are for 3 lines for my grandmother, fiance and I. Comparing those prices to Metro by T-Mobole my bill would be $100 and would not include hotspot. Visible from Verizon would be $90 and require each of us to pay our bill separately. Grab a few of your old bills and head over to the Ting rate calculator and see what your bill would be.

Buying Devices

You can buy devices from the Ting Shop, buy an unlocked device from the manufacturer or from the internet, or bring your own. You generally have to pay full price for the device in question. My personal opinion is that most people wouldn't spend a stack on a phone if they upgraded every year and maybe never. You can find new low cost phones like the Pixel 3a that work just as well as more expensive devices. If you already have an unlocked device then you are one step ahead.

From Personal Experience

I have been with Ting since May of 2015. In that time I have rescued my grandmother from overpaying with AT&T, spoken with customer service on a number of occasions, and generally enjoyed the service. If you wish to switch, try out my link and get a $25 bill credit.

That is just one example. Many cable and TV providers are trying to milk a rock. The more customers leave, the more the prices rise and the more customers leave. This is a crazy race to the bottom for these providers. Many of these companies are extremely low In customer satisfaction. Can’t say as I blame the customers for leaving.

There are thankfully a number of options with more coming on the scene all the time. Many streaming services are actually pretty good and won’t break the bank. Antenna TV is still I viable option for most of the country and new providers are promising to disrupt the cable industry even more in the near future.

If you have any opinion on this topic, feel free to contact me. Topics you would like me to cover would be welcome as well.

Signal

Many of the readers here will have likely heard of or be actively using Signal. To those people I say “good job” keep trying to help your friends see the errors of their ways. To those who have never heard of Signal let me introduce you.Reader, This is Signal. An easy to use and completely private messenger application for IOS and Android. Signal doesn't know who you talk to, for how long,what you talk about, etc. If the government were to demand the data about you they would get nothing except for your registration phone number and the last time you used the service. If they ask Facebook for your messages they would get all the data Signal doesn't have and much much more. Signal lets users send stickers, GIFS emojis, etc. These are all things that you or your friends likely use. You can also send audio, pictures, files, contacts, location, etc. The application also supports high quality voice and video calls so your conversation stays between you.

Encrypted Email

Email is a huge part of everyone's digital life. We use email to communocate with friends, get receipts for things we buy, password reset links (even though thats not very secure), reservations, etc. With all this personal information just sitting around it is very important to secure your email. Unfortunately, many people trust Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, etc (oh the horror) with their email. These companies claim to offer “free email” but they are making money by scanning every message you receive. This helps them target advertising to you and they can sell data about you to third parties you have never heard of. Proton Mail and Tutanota are built to protect user privacy. They offer free accounts that don't spy on you by using a subscription model to unlock features. I personally pay for Proton because I like what they have to offer. Some features you can unlock by subscribing include sorting incoming mail into subfolders, increased storage space, increased daily sending limit, etc. The free users still get the promise of strong end-to-end encryption and you don't have to give any personal information to sign up.

Final Thoughts

While keeping your privacy online may seem like a daunting task it is important to try. Taking any step to that end is better than doing nothing at all. Don't listen to the people who think you are crazy. They will realize one day that you actually knew what you were talking about. Also, while not an encrypted service, if you are looking to replace your Facebook/Twitter then check out my post about Mastodon.

So Mastodon Then...

Imagine if email and Twitter had a baby. It would be Mastodon. Mastodon is similar to Twitter in that it is a micro-blogging platform where one can follow and be followed by friends or anyone else (depending on privacy settings). Since the platform is called Mastodon and uses a wooly mammoth/elephant as it's mascot your statuses are called toots. This is similar to the sound elephants make.

Mastodon is similar to email because of it's federation. What's that? Well, you may have a Gmail address and your friend may have an Outlook address. You can communicate with your friend using Outlook because Outlook, Gmail, and every other provider all speak the language of email. Mastodon servers also all speak the same language. It's called ActivityPub (more on that later). So just like email you can have an account on one instance (website) and your friend can have an account on another.

Alright, So Why Should I Care?

Good question. Do you remember Myspace? Well, when that lost popularity people had to sign-up for and find their friends on Facebook. Except some of your friends didn't go to Facebook did they? Some went to Twitter. Now you have two accounts to manage and keep up with. This is because users of these platforms are put into a box. You can't find your Twitter friend from Facebook and your friends can't find your Facebook from their Twitter.

Mastodon breaks these boxes apart. Any of your friends can be on any of about 1000 websites, yet it is simple to find and interact with them. Don't worry about signing up right now, we'll get to that.

Since Mastodon isn't run by a large company it has totally different priorities. Companies such as Facebook and Twitter trick their users into staying on or coming back to the platform. By eliminating Chronological timelines they get users to refresh the page or read further down to see if they missed something. This allows the companies to display more ads and collect more data about what you as the user engage with. Have you ever gotten a notification that you have a new message, like etc? You click to find out what it is only to discover nothing waiting for you. This is a tactic to make you come back to the platform in order to monitize you.

So What Is This Fediverse Thing?

You are full of great questions. The fediverse is simply a bunch of websites and services that also speak ActivityPub. Remember I said we would get there. Well here we are. Imagine being able to comment on your favorite YouTube video, blog post, or song from that artist you follow all without leaving Your timeline. As long as the service speaks ActivityPub that is completely possible. We have talked about mastodon, but Peertube, Writefreely and Funkwhale (I don't name these things) are for videos, blogging and music respectivly. There are also other smaller social networks like Friendica (Facebook) and GNU social. However, i don't know enough about them to give any thoughts.

How Can I Get An Account?

That's the easy part. Just visit joinmastodon.org. You will find a server picker where you can select a catagory of interest as well as a language. You can pick general for an instance with no set topic. Shameless plug, I run megadon.net which is a general instance. Take a look at the rules and join there if you wish.

My alarm clock shatters my dreams and brings me back into the plane of reality. I wish i could go back to sleep. Even as this thought occurs to me my lights start to brighten as if they can read my mind. In today's world, that very well may be the case.

A few minutes later when i walk into the kitchen i can smell my coffee and delivered breakfast waiting for me. When i sit down my television springs to life as it does every morning. Headlines of the news picked by my AI scroll across the screen allowing me to see what has happened across the world since i went to bed. I finish my breakfast within the predicted time frame and head outside to my ride share just as it is arriving.

As the car pulls away I get to sit back and “enjoy my disconnect time.” On my way to work. My AI has everything covered. I only work 3 days a week because according to the doctor “we need some purpose in life”. Everyone knows the AIs running the factorys and restaurants can work faster, longer, and produce more than humans. We take tradeoffs in productivity to keep us sane though. Heck, we don't even get paid. We get a check each month from the AI tax that was put on every business when jobs were replaced. Poverty is non-existant and the wealthy class is gone too. Everyone gets enough to pay for all living expenses plus a “Sun Fund”.

My four hour “work day” breezes by as predetermined. Since the weather is nice i decide i will walk around downtown and have a look through the shops. “That ice cream sure would taste nice” i think as the shop comes into view. I don't even have to wait in a line anymore. By the time I get their my AI has already placed and paid for my order.

Thoughts

This seems like a great place to live right? This is a way i could imagine the future being. However, this future is not as nice as it appears.

The AI knows either by some sort of brain to machine interface or very accurate predictions that our character would wish to fall back asleep. It also knew exactly what to have delivered for breakfast, when to order the car and what type of ice cream our character would want.

Privacy implications

We can already get many of these things today. We can ask Google or Siri to perform a list of tasks upon command or when triggered by an event. We can order and pay for our transportation from our phones or with our voices.

All of these things come at a cost however. When using these “free” services you are actually paying a steep price. Your data is more precious to these companies than a few dollars. These mega corps choose for example to make little to no profit right away in order to guarantee large sums later. By getting your data they can accurately predict where you will go, with whom you will go with, what you will buy and what advertisements will catch your fancy for future purchases.

What Can Be Done?

While it is nearly impossible to stop all tracking it is possible to limit. How much is your own choice. One of the simplest things you can do is change your search engine to a privacy respecting one such as DuckDuckGo. You share extremely intimate details in search that can easily be used to profile and influence you. From medical questions and political candidates to salaries and more. These things can easily be used against you. You may be forced out of your job, denied housing, pay more for insurance, loans and more just from search.

Other things you can do include deleting Facebook Whatsapp Instagram — all owned by Facebook — and Twitter. Give Mastodon Pixelfed and Signal Private Messenger a try.

Don't use the stock software on your smartphone. If you own an Android device there are privacy respecting custom roms. Some may not wish to try this process themselves and that's okay. Ask friends, friends of friends or someone online to help you through the process.

There are many other things you can do to better protect yourself. You can ask me anything you need help with. Just visit my About Me page.

The Linux Example.

Many linux users express concern that large company partners of the linux foundation may be involved in these tactics. Looking at the corporate members page reveals some disturbing names. why might Google, Microsoft and Facebook want to sponsor Linux? Google owns ChromeOS which is built upon linux with Google closed-source code of course. Microsoft has Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) which allows some linux applications to be directly run in Windows 10. Facebook tried and failed to make a Facebook phone platform a few years ago and owns Oculus VR which uses Android as it's operating system.

The Mastodon Example

According to this article from December of 2019, Twitter will be hiring a team of 5 people to either improve upon or create a new standard for decentralized social media. Sound familiar? Twitter knows that in the long term the fediverse is a better solution. They will attempt to come in, corrupt ActivityPub, and then kill other fediverse projects who don't want a corrupted standard.

Thankfully, this will not be an easy task. A lot of Mastodon users fled Twitter for their own reasons. They are not likely to go back under the thumb of Twitter without a major fight.

Many mastodon instances would block these Twitter instances. This would effectively isolate Twitter users into an echo chamber until they were ready to leave and join the real fediverse.

Merger goes to court

A group of states decided to challenge the governments ruling and take the case before a federal judge. However, when the trial occured in late december the group of states were extremely ill-prepared to defend their position. Just recently the judge ruled that the merger could continue.

final thoughts.

Whether you were for or against this merger, you have to admit. The only thing the states accomplished was wasting time and taxpayer dollars.