Cell phones cause cancer...Uh?

UPDATE: The Wall Street Journal has published a more balanced (although not completely hysteria-free) article on the study.

Cancer from RF? Buckle your seatbelts folks because the roller coaster is just getting started. Like an early teaser trailer for an upcoming blockbuster movie, the first few details from a new study looking for a connection between radio waves and cancer were released this week. The headline screamed the sensational claim: “'Game-Changing' Study Links Cellphone Radiation to Cancer”. However, what the study actually found may be far from settled.

First, let me say I have a great interest in this topic. Not only am I an amateur radio operator who uses relatively high powered RF devices on a frequent basis, I also lost a close friend (and former boss) to brain cancer. Although he was just 37 when he died, he had already spent many years using early model cell phones and other equipment in the broadcast radio industry where he, no doubt, was exposed to much higher levels of RF than the average citizen.

Do I want there to be link between RF exposure and cancer? No, absolutely not. However, do I want to find a away to prevent the cruel decline and death that my friend and his family endured? Absolutely. Let's be absolute in both cases.

Let's take a look at the study's report and dig through some of the findings.

First, the report is NOT a complete report on the study. According to its authors, it only “presents partial findings” of the study and notes that analysis of the complete data is still being conducted. The

Winlink on Raspberry PI

I've been wanting to find a way to check my Winlink using my Raspberry Pi. I was not too familiar with AX.25 and all of its workings, so this was an education process from the start.

I'm using a Pi 2 running Raspbian Jessie, along with Direwolf, a Singalink and a Baofeng UV-5R. I maintain a 1200 baud packet RMS Gateway at our our local Office of Emergency Management.  Here's the steps I took, with great thanks to Andrew's Memory Blog who was doing something similar.

1. Connect the radio to the Pi. In my case, I had a spare Signalink which I used. I built an audio cord from half of an old Baofeng earpiece and some Cat5 cable.
2. Update your Pi with: 'sudo apt-get update' and then 'sudo apt-get upgrade' 
3. Download and build Direwolf. Instructions for doing so on a Pi are here. These instructions are for an iGate, but the basics of getting direwolf on the Pi come straight from the software author and as great. 
4. Configure Direwolf with your callsign and sound card. The file to edit is direwolf.conf, found in the installation directory. VERY IMPORTANT: This tripped me up even AFTER reading this. Be sure to avoid the  “# ADEVICE – plughw:1,0” line. It looks a lot like the correct “ADEVICE  plughw:1,0” line, but takes input from stdin instead of the sound card. Uncomment the one WITHOUT the dash in the middle of it. 
5. Install AX25. Next: sudo apt-get install ax25-tools ax25-apps libax25-dev libncurses5-dev
6. Edit /etc/ax25/axports and set one line to:  radio  mycall 1200 255 2 VHF
7. Make sure all the other lines in axports have # in front of them (it doesn’t like blank lines).
8. Run “direwolf -p” to get the KISS port. It will show up as something like /dev/pts/2. Once it’s running, move to another terminal window