Baudwalking New Modes of Communication By Tom Sundstrom, W2XQ appy New Year and belated Seasons The significant difference: IM is one-on-one, of your radio “career.” But how, you ask? Greetings to the Monitoring Times whereas IRC is a multi-user chat room. family of readers, subscribers, ad- How does all of this tie into the subjects Instant Messaging Hvertisers and gang behind the desks in North that interest Monitoring Times readers? Whereas These snappy little software programs Carolina. Baudwalking is a new occasional the printed word in MT provides the depth and were originally designed to do just one thing. column that takes a wide look at what’s new on background to current events, such as features on You could tell when another person signed onto the Internet as it pertains to radio, media and monitoring in the Middle East, the World Wide the Internet and could engage in a keyboard communications. Web cannot easily provide the details, depth and “chat” with that person. Feedback is immediate The listening and amateur radio hobbies analysis found in the MT articles. Rather, the ‘net and positive, without the delays of e-mail and radically changed beginning with the 1980-era is superb when it comes to breaking news. frustration of not knowing if the mail recipient telephone BBS systems and the Internet’s growth One example. As this column’s deadline had read the latest message sent. starting in 1994 or so.1 But this isn’t a history was looming, a window into the IRC chat chan- Marketing pressures and software designers lesson. There are several sources for looking at nel #swl came to life. It was late at night, and have added everything but the kitchen sink to the past.2 Let’s get going and communicate. listeners in Baltimore, New Hampshire, and Electronic mail is probably the largest ap- Ohio typed “the MW band is open... hearing plication of types of services available through trans-Atlantic signals.” I turned on the radio and the Internet. It is a blessing and it is a curse. listened to a very good signal from Croatia on Although e-mail is delivered quickly, unwanted, 1134 kHz, peaking at 30 db/s9. It was the best annoying and rude “spam” e-mail clutters the of the signals noted on 1062, 1215 and 1314 in inbox and is an expensive time-waster. What the southern New Jersey area, and I listened for can we do? a while continuing to work. What’s the point? Had I depended upon e-mail, I would have only found out about the Working around E-mail Junk Europeans the next day when picking e-mail Alternative communication methodologies from the server and only if someone thought to include instant messenger (IM) programs, blogs, write me. Weekly e-mail newsletters would be Internet relay chat (IRC) “channels” or “rooms,” slower yet. and headline news servers. Mention IM, and A second example. Are you a radio ama- some persons say “I would rather not be inter- teur but not a contester? You could tune into a rupted all the time.” The interruptions can be server posting callouts of foreign stations in the totally controlled. The IRC network of servers CQ WorldWide Contest. Data is instant, and around the world enable the creation of public includes the exact frequency and time. If you or private chat rooms, and there are software had the right transceiver and software, the data controls to fine tune each room’s characteris- could even tune the transmitter. tics. Blogs – writers’ web pages of comments A third example. The South Jersey Radio on the social or political scene, or on just about Association – http://sjra.net – have a swap net anything timely – and newsletters using special on K2AA-145.29 MHz at 8 p.m. Sunday nights. Web page coding are relatively new, but have The net control of the session opens an IM already become mainstream; “bloggers” (people program and other club members participating who write the blogs) were even invited to the on the net help with missed calls or questions Trillian, for Windows, offers a Basic and Pro USA 2004 national political conventions. on equipment. It makes for a more efficient net, version of their software that connects to mul- This month let us look at the two-way and there is less on-air confusion. tiple instant messaging services in one applica- communications: instant messaging and Internet In the business of communicating, these tion. Mac users have a similar product, Fire, relay chat. The common characteristic: imme- technologies are for more than just business and available to users of OS X 10.2 or higher. See diate communications, no delay, and no spam. personal use. It can be very useful in the pursuit the text for more details. 16 MONITORING TIMES January 2005 one were to ask, I would probably suggest look- ing at Trillian (Win) and Fire (Mac) as starting points. An aggregate program focuses on mes- saging and the extra features that bloat some of the individual programs disappear from view. A Matter of Control Some persons you ask to join you on an IM program will decline. Reasons offered include citing a nuisance value, opening the computer to virus attacks, and unwanted “visits” from persons unknown seeking to open a conversa- tion that may quickly dissolve into something tasteless. I contend that if a computer user perceives a need or want to communicate directly and quickly with a few friends, such as illustrated earlier, there is little or no reason to avoid using the “proper” IM application. A variant on two-way messaging in IRC is to use an automated program such as done here Consider these ideas to eliminate nuisances. by #exciteradio. Their Starchat chat room, shown in Chatzilla, shows the song being played Sign up for a Web mail-based e-mail account by Apple’s iTunes at the stated time. The Firefox browser, the plugin Chatzilla and iTunes are that can serve as a throwaway address. Use this available for the Windows platform as well. throwaway address when signing up for an IM account, and keep your home or personal e-mail the current generation IM programs. News and Odigo (Win) - http://www.odigo.org/ address close to the vest (family et al). sports headlines, weather, stock quotes, audio PeopleLink - http://www.peoplelink.com/ - and video messaging, conference or chat rooms, corporate product, for behind firewall. links to e-mail applications, advertisements... the What do you do when you have friends on Internet Relay Chat features are endless. different IM networks? The solution is an IM IRC stands for Internet Relay Chat. IRC IM programs typically do one-on-one short aggregator. Rather than launch up to four or five is a multi-user, multichannel chat system that messaging. Are you and a friend elsewhere do- different programs, taking up display screen real is run on a network of computers that may well ing some listening while sharing notes of what’s estate and memory resources, a single applica- be scattered all over the world. People can type heard on a frequency? Did the six-meter band tion “talks” to several networks. Generally, these messages to each other in real time. Each user open with Sporadic-E to a place far away? Is types of programs do messaging only. has a nickname (nick) and converses with other Fire (Mac) - http://epicware.com/ - AOL, ICQ, users in either public channels (chat rooms) or your friend busy working on the computer in MSN, Yahoo! and Jabber another software program and you want to attract Gaim (Win, Mac, Linux, BSD) - http://gaim. in private message areas. his or her attention amongst the pile of windows sourceforge.net/ - AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo!, There are a number of different networks, on their screen? Perhaps you are in the same IRC, Jabber, Gadu-Gadu, and Zephyr but the radio-related chat rooms – the focus of community, and the scanner has come alive due Kopete (Linux) - http://kopete.kde.org/ - sup- this column – seem to settle on less than a hand- to some activity? What’s the phone number? Are ports AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo, Jabber, IRC, ful of providers. Novell GroupWise Messenger, Lotus Same- you free for lunch? Time, and more The well-known radio-related chat rooms Virtually all IM programs can be set to PalTalk (Win) - http://www.paltalk.com/ - AOL, operate with a minimal set of rules established beep, squeak, honk, or play the national anthem Yahoo and MSN by the chat room organizers who keep order. (not really, I made up that last option...) when Pexit (Win, Mac, Linux and Unix) - http://www. Common sense and courtesy are the keys to a message arrives on station. For someone who pexit.com/ - “all the popular networks” the chat rooms. You will not find the chaos and Trillian (Win) - http://www.trillian.cc/ - AIM, mayhem that characterizes the chat areas on the cannot pay close attention to the IM window ICQ, MSN, Yahoo! and IRC for the occasional words of wisdom, the user- large Internet access providers (e.g., AOL, MSN selected noisemaker can be helpful to turn at- and others). tention to the computer screen. The programs identified as operating on the The most popular of the IM programs are Mac do so on OS X 10.2 and higher. IRC Software AOL’s AIM and ICQ, Yahoo! Messenger, and In all probability, in a hobby environment Software solutions for IRC are relatively Microsoft’s Messenger. But there are other IM you have friends and acquaintances on most of easy to use for Windows and Mac users, and are programs out there that are not so well known, the popular consumer-oriented IM programs.