#wicen — Public Fediverse posts

Another #EmergencyCommsExercise this weekend. This time #WICEN is helping in a #HorseEnduranceRide at Dingo Creek near #WondaiQld.

I wonder if yesterday's #earthquake is an omen… Didn't feel a thing at The Gap, but next Saturday I'll be at #Kilkivan counting horses for #WICEN.

#BAWG (Brisbane Area #WICEN Group) is headed back to Imbil once again to #StirlingsCrossing for another #EmergencyCommsExercise. This time we're helping support the #QERA state championships.

I'll be assisting with some of Saturday's events, as appointments on Monday mean we have to be headed back home by Sunday afternoon.

Gotta love it when someone reverts your edit because they think SE Queensland is the same as all of Queensland.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wireless_Institute_Civil_Emergency_Network&diff=1247951750&oldid=1247950066

For the record, there is NO state-wide WICEN in Queensland, has not been for decades. Each group looks after its own patch, independent from Emergency Management Queensland.

#WICEN #Wikipedia

Last Easter, I was running a checkpoint at Imbil as I’ve done before… operating a checkpoint at Derrier Hill Grid with horses passing through from three different events simultaneously, coming from two different directions, and getting more confused than a moth in a light shop. At that time I thought it’d be really handy to have a software program that could “sort ’em all out”. I punch in the competitor numbers, it tells me what division they’re in and records the time… I then assign the check-points and update the paperwork.

We have such a program, a VisualBASIC 6 application written by one of the other amateurs, however I use Linux. My current tablet, a Panasonic FZ-G1 Mk1, won’t run any supported version of Windows well (Windows 10 on 4GB RAM is agonisingly slow… and it goes out of support in October anyway), but otherwise would be an ideal workhorse for this, if I could write a program.

So I rolled up my sleeves, and wrote a checkpoint reporting application. Java was used because then it can be used on Windows too, as well as any Linux distribution with OpenJDK’s JRE. I wanted a single “distribution package” that would run on any system with the appropriate runtime, that way I wouldn’t need a build environment for each OS/architecture I wanted to support.

One thing that troubled me through this process… was getting image resources working. I used the Netbeans IDE to try and make it easier for others to contribute later on if desired: it has a GUI form builder that can help with all the GUI creation boilerplate, and helps keep the project structure more-or-less resembling a “standard” structure. (This is something that Python’s tkinter seriously lacks: a RAD tool for producing the UIs. The author of the aforementioned VB6 software calls it “T-stinker”, and I find it hard to disagree!)

Netbeans defaults to using the Maven build system for Java projects, although Ant and Gradle are both supported as well. (Not sure which one of the three is “preferred”, I know Android often use Gradle… thoughts Java people?) It also supports adding bitmap resources to a project for things like icons. I used some icons from the GTK+ v3 (LGPLv2) and Gnome Adwaita Legacy (CCBYSA3) projects.

The problem I faced, was actually using them in the UI. I was getting a NullPointerException every time I tried setting one, and Netbeans’ documentation was no help at all. It just wasn’t finding the .png files no matter what I did:

2025-06-15T06:32:54.461Z [FINEST] com.vk4msl.checkpointreporter.ui.ReporterForm: Choose nav tree node testException in thread "AWT-EventQueue-0" java.lang.NullPointerException        at javax.swing.ImageIcon.<init>(ImageIcon.java:217)        at com.vk4msl.checkpointreporter.ui.event.EventPanel.initComponents(EventPanel.java:239)        at com.vk4msl.checkpointreporter.ui.event.EventPanel.<init>(EventPanel.java:63)        at com.vk4msl.checkpointreporter.ui.ReporterForm.showEvent(ReporterForm.java:895)        at com.vk4msl.checkpointreporter.CheckpointReporter.showEntity(CheckpointReporter.java:532)        at com.vk4msl.checkpointreporter.ui.ReporterForm.navTreeValueChanged(ReporterForm.java:480)        at com.vk4msl.checkpointreporter.ui.ReporterForm.access$100(ReporterForm.java:70)        at com.vk4msl.checkpointreporter.ui.ReporterForm$2.valueChanged(ReporterForm.java:182)

Maybe it’s my search skills, or the degradation of search, but I could not put my finger on why it kept failing… the file was where it should be, the path in the code was correct according to the docs, why was it failing?

Turns out, when Maven does a build, it builds all the objects in a target/classes directory. When Netbeans runs your project, it does so out of that directory. Maven did not bother to copy the .png files across, because Netbeans never told it to.

I needed the following bit of code in my pom.xml file:

       <resources>         <resource>           <targetPath>com/vk4msl/checkpointreporter/ui/components/icons</targetPath>           <directory>${project.basedir}/src/main/java/com/vk4msl/checkpointreporter/ui/components/icons</directory>           <includes>             <include>**/README.md</include>             <include>**/*.png</include>           </includes>         </resource>       </resources>

That tells Maven to pick up those .png files (in the com.vk4msl.checkpointreporter.ui.components.icons package) and put them, along with the README.md, in the staging directory for the application. Then Java would be able to find those resources, and they’d be in the .jar file in the right place.

Other suggestions have been to move the project to using Ant (which was the old way Java projects were built, but seems to be out of favour now?)… not sure if Gradle has this problem… maybe some people more familiar with Java’s build systems can comment. This is probably the most serious Java stuff I’ve done in the last 20 years.

I used Java because it produced a single platform-independent binary that could run anywhere with the appropriate runtime, and featured a runtime that had everything I needed in a format that was easy to pick back up. C# I’ve used for command-line applications at university, but I’ve never done anything with Windows Forms, so I’d have to learn that from scratch as well as wrestling MSBuild (yuck!). Python almost was it, but as I say, dealing with tkinter and trying to map that to all the TK docs out there that assume you’re using TCL, made it a nightmare to use. I didn’t want to bring in third-party libraries like Qt or wxWidgets as that’d complicate deployment, and other options like C++, Rust and Go all produce native binaries, meaning I’d have to compile for each platform. (Or force people to build it themselves.)

Java did the job nicely. Not the prettiest application, but the end result is I have a basic Java program, using the classical Swing UI interface that should be a big help at Southbrook later this month. I’ll probably build on this further, but this should go a big way to scratching the itch I had.

https://vk4msl.com/2025/06/15/using-image-resources-with-maven-java-projects-in-netbeans/

#amateurRadio #java #maven #netbeans #wicen

Brisbane WICEN's repeater network frequencies have recently moved… all UHF voice repeaters are moving from a -5MHz offset to a -7MHz offset to avoid LIPD interference in the 433~434MHz band.

https://brisbanewicen.org.au/technical/frequencies/ has been updated accordingly.

#AmateurRadio #WICEN

Probably worth mentioning prior to the arrival of #CycloneAlfred. #EmergencyContactInformation

Emergency information can be found in the Brisbane area in the following places:

ABC Local Radio Brisbane is the local emergency broadcaster. 612kHz AM on the MW band, or on multiplex 9C (206.352MHz) DAB+.

SES QLD (https://www.ses.qld.gov.au/) can be reached on 132 500.

Fallen powerlines can be reported to Energex on 13 19 62.

UHF CB channels 5 and 35 are reserved for emergency use. Likely, a temporary repeater will be deployed on channel 5 (using 35 as the uplink).

#WICEN Mt. Coot-tha Repeater VK4RZB 438.200MHz -7MHz Offset 91.5Hz CTCSS

@stux Me, camped at Imbil for a horse endurance ride when the alarm on the phone rings at 1:30AM to get me up for a 2AM start… when I only went to bed at 10PM the previous night (and got up early _that_ day too).

(Anyone in #WICEN #AREC #RAYNET or does #EmergencyComms etc will understand…)

This week-end, Brisbane Area WICEN has its first #EmergencyCommsExercise taking place at Stirling's Crossing, #Imbil this week-end. Some from the Gold Coast Amateur Radio Society are helping us too.

Not sure if we're doing packet radio stuff, we didn't the last two times, but we'll bring the gear needed anyway. Better to have it and not need it, then need it and not have it.

I suspect we'll be operating mostly on VHF (147.150MHz +600kHz FM and 147.500MHz simplex FM).

I'll be posting some photos of the events, AltText will be put in when I get the time to do so.

#AmateurRadio #EmergencyComms #GCARS #WICEN

#Debian pre-seed late command tip… if you are using `apt-get install` commands to install packages into the new system in your `preseed/late_command` script:

use `in-target <COMMAND>` to run a command in the target, do NOT use `chroot /target <COMMAND>`.

Otherwise #debootstrap will complain about a bad file descriptor.

I think I've now got one of the #WICEN base computers installed from a USB stick almost fully automatically now.

Still some annoying prompts, but for the most part you can just hit ENTER to dismiss them.