Using AWS Organizations for learning and personal projects

If you work on many projects deployed to AWS over time, it can become more difficult to track what resources are where and what relates to what. Tagging can help a lot, so can regions. For example I can deploy one project to us-west-1 and another to us-west-2.

Another idea is to take advantages of multiple AWS accounts and manage them as an Organization. There’s no additional cost for each account or setting up the Organization, the costs are still only for the resources you are using.

Now you have multiple accounts to segregate various projects or other things you’re working on, instead of logging off one account and logging on to the other and switching back a forth, you can assume a role within other accounts from the Account dropdown and ‘Switch Roles’. This option is only visible if you are signed on as an IAM user and not the root account user.

Before you get to this step, in the account you want to switch to, create a new IAM role with the permissions you need to use, and in the Trust section, add the account id for the other account where you want to assume the role from. The complete the fields above and insert the ARN id for the role.

After the first time you’ve used this switch role feature, you’ll see the role in the Account dropdown to reuse later.

20m HF packet stations heard 11/3/21

I’ve played with VHF packet quite a bit but never experimented with HF packet. As an experiment I decided to start up my HF radio today and tune to 14.105 LSB with the UZ7HO software packet modem and leave it running during the day to see what I could hear and decode.

Turns out there were a bunch of stations, mostly sending beacons, but I also caught one side of a packet QSO. Here’s a list of the stations/packets I heard during the day:

1:Fm KE0GB-7 To ID [09:33:33R] [+++]
COSCO:KE0GB-7, Colorado Springs Area BPQ Packet Node

1:Fm KB9KC To BEACON [09:41:00R] [–+]
Ken Carterville, IL

1:Fm KI0ID To BEACON Via DRLNOD,N0HI-2 [09:47:06R] [+++]
KI0ID/B

1:Fm KE0GB-1 To MAIL Via KB9KC-7 [10:24:05R] [+++]
Mail for: K8BZ

1:Fm VE3PZ To KB9PVH [11:04:03R] [+++]
is kind of on a high ground and

1:Fm VE3PZ To KB9PVH [11:04:14R] [+++]
I think we are probably equal

1:Fm N0HI-7 To ID Via KB9KC-7 [12:32:35R] [-++]
N0HI-7 LinBPQ Switch on Raspberry Pi4

1:Fm K0RCW To ID Via DRLNOD,N0HI-2,KB9KC [17:25:19R] [++-]
K0RCW Robert’s Packet Station in Lakewood, CO

Working JA Stations on FT8 – late evening 20m

While sitting at my radio desk and checking in on my RCARCS weekly 2m net, I fired up my HF radio and noticed at 7:30pm on 20m it sounded like there was a bunch of JT8 signals, so started up WSJT-X to take a look:

First up I noticed call sign 8J3ZNJ which is an unusual prefix I haven’t seen before, turns out this is a 50th Anniversary special event station for a Japanese ham radio club,

Calling CQ a couple of times I then picked up contacts with 3 other Japan stations. Not bad for some casual spur of the moment FT8 operation!

Installing Maven tool support in vanilla Eclipse IDE

If you download an Eclipse bundle like the Eclipse IDE for Java EE developers, you’ll get Maven support built in, but if you download a vanilla Eclipse install (like from using from of the daily builds), you’ll need to install many pllugins yourself.

Eclipse support for Maven is provided via the m2Eclipse plugin, there are installation instructions here:

I’ve had luck using these installer buttons before, but on this daily build for M1 they don’t seem to do anything. Instead I used the manual approach by adding a new ‘site’ in ‘Add New Software, ‘ adding https://download.eclipse.org/technology/m2e/releases/latest/ and then selecting ‘Maven Integration for Eclipse’ :

Done!