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!

Installing Eclipse IDE for Apple M1 Silicon

Update January 2022: Since writing this official release versions are now available with MacOS AArch64 builds for M1 Macs from the main downloads page: https://www.eclipse.org/downloads/packages/

From the official Eclipse downloads page as of 10/31/21 there aren’t any M1 builds ready for download. However, following the comments on this bug/feature request, there have been daily builds for M1 it looks like for some time. The daily builds are available here.

I downloaded the latest stable build from here:

Double-clicking the downloaded .dmg and then dragging the Eclipse app into Applications is all that was needed to install. Done!