Suggested Gear for Emergency Communication purposes

Here is a sampling of gear I find useful for emergency communication purposes. Let me know if you have others to suggest. Note that while I have used some of this equipment, mostly it is simply the kinds of things that you might want, and an idea of the prices. I might be missing things like power supplies and connectors that could be useful as well to make the setup complete. Feel free to leave a comment if you want some more specific recommendations.

No Amateur Radio License, low budget:


Books to get licensed:


Low budget, Amateur Radio License


Medium Budget Amateur Radio


High Budget Amateur Radio

New Colonial Sea Trader blog website!

I've been working on it for a while, and I officially would like to announce the new Colonial Sea Trader's website! From this point forward, I will be posting to my new blog, http://blog.colonialseatrader.com/

This website will continue to be used for my Amateur Radio and other technical pursuits, but my game development will be moved to the Colonial Sea Trader's blog.

Dev Blog- Colonial Sea Trader- Improving the seed functionality, adding new goods

One of the problems that I've noticed for a while is that water is significantly overproduced compared to the other goods. This week I hunted down the cause. I found that the largest reason was that water is the one good that can be produced anywhere without needing anything, and thus water would be stored even if it wasn't needed in other places!

To solve this problem, I've decided to take a couple of stage approach. First of all, I'm adding a lot more goods. I've long had a list of about 60 goods that I wanted to add, and now those are getting added! I'm probably going to have to redo a few things while making this happen, to allow for better display of information, and buying goods. I've had a few ideas for how to make this happen, but once I have the full good layout, it should be a bit easier.

I'm going to try to add most of the plant goods that I've had in mind to do for a while. I'm also probably going to add new goods like wood that are pretty much common world wide, which should reduce the large water stockpiles that exist.

The last thing, which I'll have to do some playing with, is setting out initial planting conditions. I'm not 100% sure yet this is required, but it is something that I will be keeping an eye on as I continue the goods additions.

If you haven't yet, feel free to like me on Facebook, join my Google Group, subscribe to my Sub Reddit, or follow me on Twitter, where you are likely to get frequent updates! 

Dev Blog- Colonial Sea Trader- More UI fixes

This week I continued to work on fixing a number of UI issues that have been shown for some time, but I have put on the back burner until I completed the UI redesign that I've been working on for the last month. The most significant was fixing the line so that it shows above the city labels, as seen here.

A few other issues that I looked in to were to improve the text rendering somewhat, improving performance, testing performance in the normal game mode (And found it to be sufficient), ensured that the top dialog would always be usable, and fixing the way the line is displayed that was poor in a few instances.

This week I'm going to start tackling game play for the first time in a while. Specifically, I've noticed that water is significantly over produced, and I'm hoping to get to the bottom of that. Furthermore, I want to ensure that food is being produced at a reasonable level, and see why luxuries are overproduced. It might take a while, but I'm hoping to get to the bottom of this!

If you haven't yet, feel free to like me on Facebook, join my Google Group, subscribe to my Sub Reddit, or follow me on Twitter, where you are likely to get frequent updates! 

Dev Blog- Colonial Sea Trader- Making sure the right dialog was visible.

This was a week of bug fixing primarily, although I did start to add functionality that will be useful in other areas. The major item fixed was making sure the dialogs display in the correct order. I'm still working a few details out, but it's coming together nicely!

The other issue that I've been working on is figuring out what to do with the labels when you zoom out. Thus far I've started to add in the capacity for the UI elements on the map to increase in size when you zoom in, but it's coming along still. I should have that addressed this week, which will allow for the UI to look better at all zoom scales.

If you haven't yet, feel free to like me on Facebook, join my Google Group, subscribe to my Sub Reddit, or follow me on Twitter, where you are likely to get frequent updates! 

Dev Blog- Colonial Sea Trader- Polishing dialogs

This week was primarily spent polishing the dialogs edited last week, as well as fixing a few visual bugs. The biggest change was a few upgrades to the cityscape, which you can see below.

Also fixed was a bug that didn't show the correct value of the goods, and other dialog bugs. I will spare you an image of them, trust me, they are there.

This week I want to fix a few visual issues. Basically, those items that appear in world space don't have a consistent look. They sometimes appear behind the ship, sometimes in front of it, and sometimes even between the ship, all of which just don't quite look right! They also don't scale well with size. This week I plan on fixing all of these issues! I'm also hoping to get the website ready to go, however, I'm wanting to try out one additional thing before I'm ready to put it to the test.


If you haven't yet, feel free to like me on Facebook, join my Google Group, subscribe to my Sub Reddit, or follow me on Twitter, where you are likely to get frequent updates! 

Dev Blog- Colonial Sea Trader- Dialog upgrade finished, city look finished, speed improvements.

A good deal of progress has been made this week! The short is, I have completed the theme application, which uses better text packages, supports localization, and easy asset upgrades for most of my future work! Here are a few sample images of what has changed. Note that I'm still going to tweak the edges of the city, seek first.

I'm still going to be working on improving the graphics, but less diligently for a while. I started to do some bug fixing. I started to fix bugs, including some that speed up the world generation, UI issues, and that sort of thing. The camera now centers correctly on the ship, some crashes were fixed, I removed some dead code, improved my organization, and a lot of other things that aren't easily seen, but make a difference to me.

This week is bug crunching. The main item on deck is improving the way that the UI elements display on the world map. They don't scale well, and often don't appear at the right level, I'm going to be playing with that some to improve the looks. I also hope to do some work with the website to get it into a reasonable condition.

If you haven't yet, feel free to like me on Facebook, join my Google Group, subscribe to my Sub Reddit, or follow me on Twitter, where you are likely to get frequent updates!