All posts by j0n

Green, Technology

Battery Charger.

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Have you ever gone to the drawer looking for 4 batteries for something or other, only to find a) you don’ t have 4 of any similar type, b) you have no idea if they are charged or not. I have, and it’s always annoying.

I came across this kit last week and ordered one from Neil. I’ve just stuck it together and put it on the kitchen window, it should get some sun before I get up in the morning. The Voltage is currently reading 4.96 on the battery pack. It’ll be interested to see what they read at breakfast time.

It should be possible to leave them in the window all the time, and then I will always know where I have a ‘fresh set’. We’ll see!

Amateur Radio, D-Star, software, Technology

D-Star

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I was reading the July edition of Monitoring Monthly and came across an article by Paul Marsh. In it he mentioned a home-brew D-Star transciever designed and built by Moe, AE4JY and detailed here. Thanks for the info Paul, kudos to Moe and his buddies for a very interesting prototype and some excellent information. Is it the future of Amateur Radio? who knows, but the work done my Moe, his buddies, and others like them will definitely shape it.

Travel, Weather

Killarney

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Dee and I made a last minute decision to head for Killarney for the weekend. What a fantastic weekend it was. After we arrived on Saturday afternoon we wandered up Torc Mountain. After dinner I suggest that we attempt Mangerton on Sunday morning.
Maybe it was the wine or the weather, but Dee agreed, and we had a fantastic day in the hills.

Amateur Radio, IPv6, Utility Listening

Work work work.

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Wow, what a busy two weeks. I spent last week preparing for the GAISS field trial. Which was reasonably succesful, though I’m knackered after it. I was also acting as “Net Control” for the “Base” VHF/UHF Radio Station that we had set up for the weekend. Technically I had the easy job as I wasn’t actually walking, though I was wearing ‘many hats’ for the weekend (WIT/AREN/TARG).

Scott N1VG’s prototype OT2’s and T2-135’s worked very well over the weekend. And we had better voice communications than previous years, so we will call it a success on all fronts. I have a few pictures available here, most of the pics were supplied by others.

Back in the ‘salt mines’, several things went wrong this week. Came in on Tuesday to find both drives in a mirrored raid array had failed, thankfully we didn’t have too much on the drives, but it just goes to show, it can , and does happen. The best thing to come out of that was we re-checked that all our project data is being backed up properly. Then, last night, I was trying to access some IPv6 only sites from my home network (to test a SHIM6 enabled server in work), no joy. The laptop wasn’t getting the radvd advertised prefix. Checking it out, radvd is giving me an error:

radvd[8411]: sendmsg: Invalid argument

As a quick test, I downloaded the latest version of radvd, same problem, my guess now is that it is a kernel (2.6.17.10) issue. It will have to wait until after the weekend, or SWMBO will shoot me.

Now, I think I’ll try and catch an hours sleep before the STS-117 launch later on this evening. About 20 minutes after launch, it should be possible to hear voice communications on their downlink frequency of 259.7MHz AM.

Feel free to have a listen at http://193.1.193.156:8000/PCR1000, your could also come join in the ‘fun’ with the uhf-satcom crowd, see http://www.uhf-satcom.com/ for details.

Amateur Radio, Computing, Mapping, software, Work

GAISS progress.

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I’ve mentioned before the GAISS project (here and here). It wasn’t in the original plan, but we are now receiving the MAP27 information from the ‘base’ radio, and making them available for a small conversion appplication that re-transmits them on the National APRS frequency of 144.800Mhz. This allows us to leverage the already existing APRS infrastructure in place to get our ‘position packets’ to go around corners where there is no existing RF path.

Our GAISS GUI will then be able to pluck the relevant data from the APRS data stream and plot the positions of the SEMRA personnel that are out walking for the event. Delighted as we are to have this much working (and that we will have something to show at the Galtee Walking Festival), we are still a long way of a ‘finished’ prototype.

SEMRA Positions

Amateur Radio, Computing, software, Utility Listening

Dxtuners no more.

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Dxtuners has closed. I had gotten used to using it when travelling to keep an eye on things ‘back home’.

Last weekend I came across this post by Steve Haigh. His updated version of pcrd compiled fine on my ubuntu machine (though I did fix one small mistake).

That got me thinking, so I asked a few ‘geeks’ in work for solutions. It was suggested that controlling it over IRC would be the fastest way of doing it requiring mimimum effort on my part.

Well I think they were right, all of about 8 lines of tcl and its working again. Log in to #frequencydb on zirc and say hello.

Amateur Radio, Technology, Work

Busy Busy Busy.

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Mad busy at the moment, I keep forgetting to post and I keep forgetting to practice Morse (6’s B’s & J’s still bothering me).

We have two weeks to go before our “Field Trial” of the GAISS project. The Field trial is going to be over the weekend of the Galtee Walking Festival, the 2nd and 3rd of June. As well as trying to make sure GAISS works for the weekend, I’m also organising AREN and TARG’s involvement in providing communications for each walk for the weekend. We are still looking for licensed experimenters (Radio Hams) to help out on the weekend.

In GAISS, at this stage we are able to extract GPS information from the Simoco Radio’s. Though we haven’t managed to display one in our GUI yet. Our initial plans for a WiFi link from our receive site back to ‘Base’ were scuppered by unhelpful terrain. Plan b is to turn the received MAP27 GPS information packets into APRS packets, which we can then re-transmit over the existing APRS network.

Kristian and I are in the middle of doing our SRC Modules 1 and 2 ( Which will come in useful, should I ever find the time to get back into An Seabhac Mara), as we need them to operate at the Field Trial.

Pressure is on!

Amateur Radio

Morse Code

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Last Christmas (2006), I purchased for myself a Kent Twin Paddle Key. My intention was to re-learn ‘the code’ (I logged my last Morse Contact in 1995). It has been sitting for several months on my desk not even plugged into anything. Last weekend the IRTS had their 75th AGM and Dinner in the Vienna Woods Hotel in Cork. As I had never been to one, I decided to head down. The XYL (my lovely wife) was rescued at the last minute by another engagement.

I had the privilege to chat with (before dinner) Dave Sumner, K1ZZ (CEO of the ARRL and his wife Linda, KA1ZD, RSGB president Angus Annan, MM1CCR, IARU region 1 president, Ole Garpesdat, LA2RR and his Wife. It was great to meet such high profile people and hear first hand their thoughts for the future of the hobby, and to make them feel welcome in our small country.

After dinner (which was absolutely excellent) and after all the speeches, I got to introduce myself and speak to some of the ‘old timers’. Experimenters (Radio Hams) that have been licensed for longer than I’ve been breathing air. A couple of things struck me. Of the people I spoke to, all of them seem to have great passion for the hobby, all of them have the full support of their spouses (if still with us), all of them have a lot of knowledge and all ,while differing of opinion on lots of topics (Jameson vs Paddy etc), of them seemed to be great proponents of ‘the code’.

The passion with which they spoke was amazing, one retired gentleman lamented the fact that he could no longer maintain 40wpm receive speed, that 30-35 would be as good as he could do nowadays.

I decided that it was time to act, so this week I’ve started trying to re-learn morse code. Its a facet of the hobby that I never really immersed myself into. When I did my morse code exam it was so that I could gain access to the Shortwave Bands (160m – 10m), as that was the requirement at the time. Now there is no Morse requirement for access to these bands.

Progress has been slow, I have a program sending me morse code at 15wpm (or so it says). I have most of the letters back, but I’m still having difficulty with numbers, and seem to still mix up J & 1, V & 4 and some others. Its interesting, some letters I have no problem with at all, in fact I don’t even have to think about them, my hand just writes them out, others are ok in combination (CQ and my own callsign EI7IG, QC would require me to think), some more then require my full concentration.

30wpm is a long way off methinks!