Category Archives: Amateur Radio

Amateur Radio, AREN, Computing

Airmail2000 on Linux.

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Airmail is “a message program specifically designed for connectioto a HF radio mailbox station.” it is “a 32-bit program which runs under Windows-95, 98, NT, 2000 or XP”. For the last few weeks I’ve been testing it on Ubuntu using Wine. My Linux laptop is re-cycled, so it didn’t come with an OS. So I installed Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Desktop Edition. After installing my APRS application of choice, Xastir (from source of course). I happened to read somewhere that Airmail seemed to work reasonably well with Wine. So I tried that as well.

After installing Wine (apt-get install wine), I downloaded airmail, and one double click later it was installing. Better than that, I’ve had it running since (needed no reboots!) I’ve tested the VHF Packet Module, POP/SMTP Client, POP/SMTP server, Telnet Client, and all seems to be working as it should. There is one quirk I’ve found.

There is an option in the mail client to “Check Spelling as you type” and this is enabled by default. With this enabled, text in the ‘body’ of a message appears white on a white background (and is thus invisible). Once disabled it works fine. It took me a while to find the solution and this question has appeared a few times on the airmail list, and the simple fix is to select “Tools” then “Options”, then the “Spelling” tab which is the 8th from the left, and make sure there is no ‘tic’ in the  “Check Spelling as you type” box.

If this works for you, send me a mail, ei7ig at winlink dot org

Amateur Radio, General, Green, IPv6

Guilt free Radio!

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Eamonn seems to be enjoying his holidays. With R$15 all-you-can-eat dinners and R$1 for a beer, I’m not surprised. I, on the other hand have been so busy recently it just was not funny.

AREN has been soaking up my spare (ha!) time, with meetings, documentation, and other stuff that comes with trying to organise volunteers. AREN was also involved in recent exercises with other Voluntary Emergency Services in South Tipp,

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and last weekend AREN members aided the Glen of Aherlow Fáilte Society with communications for the Glen of Aherlow Walking Festival, as the weather was forecast to be good, numbers were quite high. Communications from both sides of the mountain were provided and everything seemed to go without a hitch (other than the torrential shower just before walkers got to the buses on Saturday afternoon). Bernard, EI8FDB, has a few pics up on flickr taken during the event. Finally though, things are slowly getting under control (even on the DIY Front!) AND we found that shim6 bug I was talking about, so I can make some headway in work.

Now, as to the title of the post (Thanks Seamus!). I’ve been collecting bits and pieces for a while (2 years or so), batteries, solar panels, charge controllers etc. I finally got the panels installed, (sub optimally unfortunately, but wife friendly) two weeks ago. I let the batteries charge up fully, then I switched off my 13.8Volt PSU, and switched on the (slightly adjusted) 24v-12V DC DC converter. That was the 27th of May. Since then I’ve had my radio gear running from it just the battery bank and the panels (some of it 24×7). At this moment in time (approx 11 days later), the panels have put 204Ah into the battery bank, the DC-DC converter has consumed 350Ah.

Miguel was asking me to work this out during the week, so here goes (its late, and I’m tired so I could easily be way off here)

554 * 24 (volts) = 13.296 (KWh)

13.296.5 /11 * 365 = 441.18kWh for the year.

My last bill says a unit costs 15.02 cent (incl vat), so I should ‘save’ about €66.26 on the ESB Bill over the course of 12 months. Or to put it another way, it will never pay for itself, economically speaking.

I’m still experimenting, and will probably add more panels (and more ‘load), but so far, I’m happy as a pig in the proverbial with it. The problems will arise however as winter descends (and that €66.26 total will be in doubt). In those (in)famous words, A lot done, more to do.

Amateur Radio

Nail… Head?

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I’ve been reading Jeff’s weblog for quite a while.  I tend to agree with him pretty much all of the time when he comments on the Amateur Radio hobby, not because I want to, but more because he is spot on.  His latest post should be required reading for any club setting up for Field Day (but we know it won’t) in order get clubs thinking about how best to present the hobby to others.

Amateur Radio, AREN

Hams Called to Action!

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From the ARRL NEWS:

“On Monday, May 12 at 0628 UTC, a magnitude 7.8 earthquake hit Sichuan, China. The Chinese Radio Sports Association, the Chinese IARU Member-Society, has designated the following frequencies for emergency services involved in the rescue: 14.270, 7.050 and 7.060 MHz. The ARRL encourages US amateurs to be aware of the emergency operations on those three frequencies.”

Amateur Radio, AREN, Work

World Amateur Radio Day, how was yours?

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Mine was cold, very cold. Friday morning I posted to a mailing list in work that I was going to set up a station in the car-park, a few colleagues braved the elements and helped me set up a station (thanks lads).

I decided to do it the hard way and enlist help in putting an 80m dipole together, while I put the VHF/UHF antenna together and on the pole. When we got the pole up, my radio, the FT-857 was not happy with a very high reflected power level (SWR).

It turned out that the antenna was about 30 feet to short. So down it came. All was well on the second attempt and I was happy when John, EI9JO returned to my call. I worked several other stations nationally (on 80meters using Near Vertical Incidence Skywave Techniques) some through the South East Repeater Network (part of which is maintained by SEARG), and some stations in Europe using PSK on 30meters.

It was cold, but it was fun.

Amateur Radio, Green, Technology

Ugly or not?

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slievenamon.jpg

Which is it? Personally, I think they are fantastic.  The are a lot nicer looking than some of the other structures visible from the same spot, and far more functional.  What really surprised me though was how quiet they are in operation.  The traffic moving along the road from Kilmeaden to Portlaw was easily able to drown out what I think was the noise from them.

Last Monday, Tipperary Amateur Radio Group were on top of Slievanamon (the Mountain pictured behind the wind turbines), participating in the Spring Leg of the Irish Radio Transmitters Society’s 2 Meters Counties Contest.  After some generator trouble, we got going and spend an enjoyable few hours up there (pictures), making approximately 57 unique contacts in 24 counties. It was great to see so much activity on the band.

Last week I was in Innsbruck, Austria, helping Miguel at the Tridentcom conference.  There was lots to take in and lots of folks to meet, too much in fact. I briefly managed to get outside for a look around and take some pictures on Tuesday evening.  The rest of the time was spent either attending technical sessions, or continuing technical discussions afterwards.

Getting set up for the contest was a technical challenge of a different kind (one could consider it therapy almost!).

Amateur Radio, AREN

Geosynchronous Birds.

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At the Symposium AMSAT President Rick Hambly, W2GPS, along with Vice President of Engineering Bob McGwier, N4HY, were able to make public the results of their recent work, which will change the face of Amateur Radio going forward. AMSAT has been in consultation with Intelsat regarding an application of Intelsat communications satellites carrying our Amateur Radio satellites into geosynchronous orbit.

Bob described changes in Department of Defense (DoD) policies that will require DoD-subsidized launches to allow secondary payloads to fill in excess launch capacity of the primary mission. During his talk, “Where’s the Launch,” Lee McLamb, KU4OS, explained that factors such as the increased size and efficiency of launch vehicles results in excess lift capacity. Gone are the days where adding a pound to the payload meant removing a pound of fuel from the booster. Lee described how current missions on the schedule have 1000 to 1500 pounds of excess capability. These are slots AMSAT can fit into.

Bob, N4HY, made the following observation about the Phase IV Lite project, “There is enough in place at this time that AMSAT needs to begin planning engineering work and possible construction of a geosynchronous payload so we are ready if Intelsat says they have a ride for us.”

This is a fantastic opportunity for the hobby, read the full article here.

Amateur Radio

ANDE DEORBIT

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Recently Henk PA3GUO and Mike DK3WN sponsored an ANDE award to encourage reception of telemetry during the last few weeks of life of the Amateur Radio satellite ANDE.

ANDE was build by students from the US Naval Academy and deployed from the Space Shuttle (STS-116) on a return mission from the International Space Station (ISS) on 21 December 2006. Due to it’s low orbit it had a short lifetime and re-entered the earth’s atmosphere just over a year later on 25 December 2007.

It operated an APRS AX25 packet digipeater on 145.825 MHz as well as a Voice Synthesizer and other communications experiments.

The ANDE award was awarded to anyone who made QSOs via ANDE or received telemetry during its final 10 days in space.

Along with many others, I had my home station listening for packets from this oversized golfball in order to gather telemetry.  As I was travelling most of the 10 days prior to ANDE’s re-entry, I was unable to make any QSOs through it, but managed to receive enough telemetry to qualify for the award.

Amateur Radio, Computing, IPv6

PB/PG 2.2.1 Released

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From Bent Bagger, OZ6BL:

—
I’m happy to announce release 2.2.1 of PB/PG for Linux.

PB and PG for Linux are programs used for download from and upload to
digital satellites (Pacsats) supporting the FTL0 protocol. This
software allows you to directly communicate with the Microsat series
of satellites. It provides a Curses (Ncurses) based user interface. It
features automatic directory fill requests and simple, rules based
file download requests.

This release serves two purposes:

1) To show that the project is still alive and kicking

2) To correct a number of small ‘inconveniencec’ and to add a few new
features. These changes/additions are described in the document
‘ReleaseNotes’ q.v. (included in the release)

PB/PG for Linux may be downloaded (in source form only) from one of
these places:

– http://www.fern.dk/pgpg/pbpg-2.2.1.tar.gz
– http://ibiblio.org/pub/linux/apps/ham/pbpg-2.2.1.tar.gz
– ftp://ftp.amsat.org/amsat/software/Linux/pbpg-2.2.1.tar.gz

I may be contacted using this address:  oz6bl (at) amsat (dot) org

Happy hamming

Best 73 de Bent/OZ6BL
 —

I submitted some rather simple patches to the package including IPv6 patches to allow it communicate to a server running predict (which has also been patched for IPv6 support), which were included, then I helped test them with my home station.  Even though I’m only using a vertical antenna, I was able to upload to and download from  the satellite quite successfully on most passes. It’s kinda cool actually, not something one does every day 🙂