Category Archives: Amateur Radio

Amateur Radio, APRS, Computing, Travel, Work

GAREC 2007

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I’m just back from the 2007 Global Amateur Radio Emergency Communications Conference (GAREC 2007). Where I presented some initial results from the GAISS project (previous entry here). I was also attending on behalf of AREN and the IRTS (who also partially paid for my attendance the conference).

Listening to the presentations from the Amateur Radio operators that worked (some for months) in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and Rita to provide communications in and out of the disaster area was most humbling.

The presentations were excellent overall, I learned quite a lot from other participants, and had a great reaction to my own presentation. Which surprised me a bit. I met a fantastic bunch of people, that I will hopefully be able to keep in contact with as time goes on.

What was most interesting to me is the holistic approach taken to Amateur Radio in countries that have experienced disaster, everyone is competent in all areas whether it be Contesting, VHF, Digital modes, whereas in Europe, people tend to have a more polarised view (i.e. some folk specialise in VHF, some in Digital etc). I have much to learn.

Here are some pictures taken before, during and after, GAREC.

All in all it was a fantastic experience (and I got a mention in the ARRL blog, thanks to Khrystyne, K1SFA).

Amateur Radio, APRS

TM-D710 Announced.

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Kenwood announces 144/430 (440)MHz FM dual bander TM-D710 series,
equipped with “APRS®” data communication system capable of exchanging positional information, messages and operating frequency, enabling multi communication with all amateur radio operators around the world. More here.

Stephen H. Smith has had a quick run through the control program and has the following observations (posted to the aprssig mailing list).

After installing the required Microsoft Dot-Net 2.0 sludgeware on a PC, I have installed the control program. The program uses the Office 2003 look with sculpted 3D looking tool bar and the reduced-legibility pastel XP-style toolbar icons. Browsing though the various menus, I have noted the following changes/additions to the configuration menus.

  1. COM port settings in the program now support up to COM20 and port speeds from 9600 to 57,600 baud.
  2. The much hyped “Echolink / VOIP” support is merely 10 memories for DTMF sequences that can be labeled and the recognition that the 6-pin MiniDIN connector can be used for voice audio as well as external TNCs, sound cards, etc. These 10 memory slots are apparently separate from another set of “DTMF” memories.
  3. External data port (6-pin MiniDin connector audio I/O) can now be locked to either A or B band; i.e. it doesn’t follow the selected band for mic as it does on the D700 .
  4. The unit apparently includes a DVR (digital voice recorder) perhaps as an option. An “AUDIO” configuration menu has several options for this device.
  5. A block of 10 memory channels is dedicated to NOAA weather radio freqs already filled in but changeable.
  6. Cross band repeater mode has ID that can be selected in either morse or voice
  7. Four PF keys on the mic and two PF keys on the front panel can be programmed to any of about 10 functions each.
  8. New “Band Mask” menu allows you to skip unwanted bands as you step up or down between bands. Especially welcome is the ability to skip non-ham 200, 300 and 800 MHz ranges.
  9. “APRS/Navitra” menu (I thought Navitra, the Japanese forerunner to APRS and the original design target of the D700 was now history, but apparently it still lives.) has 6 sub-menus.

Among the APRS options and features:

  1. Waypoint output on GPS port supports both NMEA and MAGELLAN formats.
  2. GPS port now supports Peet Bros and Davis weather stations as an alternative to GPS.
  3. You can filter out (or pass) Weather, Mobile, DIGIpeater, or Object packets and filter by range in 10 mile increments up to 2500 miles. [That would be one hell of a band opening on 2M!)
  4. Proportional pathing selectable, as is manual beaconing with a decaying algorithm.
  5. “New-N Paradigm” selectable as such from pull down menu! Default setting is WIDE1-1, WIDE2-1
  6. Voice Alert recognized and selectable
  7. WX station transmit interval selectable 5/10/30 mins
  8. UIdigi aliases supported in digipeater
  9. UIFLOOD and UITRACE options selectable with definable aliases.
  10. Canned autoreply message user-definable.
  11. Units can be displayed multiple formats:MPH, km/h or knots, Grid Format in either Maidenhead or “SAR Grid” [is this UTM??]
  12. Position displayed as either DD MM.mm or DD MM SS
  13. NO VISIBLE MENU SUPPORT FOR SMART BEACONING !!

No SmartBeaconing is a dissapointing omission. Assuming that Stephen’s observations are correct, I for one won’t be ‘upgrading’. The addition of SmartBeaconing, would have persuaded me that the Radio is worth buying, without it, I see no reason to. C’mon Kenwood, can we have SmartBeaconing please?

Amateur Radio

Its the weekend

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The weekend arrived after a rather long week in the office. Saturday afternoon was spent catching up on various chores, that were oustanding. Saturday evening I managed to get time on the Shortwave bands. I’m ‘aerially’ challenged in my location in several ways (my garden is quite small, I’m inducing current into the house alarm somewhere, and most importantly herself doesn’t like the look of the wire aerials or the noise of the alarm going off), so I’m kind of snookered.

However, I have an MFJ ISOLoop antenna in the attic, and yesterday evening I started listening on 20meters. The band was still hopping as the IARU HF World Championships were on. Well it was a blast, worked 15 countries in about 3 hours, and i could run full (100 watts) power all over the 20m band without setting off the alarm!

I also used the opportunity to try out YFKlog, which does exactly what it claims to (thanks Brendan for the tip).

Today after the rain started I took a look around the shack for a likely ‘rainy day’ project and I found a Kenwood D700 kit that I’ve had sitting here for ages. I’m not exactly sure how long it took me to complete, but it was working before I went to make dinner! So all in all, a productive weekend.

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.

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!