Steve Dimse (author of findu) has been hard at work adding RSS feeds to findu.

“Over the next couple weeks I’ll be adding RSS feeds to findU. If you don’t know, RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, and is a way to consolidate headlines and links into a newsfeed. I’d played a bit with this, but until I saw it integrated into the new version of Mac OS I didn’t realize how cool this could be, especially as it relates to findU. Unlike most sites where there is one or a small set of news feeds, findU will support custom feeds.

So far I have one example done, the weather warnings. This works very much like the weather warning cgi:

http://www.findu.com/cgi-bin/warn-near.cgi?exclude=go&call=k4hg-8&nomap=1

but the URL is:

feed://rss.findu.com/warn.cgi?call=k4hg&max=1500

You have to look at this on an RSS enabled program, otherwise it is just jibberish, but the way it works is at defined intervals the newsreader (in my case Safari, Apple’s web browser) fetches the feed and looks for new news items, in this case weather warnings within 1500 miles of K4HG’s location. Any new items are flagged by the browser, and the user knows there is new news on this channel.

The next things I’ll be doing are message feeds and a near function. You can be automatically notified if a new station appears near you, or if someone sends you an APRS message! After that there will be a position function, where you can track individual stations, and of course weather feeds…I can see lots of potential here.”

So, to get a list of APRS stations within 120 Miles of the TSSG, Waterford IT use the following link (for bloglines aggregator:

http://rss.findu.com/near.cgi?call=EI3RCW-2&last=24&n=25&distance=120

The options for the script are explained here.

I might even get around to putting Tiger onto the Powerbook this week :).

Thank you Steve.

I picked this up from the FT-817 yahoo group. It gave me a chuckle. Anyways, last friday night, Jay Leno put a champion ‘texter’ head to head with two radio hams. Credit to Wayne K6NR for the clip.
Continue reading SMS vs Morse Code →

I was up in Galway over the weekend, helping out a friend of mine in at the Galway Rally, as most of the time is spent in service not doing much, I had the radio on in the car monitoring PCsat and ISS during their Joint Operations

On sunday I left it beaconing on the 145.825, and once I got somewhat back down the country I switched to EI2WRC-2’s frequency of 144.850 which is currently being monitored by EI8JAs installation of xastir in Waterford City. As you can see from the resulting picture below, it largely covered my journey back to Waterford through Clonmel (as well as some of the journey up)

For such a simple technology (realistically), it really is quite powerful.

Got this link from a mailing list. Paul has manuals for the FT-817/FT-857/FT-897 range of radios as well as the software to ‘Wideband’ the radios. Great resource if you happen to have any of these radios (I do :). Thanks Paul.

Here is a very cool modification to allow ‘Self-starting’ of the Tripmate GPS for use mobile and/or portable. Ideal for APRS usage.

Andrew is work sent around an email with the above title, he was referring to this.

Its kind of cool methinks. I probably have enough to make “white”. Waters and Stanton is where you could get pretty much all of them, they also have a package deal.;)

I am still experimenting with APRS.

I recently received an OpenTracker and have that in the car at the moment. I also have a PocketTracker operational, but I have not yet managed to get back into the hills to evaluate how well it would work in hilly terrain. EI8JA switches his one on now and again when he has it in the Jeep. I’ve managed to follow him from my own QTH (location) back to his own. Even though he has an external antenna the power output from the PocketTracker is approximately 250 milli watts.

Anyways, recently I’ve started seeing satellites with numbers greater than 32 which would never lock. I was wondering why so I did a bit of googling and came up with this.

Basically it seems that the european version of WAAS called EGNOS is in testing and my Garmin GPS is able to receive the signal, but adheres to the ‘do not use’ flag. It will be interesting to see how it improves the accuracy of my GPS. the GPS V, with a clear sky reports an accuracy give or take 6 Meters, though some dispute that and think that the Garmin is not as good as it thinks it is!

I was returning from IST 2004 on Thursday, having departed early and leaving some of my collegues to Fly the Flag. As I was leaving my Aunts QTH in Dungarvan, John Ketch EI2GN gave me a shout on the repeater on 145.675Mhz.

I’ve been waiting for a chance to try out the ATAS-120 that I have for a while now and as I had about an hour of a trip back to Tramore we changed frequency to 7.099.
Continue reading HF Mobile →

Early, on Saturday morning, the 13th of November Ron Mcgrath, EI6GO passed away. Ron, or ‘six golden only’ as he was also known as was a founder member of Tipperary Amateur Radio Group.

He watched over many of us in Tipperary as we made our first tentative steps in Amateur Radio, patiently explained to us how to correctly conduct ourselves on air.

He was always eager to chat and interested in how you were getting on and I for one shall miss him.

di dah di dah dit — di dit

DX-Tuners have a promotion on this weekend, quite a few nodes (Including my own) are ‘free listen’. Log in and check them out.