Category Archives: Technology

D-Star

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.

Busy Busy Busy.

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!

More power

TV, Video, Sky Box 0.4kWh (~80Watts) comes to about €24 Euro for the year (lets say €30 making allowances for Rugby matches etc). Dreambox DM7000 Satellite Receiver about €18 per annum (0.3kWh). Happy birthday to my little bro today…. he’s getting old now 😉

President Bush examines Hybrid Vehicles

The full news article is available here. White house link here

What I though most interesting was what Mr Bush said on the video clip:

“I firmly believe that the goal I laid out — that Americans will use 20 percent less gasoline over the next 10 years — is going to be achieved, and here’s living proof of how we’re going to get there,”

Interesting indeed.

EI2WRC Weather Station

In October I Posted that we (SEARG) had put an APRS Weather Station on the air, just behind the College in Waterford City. Mark, EI7IS has been working on integrating the output into the club web site, so now it is visible at http://www.searg.com/WXstation.php. If you find it useful, please do let Mark know.
Temperature/Dew point
<IMG SRC="http://www.findu.com/cgi-bin/temp.cgi?call=EI2WRC&last=120&xsize=300&ysize=200&units=metric"

Barometer (millibars)
<IMG SRC="http://www.findu.com/cgi-bin/baro.cgi?call=EI2WRC&last=120&xsize=300&ysize=200&units=metric"