This is neat, a backpack that harvests power from the walking motion. How long before we see these in Altitude I wonder?
Category Archives: Technology
Palm beach and Jadoo
Dee insisted that we visit Palm Beach as the Hotel we stayed in was so close to it. We headed up there after having breakfast and saying goodbye to the Gibbons and Barrett folk.
Why Palm Beach? Home and Away is shot there apparently, and as we were so close, I was given no other option but to drive up.
I was reading an article in the October edition of CQ on one of our “rest” days and it contained an article about Jadoo’s Jbox portable power system (about $6000 dollars worth). A very cool piece of technology, very useful for portable/emergency power situations. I’ll be keeping an eye on these guys.
Happy new year everyone!
Amateur Satellites
We know that satellites are overhead as quite a lot of people now have a GPS receiver or have satellite TV. I myself have Sky at home, with its associated dish and receiver.
More recently I’ve become interested in APRS and satellite reception. I know now that is relatively simple to send a short burst of APRS data through the International Space Station (current list here), so I did a bit more reading and listening.
My antenna set-up at home isn’t adequate enough for reception of satellites, so I also tried listening in my car but I could only barely make out that there were stations there (a uhf pre-amp may help in both situations, but I’ve not got my hands on one yet).
While digging through my junk the other day looking for an old network card, I found an Arrow antenna which I lost quite a while back. Just what was required. So, last night, armed with the arrow, a Kenwood TH-D7, a headset, (required for full duplex operation) a blank piece of paper and a pen. I sat on the step at my back door and waited for Saudisat 1C to come over the horizon. (I knew when to listen as I had run a satellite tracking program earlier in the day.)
After a few minutes of what could be best described as ‘waving’ the antenna around, in the general direction of were I ‘thought’ the satellite was going to come up over the horizon, I finally heard some stations calling ‘cq satellite’. I pressed the ‘push to talk’ button and called ON5NY, to my absolute shock he replied to me. I forgot to write most of the details down, but he emailed me afterwards to confirm them (the time was 19:17 UTC) and he included some pictures of his ‘shack’. OZ1MY and PD5DJ called me immediately afterwards. It was quite a buzz. I also knew that AO-51 was scheduled to pass overhead later on so I listened out for that and managed to (briefly) speak to Graham, G7HEJ at 20:39 UTC. What a blast!
We are having a meeting of Tipperary Amateur Radio Group this evening that co-incides with a pass of AO-51, so I’ll hopefully be able to demonstrate to the other members how easy it is to use these satellites. I would recommend anyone to try it, its great fun (and when the neighbours see you waving an antenna about they WILL think you have lost it completely!).
Scott eVest
I flew to London Tuesday evening for a SEINIT project meeting in UCL on wednesday. I walked down to Borders and grabbed a few American Amateur Radio/Scanning magazines. I like to get them now and again as, compared to here (Ireland/UK), there are many many more “HAMS” in the US than here, so its a much bigger and more varied market. Anyways, I was reading the “What’s New” section of the Monitoring Times magazine on EI723 back to Cork, and I spotted an add for the Scott eVest, now with a solar panel, just what a geek with gadgets would need :). Very cool!
Canary Wireless
I saw this in the Wi-Fi Networking News. Very cool piece of kit. Unfortunately its not CE approved yet (who cares). An external antenna connection “May” be included in future versions of the product. Sounds good to me!
More EGNOS
I dropped an email off to the ESA helpdesk asking them about my mysterious satellite “39”, the following is the reply I received:
Continue reading More EGNOS
GPS V
Last friday night Roy, Junior and myself headed for Kelso in Scotland. Junior and I left Tramore at 19:00 Friday night, headed to Dublin, collected Roy and the Van, headed to Belfast, got the ferry, drove to Kelso, had brekkie, loaded the van and headed back. We got back to Tramore 22:00 Saturday night. I brought my Garmin GPS V along with the maps for Ireland and the parts of the UK we would be travelling through.
Continue reading GPS V
GPS V
I finally got a bit of a play with it the last few days, its a pretty cool piece of kit, the basemap alone is impressive. I’ll be heading to Scotland with Roy after christmas to collect a few bits and pieces belonging to his Car, so we will check it out a bit more thoroughly on that trip.
Couzins, I’ll not be making it to Dublin Sunday night as I’m working monday, also its looking like I’ll be spending most of christmas working, so I can’t say I’m looking forward to the holidays, oh well.
IPv6 SSH on OS X
I happened to be trying to ssh directly to an IPv6 host this morning and started getting real annoyed when my IPv6 capable laptop couldn’t ssh to another IPv6 host. A quick google came up with OS X Hax: IPv6 OpenSSH retrofit. Saved by google once again!
Honeyd
I’m currently listening to a webcast from SANS. Its about Honeyd, a tool for creating virtual hosts on a network. The purpose of honeyd is to gain information on people trying to break into machines on your network. The slideshow is being presented by Lance Spitzner, he is very enthusiastic. Some great questions are being asked, and being well answered by Lance. All very interesting!