Category Archives: Work

Amateur Radio, Work

Engineered – A week of wonder!

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“During the week of the 9th to 13th of February over 18,000 students took part in a range of interactive engineering related activities in 20 counties across Ireland. The activities ranged from the following:.. more

I was asked if I could co-ordinate with Waterford IT the running/scheduling of the event on behalf of the Irish Radio Transmitters Society. The IRTS had developed a Morse Code Oscillator Kit, along with a presentation to be given beforehand. As it turned out, I ended up doing the presentation myself, along with assistance from a colleague.

We entertained students from Waterpark College on the first day and students from the Ursuline Convent the second (some pics here). I say entertained, as all the students were quite sceptical at the beginning of the class. But seemed prepared to give the kit a chance after watching the Jay Leno Clip (below).

At the end of the first day, only one group from Waterpark hadn’t got their oscillator going, the second day, there were a two or three kits that weren’t fully functional by the time they had to leave.  That said they all seemed to have a go at it, glad of the distraction from normal classes.  Some even had a go at sending Morse Code to one another.

I was reliably informed last week that at least one student out of the two classes intends to have a go at the Radio Experimenter exam, so I guess we can chalk that down as a ‘success’, and as good experience.

Computing, IPv6, Work

LinShim6 v0.9 Released

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“I am glad to announce that LinShim6 version 0.9 has been released. The major additions are the followings:

——————
– Support for Keepalive Timeout option
– Faster failure recovery for TCP applications (thanks to RTO reset upon path change)
– Shim6 can now be compiled as a module. The trigger heuristic is defined as a separate module. So that it can be
unloaded or replaced depending on the needs. For example, a server that does not want to initiate a Shim6
negotiation by itself, but only answer to requests, can simply unload the heuristic module.
– Added a console option, that allows dynamic setting of the failure detection timer.
——————

The useful links are the followings :

* LinShim6 main page, where you can download the kernel patch and the daemon : http://inl.info.ucl.ac.be/LinShim6
* Updated draft shim6-impl (implementation report) : http://inl.info.ucl.ac.be/publications/shim6-implementation-report-linshim6
* Documentation (not yet updated for 0.9, however) : http://inl.info.ucl.ac.be/publications/linshim6-implementation-shim6-protocol

regards,

Sébastien.

—
Sébastien Barré
Researcher,
CSE department, UCLouvain, Belgium
http://inl.info.ucl.ac.be/sbarre”

We (TSSG) have been working with Sébastien, for quite a while, debugging the implementation, and adding features to it. Specifically in the EFIPSANS project, we are looking at SHIM6’s failure recovery capabilities in the event of one network interfacing (or, indeed one upstream provider) loosing connectivity. We have been sidetracked for a while with lots of project documentation to be delivered to the EU, hopefully we can get a linux iso prepared once again to allow others to experiment.

Computing, IPv6, Work

Irish IPv6 Summit.

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Through where I work, I’ve been using/breaking/experimenting with difference facets of IPv6 for several years. Part of what TSSG has been doing is attempting to raise awareness about IPv6 whenever the opportunity arises.  As part of the Irish IPv6 task force, TSSG is helping to organise an IPv6 Summit, which is expressly for the purpose of raising awareness in the public and private sectors. Even if you have only a passing interest, do come along (and ask difficult questions!).

Computing, Work

Shimming.

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I mentioned SHIM6 way back in November 2006, when I was working on a project where we were doing an ‘initial look’ at SHIM6.  Well now I’m back looking at it again for a different project. So I  have been putting together a testbed here in  TSSG in order that we can complete a fuller analysis of  Sébastien’s implementation.

Unfortunately I’ve not really got ‘decent’ results yet due to a ‘comedy’ of failures of older hardware that I have re-tasked for the job, and there’s one pesky bug that we haven’t quite found yet that is disrupting things, but hopefully I’ll have more ‘interesting’ results in the relatively near future.

So far (pesky bug allowing), the fail-over aspect seems to work quite well, which is very very cool when you see it in operation.

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.

Computing, Technology, Television, Work

Software Defined Radio

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This is very interesting.  Who knows, it may soon be possible to have all the different wireless technologies available on one chipset, all presented as just another ‘ethernet’ device (or maybe many devices.   If  there was an  associated hardware signal to indicate ‘oops.. we’ve had to change networks’ or some other smarts, it would make things very interesting in the whole arena of Terminal/Node Mobility for Internet connected devices

Travel, Work

Whistler – Day 2

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What a blast! Solely due to the patience and enthusiasm of our instructor Larry, and his ‘shadow’, Alex, our entire group made progress today. I managed to improve my turns to be more HGV like, rather than 747 like, woohoo! Unfortunately our education is now on an indefinite ‘hold’ as we are heading back to Vancouver tomorrow. Just to make it more annoying, it started snowing this evening, so tomorrow will most likely be one of the best skiing days of this week. We’ll just have to come back someday.

Amateur Radio, Travel, Work

Let the vacationing begin

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IETF is over, and boy was it a tough week, acronyms everywhere, drafts and protocols being the main topic of conversation (the odd bit of sci-fi trivia), quite intimidating for a newbie, though all-in-all very interesting.

Today, Dee and I began our vacation, this morning we headed out to Capilano Bridge to see what it was all about, then came back into downtown, and headed across to Granville Island. The Granville market was almost Bazaar like, though not quite on the same scale. Very enjoyable to wander through. We even managed to pick up a few items so that jolly-fat-guy will have something to ho ho ho about over Christmas.

Last Wednesday evening I attended a meeting of the Vector Emergency Communications group. It was an AGM so I didn’t hang around too long, though I did get a quick tour of the EOC from Fred, VE7CX, before he had to tend to his AGM duties.

Early Thursday morning, I headed out to Burnaby Communications for a few more items for that jolly-fat-guy, and while there John, VE7AYP and Bill, VE7CIM, strongly suggested that I should attend the North Shore Amateur Radio Club’s monthly meeting.  So after a evening pass from herself was obtained (through sniffles), I headed out to North Shore.  Leif Erickson, VA7CAE and the rest of the club made me feel very welcome and during a break in the talk showed me around their communications centre.  The speaker for the evening was Mike Andrews, VE7MPA, regional manager in the BC, Ministry of Public Safefy and Solicitor General, who gave a very interesting presentation on the concept of  Disaster Response Routes, an overview of Disaster Response, and how Amateur Radio operators fit into the overall plan.  Very interesting indeed.

Next stop, Whistler!