Computing, General, Technology

Netopia Cayman PSU Fault?

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There was I, browsing away, minding my own business on Friday evening, when all of sudden my Netopia Cayman lost sync.  I tried rebooting it a few times but no joy. On reboot, it would respond to a few pings and then stop. I rang Eircom Saturday morning and after going through all the questions, eventually, they said they would have a replacement router out to me by Tuesday at the latest.

I asked a friend of mine if he had a spare router, which he did, but he suggested that I first try replacing the PSU, as he had a router display similiar symptoms previously and it turned out to be the PSU.

Turns out, that the PSU is where the fault lies.  I plugged the router into the shack power supply and all is well again (As an aside, I now know that it uses 0.3Amps at 14.0Volts).

Amateur Radio, APRS, AREN, Work

Sean Kelly Tour – a different view

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And this is it…

SeanKellyTourSnapshop.jpg

What has this got to do with the Sean Kelly Tour? well, the Sean Kelly Tour took place last Sunday (August 30th), and from all accounts it was quite successful with roughly 2700 hardy cyclists taking to the roads.

The above screenshot (covering an area of roughly 900 square kilometers) is taken from the xastir window of my home Ubuntu desktop after I got home from the event. It shows the trails left from the APRS equipment in several vehicles (including some of these, these, one of these and one of these), several objects and a few home stations. As the screenshot is from the end of the day, it is quite confused looking.

AREN was at the event to assist Civil Defence in maintaining an accurate location of as many of the three different sub-events (50k, 100k and 160k) as we could, allowing them to more cleverly deploy their own medical resources around the course. Great use was made of the SEARG APRS digi-peater network, and it definitely (as can be almost seen) proved it’s usefulness on the day, allowing the guys in Net Control Tim, EI2KA and Bernard, EI8FDB (see below) to keep both the the Civil Defence and event organisers updated as to the locations of various items almost in real time, throughout the day.

P1030384

It was a good days exercise for AREN, and best of all I wasn’t manning Net Control!

Amateur Radio, APRS

CASTOR and POLLUX

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Castor and Pollux
I really love this image of Castor and Pollux shortly after being deployed from STS-127.

Both ANDE-2 satellites were successfully launched from STS-127 at 17:23utc July 30th over Texas, USA. Below, in the Youtube movie from OZ9AEC, the deployment starts at 05:13:

I don’t have a particularly effective satellite receive set-up (no steerable aerials, just an omnidirectional vertical aerial) for attempting to monitor these, but now and again, I’m able to receive a telemetry packet. Here is one from today:

1k2: fm POLLUX-1 to CQ via TELEM ctl UI pid=F0(Text) len 100 12:55:47
0000 MEMS 1017126 24.06 23.112 21.09 -1.02 -0.03 0.558 -8.31 -2.63 5.
0040 30 25.54 26.81 26.17 2.60 1 14 52 ..

For some reason, I find it pretty cool to receive something other than TV from a satellite in space, maybe it’s the fact that they have a finite lifetime, who knows, but I still like the picture!

Amateur Radio

My Favourite “Ham Activity”

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While travelling recently, I came across the make magazine. The edition I picked up, had some great technology projects in there covering a mixture of eco-friendly ideas, along with advice for the sustainable garden along with other more practical advice. They also have a blog where they post a mixture of “cool” and useful ideas/projects. Earlier this month, they featured a post by a young Fashion Designer from New York City named Diana. Funnily enough, it wasn’t about fashion. It was about her favourite activity in Amateur Radio, which is “Catching satellites on ham radio“.

Several things surprised me about the post. Diana is, well, a girl, and fashion designer at that. Why is that surprising? The hobby is heavily biased towards (middle aged, overweight) men. The antenna in the picture is homebrew, i.e. it looks like she made it herself (I particularly like the orange tips on the antenna elements).

Even “within” the hobby, a lot of folks don’t bother homebrewing anything, they just hand over hard earned cash. I’m guilty of this myself as much as anyone. (Though in my defence, my current HF antenna’s are a mixture of wire, fishing poles and pull-ties).

Lastly, I don’t know of a) any fashion designers, b) girls, c) girl who homebrew, in the hobby. I think it’s great! Welcome to the hobby Diana, and I hope to work you on the bands at some stage.

Amateur Radio, General, Technology, Utility Listening

Twittering using Morse Code.

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Yes, you read it right.

A massive project to bounce voices from Earth to the moon and back to another spot on Earth will be launched June 26. Several former astronauts and other famous people have signed on, and so can one lucky Wired Science reader.

We’ve secured a spot for one Tweet to be bounced off the moon, so send your most space-worthy 140 characters to @wiredscience or e-mail betsy_mason@wired.com. The winner can go to a moon bounce station to personally send the message to the moon.

Read the full article here. Thanks Jeff for spotting it. No doubt about it, it is a big (literally) project, and the article does a very good job at explaining it

Amateur Radio, AX25, Computing, software

paclink-unix

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I posted before about using the Airmail through Wine on Linux to access the Winlink system. It’s fine, it works, but it is a lot of overhead. Recently, in a response to a question, Dana, KA1WPM posted to one of the Winlink email lists that I’m on about the existence of paclink-unix. Paclink-unix was started by Nick Castellano, N2QZ.

Now I had seen this mentioned before, but for whatever reason I never took the time to look at it. This time I took a closer look.

After downloading the source and having a quick browse, a few small modifications had to be made.

In mime2wl.c I changed Nick’s call-sign to my own. The same had to be done in mail.wl2k.c

in wl2k.c I changed

asprintf(&command, "%s -ba %s", SENDMAIL, emailaddress)
to

asprintf(&command, "%s -bm %s", SENDMAIL, emailaddress)

I’m not sure what -ba means to the original sendmail, but -bm for postfix, which I’m using, seemed to be what I was looking for, after consulting the manpage.

Next the configuration. After (very) briefly consulting the postfix docs. I came up with the following:


/etc/postfix/main.cf
....
transport_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/transport
...

/etc/postfix/master.cf
…
wl2k unix – n n – – pipe
flags=RXhu user=j0n argv=/usr/local/libexec/mail.wl2k
….

I mostly copied the maildrop line already in the configuration file. removing the ‘D’ in the flags and adding an ‘X’. I’ve not yet tested whether I need the ‘D’ or not.

X indicates ” Indicate that the external command performs final delivery. This flag affects the status reported in “success” DSN (delivery status notification) messages, and changes it from “relayed” into “delivered”.”


/etc/postfix/transport
...
winlink.org wl2k:localhost
...

So anything destined @winlink.org now gets sent through the local transport.

That’s pretty much it for the moment.

If I need to send to any other domains through winlink I could add the following “catch-all” to the transports file.

* wl2k:localhost

And everything would go through it.

Testing it then I sent myself an email at winlink.org, and tried to collect it using the supplied tools.

j0n@ns1:~/src/paclink-unix-0.3$ sudo wl2kax25 EI7IG "EI8IG-10 v EI2WRC-4" 1200 60 ei7ig@localhost
Connected.
---
<

<

<

<[WL2K-2.0.0.18-B2FIHM$]
wl2kax25: sid [WL2K-2.0.0.18-B2FIHM$] inboundsidcodes -B2FIHM$

>; EI8IG-10 V EI2WRC-4 DE EI7IG QTC 0
>[PaclinkUNIX-1.0-B2FIHM$]
>FF

wl2kax25: proposal code C type E mid 6L9CAL8YBRST usize 274 csize 236 next (nil) path (null) ubuf (nil) cbuf (nil)
79
wl2kax25: sentcksum=79 proposalcksum=79
wl2kax25: 1 proposal received
>FS Y
wl2kax25: title: Testing Postfix
wl2kax25: offset: 0
wl2kax25: STX
wl2kax25: len 236
wl2kax25: EOT
wl2kax25: extracting…
wl2kax25: calling sendmail for delivery
wl2kax25: delivery completed
wl2kax25: Finished!
>FF

j0n@ns1:~/src/paclink-unix-0.3$

wl2kax25 is like fetchmail. It connects out over a linux ax25 port (i.e. Radio) to a winlink node and retrieves it to be delivered to an email account of your choosing. In the above example, the winlink node is approximately 35km away, but not accessible directly. Consequently I used the EI2WRC-4 digital repeater (digipeater) to relay my packets.

For a ‘pre-alpha’ piece of software, it is working nicely for me, and it is good to have a Linux “Native” winlink client. Many thanks to Nick and Dana for their efforts.

Computing, Work

OSX go-slow.

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I’m still running 10.4 on my MacBook Pro. This morning when I came into work there was a security update for Safari available which I duly installed. At this point it all went horribly wrong. Securityd swallowed 1.7GB of Ram (out of 2GB) and it caused my machine to page-in and out continuously.

A quick bit of googling, and I came across this post. Suffice it to say, it worked a charm.

The summary (I wasn’t brave enough to just rm the file)


sudo mv /var/db/CodeEquivalenceDatabase /var/db/CodeEquivalenceDatabase.org

and then reboot the machine.

Many thanks to the poster, you have, most definitely, saved my day!

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.