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K3 #2184 (part 1)

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It arrived yesterday, but I was too tired to do anything with it last night. When I opened the box this morning, I instantly thought I had made a big mistake getting it in kit form. Lots of little bags with more little components all labelled very very carefully.

I got some courage up after lunch and pulled it all out of the box, everything I ordered seemed to be present, so I took a deep breath and opened the first anti-static bag.

Main RF PCB

It progressed rapidly after that.
Filters and LPA Installed

Front Shield, Left Side Installed & KAT3 Installed

KIO3 Installed

K3IO Installed

KIO3 Digital IO Installed

IMGP3411.jpg

Rear of Front Panel

Front Panel with Knobs and plastic covers Installed

Enough for today. I only panicked once (when I couldn’t find the 2-56 1/4″ screws for the LCD standoffs), and only made two mistakes that I know of (so far) which happened on KIO3. Many thanks to Mario, Marina, Dina, Patricia, Sharron and Ellison for your attention to detail while packing.

Green

Power Consumption.

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Here are some rough figures that I’ve come up with for ‘annual’ usage.

  • PC/UPS/Dsl Router, 990kWh
  • Fridge/Freezer, 525kWh
  • Work Laptop(at home)/Screen/Wireless Router , 235kWh
  • Chest Freezer, 182kWh
  • Kettle, 182kWh
  • Sky Box, 142kWh
  • TV/DVD/Speakers, 118kWh
  • Washing Machine, 93kWh
  • Printer/ancillaries, 89kWh
  • Projection Alarm clock, 34kWh
  • Toaster, 6Kwh

Biggest surprise for me was the small chest freezer, it seems to be very efficient.  I’ll have to think a bit more about the rest.

Amateur Radio, APRS, Green

Magic Smoke!

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Unfortunately I accidentally released the magic smoke (sorry Scott, didn’t mean to hurt it) from the venerable OT-1 that I was using to measure my PV array (see my earlier post). So I’ve parked that experiment for a while. As we get closer to the solstice, its amazing (to me) to watch the amount of ‘sun hours’ available to the panel decrease. I’ll have to begin negotiations with SWMBO for a better location for them next year.

Amateur Radio, AREN, AX25, Computing, DTN

DTN over AX25 – Update.

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Dissapointingly it has taken far to long to get back to this (see my earlier post), but recently Darren and I managed to be both online over the same few days to organise some testing. The infrastructure has changed slightly, in that the testing is now taking place through an AX25 Digipeater on a 1200bps Packet Channel, with the nodes being approximately 32Km distant from one another.

Both machines were Ubuntu 8.04, with kernel 2.6.17 on my end, 2.6.24 on the far end, latest ax25 utilities and tools.

My end was used to bring up the link every time (The far end has no /proc/ax25, so I can’t sent the ax25 parameters remotely, I’ve to change/rebuild the kernel afaik)

Through the digi we used the following settings when setting up the kiss ports. Txdelay of 150ms, paclen of 255, maxframe set to 1.

We quite quickly identified a problem with ‘chattyness’ (the locals got upset), and Darren did some re-work. Since then its performing much better, and the locals are much happier. I was away for a bit and Darren has updated the code some more, so more testing for me I think.

Given that I’m looking at this from an Emcomm/AREN point of view, I’m really pleased with how its progressed so far, and I think Darren may even be considering sending the code ‘upstream’.

./configure ; make; sudo make install

Amateur Radio, APRS, Green

PV Measurement

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I’m still going through the various items in the house, trying to get average usage profiles is quite difficult, so far the biggest hog is the Ubuntu Server I have running under the desk, so I might have to re-visit my choice of machine in the future.

Something I’ve wanted to do ever since I installed the PV Panels was to get some data on them. I’ve started it at least, here (login required) you can see some data. The top graph is the air temperature in the office. The second is the battery bank voltage as seen at the charge controller. The third is not yet connected, but I’m hoping to get a current measurement from the panels as well over the next few days.

The device doing the measurement is an OT1 (discontinued) from Argent Data Systems. The radio is a Yaesu FT-1500M (also discontinued) with a transmit power set to 5 Watts. I had to make a minor modification to the OT1. The potential divider circuit is set-up for measuring up to 15 Volts, I had to change one resistor to allow measurement up to 30Volts.

Green, Technology

Power hogs.

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I flirted with measuring the power consumption around the house last year, but got side tracked.  Now that we’re getting a 17.5% increase in Electricity prices, I think its high time I revisited this area. Co-incidentally, I happened to be running the TV ‘stuff’ through a Kill A Watt meter for the past week.  Total  consumption was 2.25kWh (approx €0.33).

I’m going to slowly go through the house and get a handle on what everything consumes.

The PV panels I put up are silently working away.  Unfortunately ‘operator error’ reset the counters a while back, and I’ve not been as diligent since. However, in the time between the 27th May and the 28th of June, the panels produced approximately 1500Amp Hours, 36,000 Watt Hours (1500 x 24), 36kWh or about €5.25 worth of electricity.