I recently received an OpenTracker and have that in the car at the moment. I also have a PocketTracker operational, but I have not yet managed to get back into the hills to evaluate how well it would work in hilly terrain. EI8JA switches his one on now and again when he has it in the Jeep. I’ve managed to follow him from my own QTH (location) back to his own. Even though he has an external antenna the power output from the PocketTracker is approximately 250 milli watts.
Anyways, recently I’ve started seeing satellites with numbers greater than 32 which would never lock. I was wondering why so I did a bit of googling and came up with this.
Basically it seems that the european version of WAAS called EGNOS is in testing and my Garmin GPS is able to receive the signal, but adheres to the ‘do not use’ flag. It will be interesting to see how it improves the accuracy of my GPS. the GPS V, with a clear sky reports an accuracy give or take 6 Meters, though some dispute that and think that the Garmin is not as good as it thinks it is!
I was returning from IST 2004 on Thursday, having departed early and leaving some of my collegues to Fly the Flag. As I was leaving my Aunts QTH in Dungarvan, John Ketch EI2GN gave me a shout on the repeater on 145.675Mhz.
I’ve been waiting for a chance to try out the ATAS-120 that I have for a while now and as I had about an hour of a trip back to Tramore we changed frequency to 7.099. Continue reading HF Mobile→
Early, on Saturday morning, the 13th of November Ron Mcgrath, EI6GO passed away. Ron, or ‘six golden only’ as he was also known as was a founder member of Tipperary Amateur Radio Group.
He watched over many of us in Tipperary as we made our first tentative steps in Amateur Radio, patiently explained to us how to correctly conduct ourselves on air.
He was always eager to chat and interested in how you were getting on and I for one shall miss him.
At about 15:00 UTC today Martin Hayes (EI9FMB) and I (EI7IG) got the Amateur Radio Station in Waterford Institute of Technology back on the air. Now it may not sound like a big deal, but I can assure you that it was. Its taken several years of hounding the “powers that be” in order to get this fairly small step accomplished. Continue reading EI3RCW is Back→
Reading Shortwave Magazine a few months back and I came across an article discussing the services of www.dxtuners.com. Its a cool idea, basically it allows you to tune a radio receiver on the other side of the globe if you wish. In fact I was so impressed I set up my own node so now there is a dxtuners node in Waterford. Unfortunately, the node in Waterford is valued quite highly by the dxtuners network, so a subscription is required to listen to it.
If any of you dxtuners are reading this, feel free to contact me if you want frequencies added to the band listings.
I’ve started back experimenting with APRS, now that I have time again. My renewed enthusiasim is due to the fact that we have a local APRS to Internet gateway under test, and at the moment, I’m really the only person that can ‘test’ it.
I have to sort out my mobile setup, I just need to box the Tinytrack and get power and GPS cabling sorted out. Unfortunately, it is taking much longer than I thought it would, but, it will get sorted out eventually.
Caroline is still wandering about, though she is on her way back to a cooler climate shortly.
Stephen and Annie were both briefly home so I dropped up and we had a few beers and a bit of a laugh. As always, it was a pleasure to stop by and have a few beers with the Burke family, and, as The Boss has purchased a new car, it was a good excuse to put a few miles on it.
Back to work today. Spent pretty much all day catching up on emails, fortunately most could just be deleted on sight. Oh well….
Unfortunately we are back from holidays. We spent a few days in Barcelona (a beautiful city, we will definitely be back). We then got the train down to Valencia, stayed there two nights, and then spent a week in Torrevieja. A most enjoyable and relaxing holiday.
Now that we have returned to reality we have a few days before returning to work. A prospect I am definately not looking forward to.
All the class managed to get through the course succesfully, the certification exam will have to wait however until after I come back from holidays (Barcelona here we come).
Caroline, thanks for the emails, your only making all of us jealous.
Random thoughts — Mostly Amateur Radio, Satellite, Linux or Work related.
