Category Archives: Ham

Stuff dealing with amateur radio

by srhuston

Look Ma, No SWRs!

Went down to Delaware yesterday afternoon to fuel two of my habits – one being served by Ham Radio Outlet, and the other by a store next door that sells things by the carton cheaper than in NJ or PA.  Of course, we got there at 16:28, two minutes before they closed, but I wasn’t really there to browse; I had a mission.  Asked for a soldered type N connector, but they’ve been out of them for four months.  Okay, how about a SWR meter that does 2m/440?  He asked how low in frequency I wanted it, and I admitted I’d like it to go to HF.  That one is $200.  Okay, how about just 2m/440?  That one’s $79.95.  So I bought the less expensive SX40C, made by Diamond (who coincidentally made my antenna as well).  Last question was about standoffs for mounting my antenna mast on the house.  Right now, I drove a good 2.5′ of it into the ground, and bolted it around 5′ from the ground, but I’d like another standoff near the top of the house so I could make it taller too – only problem is, the gutter sticks out more than the 4″ that the current standoff gives.  But, they didn’t have any of those either, so I’ll have to check the home improvement and hardware stores in the area I guess.

The good news is, when I got home and installed the SWR meter, I checked the antenna and have barely any reflected power, even when pushing out 100W on 2m or 440MHz.  So I guess that N connector adapter I used which I didn’t like very much is doing a good enough job.  Oh, and I’ll see if I can get some more photos uploaded today, since I haven’t been doing that much and we have a lot more done in the house now :>

by srhuston

One-Click Easyness

So Stephanie wanted to setup some new stuff on her site for her school.  Hey, now that I’m not hosting stuff on my desktop PC anymore, this should be simple.  And boy was it.  Create a new domain, install WordPress on it, and just now created another domain and will setup a calendar there.  As Cartman might say, “that was hella easy.”

Yesterday in general, however, was not.  Stephanie ran out to a couple teacher stores, and I decided to try to tackle some of the yard work.  Succeeded in taking down a few of the small trees that had taken root in various places where they shouldn’t be, including the one semi-large one in front of the gas meter.  I’ll have to call the gas company to figure out how we’re going to get that one out – its roots could be close to the pipe, and I don’t want to chance it since it’s on the “hot side” of the shutoff valve.  Not worth the whoops.  Got most of the ivy from the front of the house out, but not all of it yet.  That shit is massively entangled in there, and not coming out easily.  Started digging cylindrical holes in the ground around it, and then pulling up bits and shaking off the dirt from the roots.  If I’d started that way, I might have got all of it done instead of how I was pulling it out.  Oh well.  When Stephanie got home, we got all the stuff into trash bags and cans, and ready for Tuesday’s pickup.  And some time this week, she might try to finish getting the ivy out.  We seem to have killed the most of the spiders, and I even dug out the tree stump that was in the ground there.

As for now, I think I’m going to plug this in to charge, and go setup the Buddipole in the back yard.  Time to get on the air methinks – especially since I haven’t done that since we moved here yet :>

by srhuston

We’re Afloat (not)

Stephanie stopped by the house, for the first time since the flooding in our area started, and everything is fine.  Little bit of standing water in a couple of the drains around the basement, but nothing really wet at all.  Most excellent.  Power and water are working fine too.

Speaking of the floods, I spent most of yesterday at the Mercer County Emergency Operations Center (EOC).  We weren’t really needed for anything, but were there to make sure it was known that we’re ready should something go wrong, and I did help with a few communications events here and there – fixing one of the police band radios, and locating a few EMTs on their way down from another county to make sure they knew where to go for staging.  Was strange to have a mic in front of me, and not use my call sign, but instead things like “Strike team Juliet, Mercer EOC”.  Might go back there tonight for another shift, depending on how Stephanie feels – if she’s still working at the house, I’ll go to the house, otherwise I’ll probably head back to the EOC.

by srhuston

CQ Field Day, CQ Field Day

Worked on the house for a few hours, and traced out a lot of the circuits that either weren’t labeled, or I found later were labeled incorrectly or just not fully (ie, one marked “Sump Pump” which branches off to who-knows-where before that).  Figured out how I’m going to attack the basement lights so they’re all on one circuit, and all switched by the switch at the top of the stairs already instead of walking around to turn them all on.  Wrapped all that up around 2300, and headed to the club shack.

Once there, I had a look around – man, did some people do some serious cleaning up there!  There’s room for three stations comfortably, and a fourth could fit in there too.  Had one on 80m phone, one was on 40m CW and one on 20m PSK31.  Shortly after I arrived, Dan K2QM got up and offered me the 40m station, so I moved it over to the SSB portion of the band and went to town.  I didn’t figure out how many contacts I got, but at around 0455 I had wrapped up the 100th contact on 40 phone.  I’d figured I’d stop when I got there, or 5am, whichever came first – and I was happy the 100 contacts came first :>  Lots of fun this year, unlike last year when I ended up sitting around with nothing to do a lot of the time.  Figures, we have less stations operating now than last year, but nobody was waiting around for me to get off the air this time so it’s not like I kept someone from operating.

Oh well.. off to sleep, and then back to the house in the afternoon to hopefully get started on (and finish up some of) the wiring.

by srhuston

One down…

Well, ran the lawnmower and string trimmer for the first time yesterday evening.  Did all of the front yard, and it came out nice.  Only problem was I didn’t have time to do the back, but since that’s behind a fence and people can’t see it I was less concerned.  At least nobody will complain about the front looking bad :>  Mower works very well, and the trimmer does too once it gets started.  My only issue today is that my hands hurt from holding the handle, and the arms are a little sore.  Hey, maybe I’ll finally lose some weight doing yardwork…

In other news, ARRL Field Day is this weekend, and our plan was to setup in Mercer County Park.  Unfortunately, the weather may not cooperate – currently calling for an 80% chance of rain and thunderstorms all weekend, with a total rainfall between 3 and 6 inches.  So we’re going to setup at the club shack, and run a smaller Field Day operation there.  Also planning on setting up at the Mercer County Emergency Operations Center (EOC), and I’m trying to get in touch with N2HX about opening up the State EOC for a little bit too.  So if you’ve got a shortwave radio, tune around 20m (14MHz) and give a listen for Whiskey Two Zulu Quebec, Whiskey Two Mike Echo Romeo, and maybe November Juliet Two Echo Mike (though the latter two will probably only be on 80m, 3.5-4MHz)

by srhuston

But Wait, There’s More

Last, but not least, something I read on the ARRL website today made me smile.  Seems the FCC is looking to make a few changes post-Katrina, and the outlook is good for hams.  Would be nice if they made it “official” to do what many of us do already (setup stations at shelters, Red Cross locations, EOCs at local and state level) especially if they offer to foot the bill for some of the equipment.  Most of it has to come out of local budgets, and places just don’t budget for it – so I guess another good possibility is if they require the served agencies budget for it.  At least then we might not have to scrounge to get parts for an old radio, because nobody wants to buy a replacement.

by srhuston

And *THAT* Is Why Hams Rule

So Stephanie and I were watching the opening ceremonies for the 2004 Summer Olympics, and we decided to head out to get some stuff around 2200. I needed soda for work and home, and we figured we’d get a couple other things while we’re out. Headed to the local ShopRite, got the stuff we needed, and came home.

As I’m backing into a parking spot, we both notice a rather large man with his shirt hanging open, whom we’ve never seen in the area before, just hanging around one end of the parking lot. I park the truck, turn off the lights and unbuckle my seatbelt, and this guy’s just staring at the truck. After a couple words between us, I re-buckle my seatbelt, turn the lights on and pull out of the spot, heading back out to the road. “Now what do we do,” my wife asks. Well, I don’t want to call 911 for something like this, since it’s not an emergency, and I don’t like dialing that number unless there’s something really bad happening (though I’m sure someone right now is thinking, “This is bad enough, dial the damned phone.”) So I grab my radio and tune in a local repeater. “W2SRH mobile, anyone on frequency?” No response. Tune in another repeater. “W2SRH mobile, anyone else on frequency?” “This is KC2MBY, what can I do for you?” Perfect. I ask Scott to look up the phone number for the local police non-emergency number, and he gives me one. Then said that if that number didn’t do it, let him know and he’d look for another one, or if it came down to it he could call some friends of his in the NJ State Police and work from there.

Why have I told this story? Because the same thing could’ve happened if I had no cell phone at all, or if I had no signal on it or the battery was dead. Scott, a person I’ve never met before in my life, could’ve saved my life had the situation been much worse. And even though it wasn’t, he certainly helped me out, someone whom he’s never met either, just in the spirit of what made us get into this hobby. This is what amateur radio is all about, people finding things they enjoy, experimenting with new technologies and ideas, and helping out their fellow hams and non-hams alike.

Oh, and the creepy guy in the parking lot? No idea – on a return drive-by of the lot, we saw him crossing the street and heading away, and when I returned a third time just after that, we watched him walk away. Took that opportunity to park and get our stuff, head inside. Called KC2MBY back once I got in the apartment and thanked him again for his assistance, let him know that we were safe and inside.

Posted in Ham /
by srhuston

Oh, and Get Me the Machine that goes *PING*

So… it’s been awhile. Partly because I’m lazy, and partly because I’ve been busy at work and by the time I get home, I don’t have much playtime. So what’s new in the world?

Been playing with APRS, the Automatic Position Reporting System (Some links: here, here and here). It’s basically a packet radio system, but instead of normal packet radio which is point-to-point, this is more of a broadcast type system. Packets can be destined for a specific radio, so you can send messages from one system to another, or they can be broadcast for all (all amateurs, that is, not really for the general public and therefore not “broadcasting” in the FCC’s eyes). Since I don’t have a TNC (Terminal Node Controller, basically a modem that connects to a radio) to receive APRS packets in my area, I have it setup with an internet link (the last link above is to APRS-IS, the APRS internet service, which links digipeaters over the internet) on my laptop and at work, the latter runs pretty much constantly now as W2SRH-1. Oh, and just for completeness, a digipeater is for digital packets what a repeater is for analog voice – basically, it takes the packet you send, and re-sends it for all to hear. This way, if you’re running a very low-power radio in your vehicle, your packets still have a chance of getting over a large area if a digipeater picks them up and rebroadcasts them. Now why would you run a packet system in a car? Because you can hook a GPS receiver up to it, and as you move about the planet the little TNC and associated systems will send out your coordinates as a packet, which is picked up by these digipeaters and I-Gates (internet gateways), and someone else with APRS will see a little vehicle icon move across their screen as you travel. Pretty neat! I can watch as people who live in my area, or around the world since I read an unfiltered feed at work (ie, the packets I get are not limited to a specific area), move from one point to another. While that may not sound too interesting to everyone, it is kinda neat to see, and has other uses as well. For search-and-rescue work, an area can be setup where the operation will take place, and if everyone is carrying APRS transmitters then someone can monitor their progress and see what areas they’ve covered. Or in the case of an emergency, someone can pinpoint the location on the map, and others can see it. You could even use it to mark off an event of some sort, or something that others might find important: an accident location on a highway that should be avoided (or where help is needed), or the current and predicted location of a hurricane (which I saw just yesterday). While using this system with a radio is how it was originally intended, it’s still neat to be able to use it with an internet connection.

What else is new lately… we got a new machine at work, which is supposed to hold all the data that people want to keep on spinning platters but not backed up. 15 SATA drives, 200GB each, 3U enclosure. Only one problem: No floppy or CD-ROM drives. No problem, we’ll install Fedora with a USB key! Bought two keys, threw a boot disk on one of them, plugged it in, and… oh, another problem, the damned motherboard doesn’t boot from a USB device. Great. Oh, wanna go three for three? Okay, Fedora doesn’t have drivers for the motherboard’s SATA ports. Hell, RedHat in its entirety, as well as the Linux kernel, doesn’t support them – the company that sold it to us compiled a patch from who-knows-where into the kernel to get it to work. Well this just makes things interesting, doesn’t it? One good thing lately, we got rid of 10 of the old Sun Ultra5 workstations, and there’s only two of them left in the building. Those two will be leaving soon, like as soon as I get my hands on them (one’s in a pile in the server room, and one’s in a pile on someone’s desk). We should have enough computers from the decommissioned Beowulf cluster to replace a couple of the Ultra1 workstations too, and it’ll be good to get rid of them as well. That will still leave us with a few Suns in the building, not as many as when I started but getting close to a manageable number since the one machine that is serving their filesystems is no longer under hardware contract, and starting to show its age.

Along those lines, we also have to move faster on deploying LDAP to replace NIS, since our NIS server is getting overloaded (same Sun that serves ‘/’ to the other Suns). At least I’m guessing that’s what is happening, all I know is that every now and then I get error messages from various machines in the building that they can’t contact Newton for NIS information, but when I login to them things are working fine. NIS isn’t really well equipped for this kind of setup anyway, while LDAP is a bit more robust. I tested some LDAP server stuff today, including replication (where one or more ‘slave’ servers get their information from the LDAP master; the slaves are read-only, the master allows writes also) and auto-failover, and it all worked wonderfully. I setup a client machine to listen to the master and slave, logged in, did some things, killed the master and tried logging in again… and it worked just as fast as when the master was up, only it was talking to the slave now. Tried a write operation, and it failed with “Unable to process request”, quite a fine answer when I try writing to a read-only database. Brought the master back up, tried it again… and it tried to write to the slave, got an error, and bumped right over to the master where it worked fine. Perfect! End result is that I can setup a few slaves, and if the master gets overloaded or goes down, the slaves will continue to serve data, but nobody can change their password (nor can any new accounts be created) until the master returns. Sounds good to me!

Stephanie’s graduation is in a couple weeks, that should be fun. At least one of us graduated from college, and she’s now got more letters after her name than I will unless I get some certifications (but she’ll always have more degrees, I don’t think I’ll ever be going back to school). Before that, however, is … RUSH, Live at the PNC Bank Arts Center in Holmdel, New Jersey … ahh, this should be good. I have heard a couple songs from their latest album, it’s a tribute album with all cover songs from bands that inspired Rush (Geddy Lee singing “…sometimes I wonder what I’m a-gonna do, ’cause there ain’t no cure for the summertime blues…”).

Okay, on that note, I just went and looked up the tabs to Broon’s Bane again, and wish I had a room where I could practice and not wake anyone up. ‘Cause now I want to try to play it again. Like I wouldn’t get frustrated since I haven’t touched either my 6-string or my 12-string in ages, but I still want to play. Grr. Off to bed with me.

by srhuston

Over-Do It? Nah…

So Stephanie was down at the shore yesterday for a bachelorette party for a friend of hers from college, and I had the day to figure out something to do. Went to the DVRA Foxhunt in the morning, which is an event where one person hides a transmitter somewhere, and we all start at a location within 10km of the hiding spot and try to find it. My team got there last partially because we got stuck behind a footrace in Pennington – when we pulled into the parking lot we weren’t far behind the rest of the people (many were just getting out of their cars). After that I went home for a couple minutes and then up to the club shack, thinking others would be there for a VHF/UHF contest going on this weekend. Apparently they’d all left just before I arrived, but no big deal. I stayed there for a little while listening, and apparently the contest hadn’t yet started, so I was going to head home when the cell phone started buzzing that the server room was too hot.

Sometime last week I moved the vents on the new A/C unit to try to redirect the cold air where it was more needed, and apparently created a hot zone right in front of one of the racks. So a little more moving around and it was fixed. Back to home I went with nothing to do, and watched a little TV. When I realized I was falling asleep on the couch, I thought I’d go for a bike ride to wake up and do something. Before I knew it, I was 3/4 of the way to the club shack (maybe 5 miles away from my apartment) so I went there and hung out for about an hour. Around 1800 I headed back home on the bike, and this time I timed it – with the couple rest stops I made, which weren’t very long (maybe a minute here and there) it only took 45 minutes to get home. Not too bad, and probably a 10 mile trip all around. Stephanie was a little floored that I rode that far with not having been on the bike much at all before that, but if there’s one part of my body that’s in good shape it’s my legs. I felt a little wobbly going up and down the stairs both when I got home and shortly after that, but by the time I went to bed I was just fine. So I guess I didn’t over-do it at all :>

We planned on having people over tonight, but most of them weren’t able to make it (and the one person who was, we haven’t heard from since the invite, so we don’t know for sure if he’s coming). Other than that there’s no real plans for the day, so we’ll see what the afternoon brings. Next week at work I have to swap out some bad drives in one of the large filesystem servers, and then bring it down for a filesystem check to see if there’s any damage to the data (probably is, but we’ll see). Also need to come up with a decent way of updating the Yum repositories for automatic updates at work, so that if there’s a package I don’t want to bother updating I can exclude it. A little shell scripting will do the trick, just need to sit down and figure it out.

Guess that’s good for now, off to take a shower.

by srhuston

There’s Something You Don’t See

..namely an out of shape guy on a mountain bike, smoking a butt. Okay, it’s counterproductive, but it’s a dirty nasty habit that I still haven’t shaken.

Anywho, it’s been awhile since I put anything in here, and I thought about it a couple times but just didn’t mosey over to my website from work (where I would have more time to sit down and write than if I normally try it from home). But today I’ve got a bit of time. Actually got into work a little early for me, and left at a normal time so Steph and I went for a bike ride shortly after I got home. Headed over to TCNJ and rode around the campus a bit, and then back to home. I *knew* I should’ve put the speaker-mic on my HT as I left, but I didn’t, so when I heard Dan (K2QM) calling I couldn’t really answer without pulling over and stopping. Oh well, next time.

So what’s new and exciting this week… got a local repository setup for not only doing new installs (Fedora Core 2 is what we’re looking at) but for updating old installs as well. Just this afternoon I got the last of the machines updated, so now everything is running the latest patches for everything. Only a handful of machines that aren’t, but they’ll be upgraded by hand to FC2 before long (they’ll be the first ones to get the upgrade since they’re the oldest and not patchable currently – I’m not setting up a yum repository for 6 machines). Kinda nice to be able to move an RPM into a directory, and that night all the machines in the building will install it without extra work.

Since the last entry, I’ve also got all the equipment at home to be able to get on the air (not much, just power supply, another magmount and antenna) plus the quick charger for my handheld and the speaker-mic. Only I haven’t been able to do much with it because of how I’ve been working lately. Also trying to setup Camden County RACES with my brother-in-law since he’s doing a cleanup down by where he lives and didn’t know what to do for communications during the event. With any luck, anywhere from 10 to 20 hams will be there to take care of it (myself included).

Probably other stuff, but I’ve put this down a couple times and come back to it, and I don’t feel like thinking anymore. Back to the Dungeons of Doom.