PA1JIM » Miscellaneous

Elecraft K1 casing

PA1JIM — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 12:08:56 +0000

Pending the delivery of my Elecraft K1, I was browsing the Elecraft website when I found this link.
It turns out Rose is a lovely lady who makes (all by hand) beautiful Elecraft cases! Because it’s made by hand, she can sew your own call on the case. I’m a sucker for this kind of handcraft! So I ordered a case for my Elecraft K1 right away!
If you want such a beautiful case for your Elecraft, just send Rose an email!

Balloon fox hunting on Sunday, 11th september 2011

PA1JIM — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 07:59:24 +0000

The annual balloon fox hunt will take place on Sunday, September 11th. A probe built by radio amateurs will be launched underneath a weather balloon at KNMI in De Bilt (Dutch weather institute). After the launch a always spectacular hunt by other radio amateurs and enthusiasts will follow. The goal is to find the probe first and you’ll be the winner!
Over the years, the balloon fox hunting has become a multimedia event for and by people interested in the radio hobby. There are numerous activities going during the hunt for guidance for the hunters, but also for a huge group of non-participating interested parties.
Throughout the day various coaching stations are active on 80m, 2m and 70cm. At 2 meters there is the special event repeater PI3VRZ on the air at about 350m height from the Gerbrandy tower in IJsselstein. Also, the hunting footage can be monitored through Amateur Television and the Internet. This year we even try to live broadcast the start, landing and awards ceremony.
The organization welcomes the great number of participants over the years (still growing)! Joining the hunt is very easy, with only a 2 meter antenna receiver and a simple directional antenna, you are assured of an afternoon of fun, a must for the whole family! Often the simplest equippes who are the most successful …

Put Sunday, September 11th on your calendar! For any further information such as frequency and times visit www.ballonvossenjacht.nl.

About – fdforward’s posterous

PA1JIM — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 07:46:39 +0000

Is this the beginning of web3.0?
Interesting to see the struggle from blogs to Twitter to social networks to perfect information overload to…. something new?

Digital Radio Mondiale

PA1JIM — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 09:05:21 +0000

A while ago I wrote about weird load signals I heard in the HF-spectrum. Mischa, PA1OKZ pointed me out that they probably are Digital Radio Mondiale signals. And indeed, when Mischa and I were checking the most loud signals I had encountered, it were DRM-broadcastings. So another mystery is solved. Thanks Mischa, for pointing this one out!

AVRS

PA1JIM — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 08:39:58 +0000

Interesting article over at G4ILO’s about Automatic Voice Relay System. A pretty old design what can connect analog tot digital via A-star to D-star. Here you can read an article of the initiator himself, WB4APR

CQ WW SSB 2010

PA1JIM — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 13:05:00 +0000

Last weekend I participated in the CQ WW SSB 2010 contest at our clubstation. First timer for a 48 hour contest. While preparing I decided not to work the full 48 hours. Earlier this year I participated in the PACC-contest for 24 hours and I found that exhausting enough. So I did want to start on saterday morning around 5:00 UTC until 22:00 UTC and return on sunday around 6:00 UTC untill 16:00 UTC. That left sunday evening for breaking up the gear. Everything worked as planned, kind of… We were active from the clubstation with two hams. We had build up 2 seats and there where 4 antenna’s operationable. A 10-15-20 beam, a 80m dipole, a 40m dipole (which hung too low) and a 20m dipole (which hung waaay to low). We swapped seats every once in a while to use the beam for 15m and 20m. 15m and 20m where the bands this weekend. I was able to work a few really far calls and added 19 new DXCC-entities to my log. In total I worked 295 QSO’s. Not too much, but I blame it to the bad antenna conditions (at least for multiple operators).

We really need to get up more monoband dipoles and get them up high! Problem is there are enough high trees around our clubstation but almost none possibilities to climb them. I think we need to figure out how to get the antennas up. For the PACC next year we want to try a multi-multi-station for the first time. So that is gonna need some serious preparations!

Sun Cobalt RaQ550

PA1JIM — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 11:48:32 +0000

We’re in need of a good and stable database server at the club station PI4RCG to facilitate central logging. In two weeks we’ve a balloonfoxhunting thing coming up and there must be 3 operators able to log their QSO’s (80m, 2m and 70cm). Last weekend I ran into a Sun Cobalt RaQ550 server. A nifty little 19-inch server with a Pentium III, 1.26GHz, 2x80GB harddisks in RAID1, 512MB memory onboard. No video/sound so you need to switch on a serial line to be able to see the terminal. You can connect to the terminal with for instance puTTY with speed 115200 and 8N1. The original OS was not reachable because the owner forgot the passwords. Not a big problem because I want to run Debian Linux on it anyway. Since Google is your friend I went surfing around to find how to install Debian Lenny on a Sun Cobalt Raq550. There are some articles but most of it is out dated.
If you’re interested, please read on how I made it work.

First you need to know the Cobalt hasn’t a BIOS on board. It has some sort of ROM were a linux kernel is located. That kernel is in fact a bootloader like Grub or LiLo but extremely simple. When you want to run linux on a Cobalt RaQ550, you need to flash this ROM so the bootloader is able to boot your linux kernel from disk. I run into this article on how to do that. I’ve made a virtual machine in VMware, running Debian Lenny, a DHCP-server, a NFSserver and a NFSshare with a installation of Debian Sarge on it. And also 2 files from this site (the ROMflasher and the new ROMfile, the 2M-version is especially for the RaQ 550).
When booting from network on the Cobalt I was able to flash the ROM.
From step 3 I was in the dark because my Cobalt wouldn’t recognize it’s own disks while booted from the network. It sees its disks when initializing but they are not reachable for fdisk.
I snatched 1 disk out and put it in another server. There I booted from the Debian Lenny netboot installer and installed Lenny on the disk (be sure you put /boot on the first partition, I just used one partition for / and /boot). Then I booted the disk and change some setting like inittab (for the serial connection) according to the howto.

The Cobalt is nog able to boot from the disk yet. What took me several days and a whole bunch of howto’s to figure out are the next steps:

- ‘aptitude install build-essential bzip2 kernel-package gcc libncurses5 libncurses5-dev bin86 gawk ncurses-dev initramfs-tools linux-source openssh-server’
- ‘cd /usr/src/’
- ‘tar -jxf linux-source’
- ‘ln -s linux-source linux’
- ‘cd linux’
- ‘wget http://files.parvi.us/gentoo-stuff/patches/cobalt-kernel-2.6.x/linux-cobalt-2.6.32-2009120301.jeffw.patch’
- ‘patch -p1 < linux-cobalt-2.6.32-2009120301.jeffw.patch'
- 'wget http://files.parvi.us/gentoo-stuff/patches/cobalt-kernel-2.6.x/configs/gen_v-minimal.config' and a 'cp gen_v-minimal.config .config'
- 'nano Makefile'
- 'EXTRAVERSION = -Sun-Cobalt-RaQ550'
- 'make-kpkg clean'
- 'make-kpkg --initrd --revision='201008301-Sun-Cobalt-RaQ550' kernel_image kernel_headers modules_image'
- 'cd /usr/src'
- 'dpkg -i linux-image-2.6.x.x_201008301-Sun-Cobalt-RaQ550_i386.deb'
- 'dpkg -i linux-headers-2.6.x.x_201008301-Sun-Cobalt-RaQ550_i386.deb'
- 'cd /usr/src/linux'
- 'make vmlinux modules modules_install'
- 'strip vmlinux'
- 'bzip2 -c vmlinux > /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.x.x-Sun-Cobalt.bz2′
- ‘du /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.x.x-Sun-Cobalt-RaQ550.bz2′ and check if < 1800Kb!!
- ‘cd /boot’
- ‘rm System.map vmlinux.bz2 initrd.img’
- ‘ln -s System.map-2.6.2x.x-Sun-Cobalt System.map’
- ‘ln -s initrd.img-2.6.x.x-Sun-Cobalt initrd.img’
- ‘ln -s vmlinuz-2.6.x.x-Sun-Cobalt-RaQ550.bz2 vmlinux.bz2′
- ‘shutdown -h now’

Now shutdown the install host and put the disk back in the Cobalt. It must be able to boot into Lenny and your Cobalt is up and running. Congratulations!
I put a lot of time in trying to enable RAID1 on the Cobalt, but it seems impossible. The fact that the bootrom keeps on calling /dev/hda1 makes it not possible to rise things to /dev/md0. (at least not possible to add hda1 to the RAID because resource is busy, can’t work around it).

Unidentified Signals

PA1JIM — Sun, 02 May 2010 11:05:27 +0000

When I was tuning around at the band the other day, I mistakenly went out of band and ran into a pretty strong signal. A weird signal. When I spin around some more I’ve noticed this signal repeats itself all over HF. First I thought its something in the neighborhood but when I asked Fred, PA3YH and Anne, PB1A to listen for the signal, they confirmed it.

I’ve made a list of all the HF frequencies were I hear this signal. Does anyone know where this signal is coming from and what it is? Are there more HAM’s who hear this?
Listen to the mp3 here: Unidentified signal JO22NF
The list of frequencies is over here: Frequencies Unidentified Signal

Genesis G3020 SDR

PA1JIM — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 13:27:19 +0000

Reminder to self: is this interesting to build?

BPSK31 first contacts

PA1JIM — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 14:33:23 +0000

Lately I’m not doing well on the antenna area. I did pull down the multiband dipole because it was really a horrible sight from the back garden. Then I put down the Antron 99A because it wasn’t giving the performance I hoped for (I couldn’t use it for 20m anyway). And the Cobwebb is still under construction which give a little delay because of the DYI-stuff I have to do around the house at the moment. So the only antenna I now use is a single wire which I draped over the roof. More of less in a square, 20 meters long.
I’ve noticed a pretty nice receiving signal in SSB but (of course) transmitting is awful. Not been able to make a single contact in SSB.
But the other day I got an idea: why not trying BPSK31?! So when I fired up the Signalink USB I started making QSO’s! A lot of European Russia (UA3PI, UA3GX, RA3FO, RN3DY, RX3DD, RU3EJ) but after trying a little harder I also contacted Croatia (9A6DJM), Ukraine (UX1MW, UX1LN) and Romania (YO3JX). This turns out to be fun! Fine tuning my macro’s a little here and there.
Seems that my wire on the roof has a liking for the east, don’t know why since it lays out in a square. But hey, it’s nice working till I’ve get my Cobwebb up and running!