Wednesday, November 20, 2013
It's Time for a Smart Talkie!
So who will be the first to bundle an Android 'pad with an Amateur Radio transceiver? This looks like a break through application for ICOM's DStar. Other 'digital' modes would work but it would take more development.
Maybe the open source folks will do it - http://radio.testa.co/
-- update 11/20/2013 --
The Runbo was an option but it was pricey. This one (EARL) looks even better:
http://www.meetearl.com/
On the other hand, maybe just adding an Argent Data T3-9670 to a tablet or smart phone will be better yet.
Amateur Radio HF Restrictions in USA
Dear ARRL Directors:
I wish I had the time to write a well crafted explanation but the information is there on the advanced Amateur Radio development mailing lists and in regulations from many other countries around the world..
This is a bad idea and could hurt us for years to come. Reducing the symbol rate is, of course, a good thing. Locking us into a mere 2.8 KHz on HF is an artificial limitation that will, in the near future, lead to the same frustrations as the archaic symbol rate restriction and further hinder our adoption of modern technology. A bad change now will add years to the process until we make a better proposal. Ideally there should be no limit by rules but rather by appropriate technologies and reasonable operation practices as is shown to work successfully elsewhere.
Please further research and reconsider this proposal.
73's
Bill, WA7NWP
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: ARRL Web site
Date: Wed, Nov 20, 2013 at 9:48 AM
Subject: ARLB030 ARRL Files "Symbol Rate" Petition with FCC
To: wa7nwp@gmail.com
SB QST @ ARL $ARLB030
ARLB030 ARRL Files "Symbol Rate" Petition with FCC
ZCZC AG30
QST de W1AW
ARRL Bulletin 30 ARLB030
From ARRL Headquarters
Newington CT November 20, 2013
To all radio amateurs
SB QST ARL ARLB030
ARLB030 ARRL Files "Symbol Rate" Petition with FCC
The ARRL has asked the FCC to delete the symbol rate limit in
§97.307(f) of its Amateur Service rules, replacing it with a maximum
bandwidth for data emissions of 2.8 kHz on amateur frequencies below
29.7 MHz. The ARRL Board of Directors adopted the policy underlying
the petition initiative at its July 2013 meeting. The petition was
filed November 15.
I wish I had the time to write a well crafted explanation but the information is there on the advanced Amateur Radio development mailing lists and in regulations from many other countries around the world..
This is a bad idea and could hurt us for years to come. Reducing the symbol rate is, of course, a good thing. Locking us into a mere 2.8 KHz on HF is an artificial limitation that will, in the near future, lead to the same frustrations as the archaic symbol rate restriction and further hinder our adoption of modern technology. A bad change now will add years to the process until we make a better proposal. Ideally there should be no limit by rules but rather by appropriate technologies and reasonable operation practices as is shown to work successfully elsewhere.
Please further research and reconsider this proposal.
73's
Bill, WA7NWP
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: ARRL Web site
Date: Wed, Nov 20, 2013 at 9:48 AM
Subject: ARLB030 ARRL Files "Symbol Rate" Petition with FCC
To: wa7nwp@gmail.com
SB QST @ ARL $ARLB030
ARLB030 ARRL Files "Symbol Rate" Petition with FCC
ZCZC AG30
QST de W1AW
ARRL Bulletin 30 ARLB030
From ARRL Headquarters
Newington CT November 20, 2013
To all radio amateurs
SB QST ARL ARLB030
ARLB030 ARRL Files "Symbol Rate" Petition with FCC
The ARRL has asked the FCC to delete the symbol rate limit in
§97.307(f) of its Amateur Service rules, replacing it with a maximum
bandwidth for data emissions of 2.8 kHz on amateur frequencies below
29.7 MHz. The ARRL Board of Directors adopted the policy underlying
the petition initiative at its July 2013 meeting. The petition was
filed November 15.
Thursday, October 24, 2013
A few mesh things..
1- Reprogrammed two M2 bullets running the earlier NW-MESH load with the latest CHANGEME firmware. Tried one as an upgrade instead of an install but wasn't sure about settings so went ahead and installed the whole thing. Ubiquity installs are getting faster and easier every time.
2- A lighttpd web server is running on the Pi. For now it's just serving some files off the attached old 500 G drive. Good learn here is it's possible to directly HNA advertise the /pub directory and a PHP (web page script) file. Thus either resource is available anywhere on the mesh as a simple web page click.
3 - PI vs POGO. I'm currently running a PI as a 'computer/build server' and a POGO planned as a dedicated NW-MESH resource server. For future projects I'll be going more PI and less POGO. While the POGO is faster and cheaper; it has less memory, no audio/video output and the full disk system is on a removeable memory chip which is easy to replace. The biggest differentiation for me is that the PI uses (essentially) Debian and POGO is running ARCH-Linux which suffers big time from the newer is better syndrome. PI just works - POGO got broke on an update that required searching out some "just this time" special commands that 'might work' because all of the /bin files were moved to /usr/bin.
4 - I'm working towards moving the local-local traffic off the mesh on to local Access Points as that's faster. HD video won't go on the mesh and stutters. :(
5 - 5 GHz is looking better all the time. The three channels on 2.4 GHz aren't enough. Any future AP's will be at lease Dual Band and I'm looking forward to trying out NW-MESH on 5 GHz.
6 - Waiting for the new Agent 440 Data Radio - we'll soon be Babbling on UHF.
7 - (added) I now have an FTP server, proftpd, running on the Pogo. With a little more customization I should be able to point the IP camera at it instead of the FTP server that's been running for months and months on the little white ASUS netbook. That will free up the netbook so it'll no longer be a mesh server but rather a client user device.
More soon.
73
Bill, WA7NWP
Thursday, September 26, 2013
Amateur Radio Licensing
Some web sites to help with Amateur Radio Licensing
- Ham Study - sponsored by ICOM
- http://hamexam.org/ - Amateur Radio Practice Exams
- http://www.qsl.net/k/kb7tbt//newham/ - Ham Help page. Comprehensive list of links.
- http://aa9pw.com/ - FCC Exam practice
- http://www.qrz.com/page/ham-radio-howto.html - Summary
- http://www.arrl.org/getting-licensed - Getting Licensed comments
- http://www.arrl.org/licensing-education-training
- Ham Lesson of the day - archives
- KB6NU Study Guides
- Ham Test Online
Tuesday, September 24, 2013
What to do with an NW-MESH system?
Folks keep asking what they can do with a NW-MESH (equivalent to HSMM-MESH, Broadband Hamnet, etc).
Here's my list of what I've done or an doing with it.
- I needed to put the Raspberry PI on the internet for a system update. All four sockets in the nearest router were in use. I grabbed another NW-MESH router, turned it on and plugged in the PI. It was on the Internet and updating..
- The file server is in the back of the house. Both formats of new movie are on the laptop in the front room. I run WINSCP from the laptop and copy the files to the server and in a little while the 8+ Gigabytes were safely archived.
- I have an IP camera (Trendnet TV-IP551W) taking pictures of the front yard. It takes a picture every five minutes and transfers it to an FTP server archive. The camera and netbook running the FTP server, filezilla, are currently on the same router but they could be on any of the four NW-MESH routers currently running.
- To access the pictures, I bring up the home page of the lighttpd web server running on the netbook and click on the link to the web cam archives. Then I can access, by day, any of the pictures.
- It's fun to just check the wifi heard list of the Ubiquity Bullet on the table on the back deck. I'm hearing three pages of stations. It will be even more interesting with I raise the height a bit or put on the directional high gain VAGI antenna.
- More soon...
Tuesday, September 17, 2013
Error Correcting Soundcard Packet
My first packet received thanks to a bit corrected... Note the [SINGLE] in the status.
1:Fm VE4GLS To APU25N Via GATE [19:03:06R] [SINGLE]
>160203zDX: W7KKE 45.00.66N 124.00.35W 2068.9km 267ΓΈ 11:04
It's a little thing (that's some 'small' humor) but I got a kick out of it.
Update:
The monitoring of HF 300 baud packet on 10149.3 MHz CF continues. The display screen shows 17 packets from 6 different stations around the country. Two of those 17 packets are tagged as having [SINGLE] bit errors fixed.
No APRS-MESSENGER psk packets decoded yet. I have to tweak the frequency settings on that application.
I need a better antenna....
1:Fm VE4GLS To APU25N Via GATE
>160203zDX: W7KKE 45.00.66N 124.00.35W 2068.9km 267ΓΈ 11:04
It's a little thing (that's some 'small' humor) but I got a kick out of it.
Update:
The monitoring of HF 300 baud packet on 10149.3 MHz CF continues. The display screen shows 17 packets from 6 different stations around the country. Two of those 17 packets are tagged as having [SINGLE] bit errors fixed.
No APRS-MESSENGER psk packets decoded yet. I have to tweak the frequency settings on that application.
I need a better antenna....
Friday, August 9, 2013
Raspberry PI first steps
Some notes from an Email posting - I'll clean up the formatting RSN. Bill
----
There was some questions about where to go next when the PI package arrived. I worked through that this morning and have successfully pinged wetnet.net which I consider a good start...
Here's what I've done. This is the Windows process...
* Purchased a package of PI rev B, case, power module and cable - http://www.amazon.com/gp/
* mkdir /work/pi
* Downloaded the Raspbian Wheezy image from the link at http://www.raspberrypi.org/
* Extracted iso image from .zip file
* Downloaded the SHA-1 calculator tool as described at : http://downloads.raspberrypi.
* Opened CMD window; cd /work/pi; ran calculator on the unpacked image. Yeah - it matches.
* Downloaded win32diskImage tool from http://sourceforge.net/
/work/pi/win32diskimage ;
* Inserted 8 GB Sandisk SD card - Class 6(10 MBs - not great but it's what I had and it was on sale...)
* ran win32diskImage.exe - selected SD card. Selected .iso image. "WRITE" - it said 'success'.. Yeah!
* Essentially followed quick start instructions from : http://www.raspberrypi.org/
- HDMI from PI to TV
* USB keyboard to PI
* 8 GB SD card to PI
* Power cable from PI to power module. Power Module to outlet...
* TV to PI - it's there (YEAH!) and Linux is booting.
* First time there was some setup steps. Interesting but I'll get that later.
* Switched PC from client on the (NW-MESH) network back to Server - Internet Connection Sharing from the Telephone Internet Dongle..
* Network cable from PI to the WRT54G. ..wait.. ifconfig shows 172.27.0.x - YEAH! we're on the net.
* ping wetnet.net - YEAH! it works.
* df -h . ; shows only 1.5 G disk. Hmm - how to get back to that one time config screen? Wasn't hard to find: "sudo raspi-config"
- expanded the file system
- advanced
+ enabled SSH
+ renamed hostname from 'raspberrypi' to 'pi1'
* rebooted - YEAH - now have the full 8 GB available.
# that's the main setup. Here's a couple more items to check out the system.
* checked to see how it compared to the pogo series 4 server. cat /proc/cpuinfo - 700 bogomips, That's close to the 800 bogo's of the pogo. Good enough!
* wondered if if did online updating. Yes - 'sudo apt-get update' worked. 'sudo apt-get upgrade' wanted to bring in 80 MB of upgrades. It's not a good time on the marginal network so I tested bringing in one of the listed packages with a simple "sudo apt-get install
nfs-common". I see now that Raspbian is a Debian branch so the apt-get tool chain is to be expected.
----
There was some questions about where to go next when the PI package arrived. I worked through that this morning and have successfully pinged wetnet.net which I consider a good start...
Here's what I've done. This is the Windows process...
* Purchased a package of PI rev B, case, power module and cable - http://www.amazon.com/gp/
* mkdir /work/pi
* Downloaded the Raspbian Wheezy image from the link at http://www.raspberrypi.org/
* Extracted iso image from .zip file
* Downloaded the SHA-1 calculator tool as described at : http://downloads.raspberrypi.
* Opened CMD window; cd /work/pi; ran calculator on the unpacked image. Yeah - it matches.
* Downloaded win32diskImage tool from http://sourceforge.net/
/work/pi/win32diskimage ;
* Inserted 8 GB Sandisk SD card - Class 6(10 MBs - not great but it's what I had and it was on sale...)
* ran win32diskImage.exe - selected SD card. Selected .iso image. "WRITE" - it said 'success'.. Yeah!
* Essentially followed quick start instructions from : http://www.raspberrypi.org/
- HDMI from PI to TV
* USB keyboard to PI
* 8 GB SD card to PI
* Power cable from PI to power module. Power Module to outlet...
* TV to PI - it's there (YEAH!) and Linux is booting.
* First time there was some setup steps. Interesting but I'll get that later.
* Switched PC from client on the (NW-MESH) network back to Server - Internet Connection Sharing from the Telephone Internet Dongle..
* Network cable from PI to the WRT54G. ..wait.. ifconfig shows 172.27.0.x - YEAH! we're on the net.
* ping wetnet.net - YEAH! it works.
* df -h . ; shows only 1.5 G disk. Hmm - how to get back to that one time config screen? Wasn't hard to find: "sudo raspi-config"
- expanded the file system
- advanced
+ enabled SSH
+ renamed hostname from 'raspberrypi' to 'pi1'
* rebooted - YEAH - now have the full 8 GB available.
# that's the main setup. Here's a couple more items to check out the system.
* checked to see how it compared to the pogo series 4 server. cat /proc/cpuinfo - 700 bogomips, That's close to the 800 bogo's of the pogo. Good enough!
* wondered if if did online updating. Yes - 'sudo apt-get update' worked. 'sudo apt-get upgrade' wanted to bring in 80 MB of upgrades. It's not a good time on the marginal network so I tested bringing in one of the listed packages with a simple "sudo apt-get install
nfs-common". I see now that Raspbian is a Debian branch so the apt-get tool chain is to be expected.
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