This is a great audio / short story about ham radio, which is produced/written by Jeff-KE9V. If you have never listen to it, I highly recommend downloading it. Jeff took is down for a a couple years, I was super lucky that I had saved a copy before it went off line.
Last week a discussion was started among some ham radio friends about replacing the fan on a particular Kenwood mobile radio. While I don’t have that particular radio, I do have the Icom ID-5100, which I like very much except for one annoying thing. The stock fan is REALLY LOUD. So I spent less than five minutes finding a good Google article posted by G6NHU about his efforts replacing the fan on his 5100. He even posted a YouTube video with the before and after impact of the fan change.
I decided to order the fan G6NHU recommended and one of the brand that my friend had recommended from his Kenwood replacement. (The Icom has a slightly different size, but it was easy to find it on Amazon). I ended up trying both and the Noctua was quieter, as in virtually silent. I had to put a flash light directly on the blades to confirm it was working, because I couldn’t hear it. The other fan G6NHU recommend was also much quieter than the stock, but this was a situation where you got what you paid for.
Here are some pictures of the actual surgery. The toughest part for me was getting the fan screws out initially. They were put in with some sort of loctite and I couldn’t budge three of them initially. But 30 seconds under the heat gun and I was able to remove them. Then it was just a matter of cutting the special connector from the stock fan and soldering it on the new fan.
Here is a snap when I got the fan off initially.
Next up is a snap of the inside, it was pretty easy getting the bottom cover off and just un-plugging the stock fan.
Here is the initial test, to make sure everything was working before re-assembling.
Should note the super quiet fan is a three wire type, the yellow wire provides RPM data back to PC motherboards. Since I didn’t need it, I just cut it off when I was sure it was working.
Here is a picture of everything put back together. The fan is a desert dirt brown, which clashes pretty bad with the all black of the ID-5100 case. But the body of the radio lives under my desk and I don’t tend to care to much about colors. (Function over form)
Attended the Seaside hamfest this weekend. I am pretty sure that I attended my first one 30 years ago or really close to it. I enjoy seeing people and hanging out, but there is little at the hamfest that actually interests me. I bought my normal bag of adapters and misc. connectors and then tried to wonder around the main flea market area. Since I’m still not doing great with the leg thing, I ended up going back to the room to rest after an hour.
My main reason for coming this year was to give a talk on the WWARA and repeater coordination. The idea was to hold a short membership meeting during the talk (which I managed todo in less than two minutes) and then give a talk about what repeater coordination actually is and some of the things the WWARA does for regular hams. The room was nearly filled and people were asking questions, so I’m going to call it a success. Here is a link to the talk.
Spent most of Friday afternoon and Sunday afternoon working on the Beacon Hill HamWAN site. Here are the pictures from the two days.
Friday I finished the rack build out, which was mainly getting the UPS batteries wired up and assembling the PDU and Switch. With that working, I was able to configure enough of the PtP link to Baldi (which Bart had installed the previous weekend) to allow the admin group to get into the site.
Today the crew got the S2 sector installed (what I call the Kenny sector, since it points at my QTH) and another PtP antenna for Haystack. They were all at least talking to each other when we left, but I think more admin configuration is needed. (where is DHCP guys?)
Next weekend is another PtP dish for Gold and then S1 / S3 sectors. Got to use a rotary hammer today to drill holes in the concrete for the PtP dish. That was cool….
Forgot to post these pictures of the trip to Lyman Hill last month. The trip was to install the new 224.78 repeater. The most interesting thing about the trip was the ‘crowd’ we found when we got up there. Another amateur group was working on their repeater in another building and the WireISP guys were there. (the incredibly messing / scary rack next to the repeater is the WISP)
Spent the afternoon helping out with a new HamWAN site installation. About half the day was spent hauling up all the equipment. (Full size Dell rack, batteries for UPS, four dishes and three sector antennas) I spent the rest of the time trying to install the UPS, which was really a bunch of rare parts. What I got done will need to be yanked out and re-done on Friday, since I was working with a bad set of assumptions. (No worries, it will be quicker the second time :-)
Like an idiot I got no pictures of what I did, but did get a bunch of pictures of the outside and the one dish Bart got mounted. (Mostly, it will also need some additional work)
I was asked to give a talk on HamWAN this morning at the Sky Valley ARC club. It was the first ‘official’ request I have gotten since putting my name down on the local ARRL speaker list. It was probably the third time I have talked about HamWAN, but the first planned on, I even had slides this time!
Last week I gave a quick introduction to the Mac OSX program called Buster (for accessing the DSTAR reflectors) and something called AMBEserver (Which leverages the NWDigitalRadio’s ThumbDV or PiDV products). Here is a PDF of the slides.
I got a Icom ID-5100 for Christmas and a couple weeks ago finally pulled it out of the box and put it on the air. There are a number of things I like about it, but there was one glaring issue, it didn’t play well with my homemade DSTAR repeater. Some Google searching reveled this is a common problem, the ID-5100 is very picky about the signal shape, which means I don’t have the audio levels set quite perfect on the GMSK modem.
So I have been ‘planning’ to upgrade my DutchSTAR GMSK modem to a DV-RTPR board on the repeater for a while. (Like maybe three years?) Since fixing the ID-5100 problem was going to require messing with all the stuff to update to the DV-RTPR board, I decided to finally just make the switch. I found the partially built cable to connect it to the repeater and finished it, then dragged everything into the repeater room to hook it up. Getting the DV-RPTR to play with the repeater was really easy, which means it was time to put the new computer I built for the DV-RTPR into place as well.
That is when the plan feel apart a little. The Ubuntu OS installation was so old, it isn’t supported anymore. So before I could do anything, I had to rebuild it. Since I have a serious issue getting USB thumb drives to boot anything, this ended up taking hours. I finally got it to boot and started the installation before going to bed. Of course it stopped a short time later needing some input and I had to un-wedge it this morning. It is still going, but at least appears to be at the stage where it is installing packages.
Since I’m stupid, I decided to check the version of Ubuntu on my desktop linux box and found it was also running the out of data version now. The thought of flattening it and starting from scratch pained me, so I just told it to auto-update itself. I figured the worst that will happen is I need to flatten it and start from scratch anyhow. So it is also now unpacking a butt load of packages.
There exists a little piece of rock that the US claims as their own in the Caribbean, just east of Haiti and and west of Jamaica called Navassa. There isn’t much there, but the US Fish and Wildlife control who can land on the rock and nobody has been allowed for many years. This makes it a highly desired contact for hams chasing DX, since many were probably not even licensed the last time the island was on the air.
For the last couple weeks a major DXpedition has been under way on the island. I didn’t even try to log a contact with them the first week, since all the big guns were lighting them up. Today is their last day on the island (Actually I think most of the crew has already left) and they have asked everybody who has already got a contact to stop trying, so us little guys have a chance.
Well my noise situation sucks, I can’t even hear them on 20m. But they have been quite strong on 10m all afternoon and after calling them for several hours, I finally got into the logs. Yea!
2015-02-16 / UPDATE: I just checked and confirmed my contact made it into the log officially. Guess I need to figure out how to upload stuff to LoTW again.
K1N Confirmed for KU7M