Hole-n-Wall » 2015

Excuse…

February 20th, 2015 kennyr

Posted in Life | Comments Off on Excuse…

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.

Posted in computers, Ham Radio | Comments Off on Upgrading weekend…

Finally K1N is in the log….

February 14th, 2015 kennyr

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

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ID-5100 Problems….

February 8th, 2015 kennyr

Finally hooked up my Christmas present this weekend and got it programmed for my DSTAR repeater. Discovered the ID-5100 is even more picky about the deviation and levels than the ID-51. I either need to pull the entire repeater down to get at the GMSK modem or finally finish setting up the DVRPTR board I purchased forever ago to replace it.

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