Upgrading weekend…
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.