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
Posted in Ham Radio | Comments Off on Finally K1N is in the log….
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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I was off all this week and have been catching up on various things. One of the to-do items on my list was finishing the video of my black belt test. I got the video’s of the other black belts done right away, but sort of ran out of steam when it was time to-do my own. I finished putting it together yesterday and got it posted tonight.
I had originally did a short video of one of the three breaks, which included some slow motion video of me breaking a real wooden board. This was done before I upgrade my MBP to 10.10. So I was a little surprised when I attempted to load iMovieHD and it gave me a error message, seems iMovieHD isn’t supported on 10.10. So I had to import the Quicktime video and edit out the intro, so I could glue that footage into the new fully version. Also mean learning the new iMovie, which actually was a little easier to use.
Here is the video….
NOTE: I know this is bad form, but the miss in the first sequence is the only board break miss I’ve had during any of my tests. At the time, I couldn’t figure out what happen. (The second attempt broke the board, but it wasn’t pretty.)
Anyhow, with the video it is pretty clear what happen. CGN Vlcek flinched and moved the board about three inches as I was coming around. It isn’t difficult to break these boards, as long as you hit them in the center. I bounced that attempt off the edge, which means I kicked the board out of CGN’s hands rather than break it. Holding for board breaks is really tough, I’ve found turning my head and closing my eyes is the only way to guarantee you won’t flinch.
Posted in TKD | Comments Off on TKD Black Belt Video….
NOTE: I wrote this blog post over a year ago and never seem to have published it. I just re-read it and had to laugh. I was thinking about tackling this LoTW problem during the downtime this week. The one update to the story is that I have finally managed to upload a set of QSO’s to the system. One manually and then I also managed to get Aether to also work. I still don’t know exactly how to upload QSO’s under my old callsigns. Maybe I’ll work newest to oldest and just deal with it when I get all the KU7M uploaded. I also wonder if I will get there before retiring. :-)
73,
Kenny
———Original Post / 2013-10-27————
I know, I’m really late to jump on this bandwagon. Both because the Logbook of The World has been around for years now and there has been plenty of rants about it. But I have to share. I just went through my LoTW directory on my server at home and I have made four different passes trying to get it setup and working. Meaning I have generated four different sets of certificates over the years. I believe at least one of them was completed successfully, but to date I have never posted a single QSO entry.
So most rants I’m sure are centered around the whole cert process. The cert generation process is certainly a tough set of hurdles, but knowing a tiny little bit about public key certs, I understand why it works the way it does. The world doesn’t yet have a central key authority, so the ARRL had to roll their own. But here is the problem I kept running into, I’d generate a cert pair, finally get it uploaded and then completely lose steam on the process by the time postcard showed up. I also seemed to completely miss that having the public/private key wasn’t enough of a backup. Then there is the general problem that the ARRL seems to have a problem keeping the website up and running.
So fast forward to last week and I got motivated again to set this whole thing up. I downloaded the app to my mac and proceeded to look for the last set of keys I generated when I last tried to set this whole thing up. I immediately ran into the same set of problems, but I was a little bit ahead this time. So while I didn’t have a full backup (which I’m hoping is a *.p12 file), I seem to have had enough to make the ARRL send me a updated set of working keys.
So now I have to complete step two, which is to actually generate a signed log file and get it posted. So I went hunting for Macintosh logging software and decided to try out Aether.(It is available on the AppStore, which is important to me. It supports grid squares for VHF/UHF contacts and also seems to be happy importing and exporting logs) They have a full version on the web you can download and try out. (They support 30 QSOs in the free version) So without really looking at any docs, I managed to setup my station info pretty easily. I then grabbed the last QSO from my paper logbook and entered it. (Yes, I have a paper log book. I have had this logbook since my novice days and has all of my non-contest HF contacts in it)
So far, everything is working pretty well. I then decided to try and push the log to LoTW. This of course requires me entering a bunch of passwords to unlock the keys, but Aether manages to locate the keys without any help. (I’m guessing everything is stuck in my Mac keychain?) So then it tries pushing the entry into the ARRL servers and of course it fails. I try again, again it fails. I then exported the log to a ADIF file and started up the ARRL TSQL app, which is suppose to be able to push ADIF files into the LoTW service. This of course also fails.
Now I’m a little bit lost and try to log into the LoTW website and do it completely manually. Then I figure out the main problem, the LoTW site is down. BAM! Fail all over again. So now I’m stuck again and decided to write this rant instead. I am now going to try and generate certs for my other callsigns, so if I ever make this work, I can upload all the old logs I have. I have a bunch of VHF contest logs that I’d like to upload and most of them are using my old KK7GU callsign. And of course there are years worth of HF contacts in my paper logbook using my original KA7VQD callsign. I think I know how to-do this cert generation/tie it to my main cert. But of course I just realized that the ARRL site is down, so of course I won’t be able to finish this process.
