Snow Time Updates

I think I need a mobile rig on my tractor-snowblower so I can spend some time on the air.  It's that kind of winter.  But I can't really complain, as life is good, the farm infrastructure is holding up, we can still get up and down the driveway and into town, and work is busy but satisfying.

New Ham projects: 
     -Rather than hamsticks I've got a 392M HF and VHF mobile antenna from trxcommunications.   I haven't hooked it up yet but am looking forward to moving the Yaesu FT-450 into the Isuzu and giving it a try.
      -I hope to be part of the RPi in Ham Radio discussion at SeaPac this year.  I'm sure the other Elmers will outclass me completely since my Linux skills are entirely self taught but I have used WSJT-X successfully on Raspbian and on Ubuntu-Mate and have done a few other projects.  (If you want to watch your turtles on VLC, I'm your man!)
      -There should be a tower in my future if all is well.  It may take a little while but it will be nice to do HF activities with a good antenna system.  Maybe after that, an amplifier....
      -When the snow dies down a bit I hope to activate a few more SOTA peaks, as yet unactivated.

As I write another winter storm is sweeping through the area, and I will need to get up at 5 to remove snow from my driveway and my son's as well in time for travel into town for church.  Maybe after I can excite some electrons to emit EM waves....

Barn in the snow

The Long and Snowy Driveway (the first 2/3 anyway)

New Mouse Control Assistants

Cube sats anyone

An opportunity to place cubesats in Lunar orbit!!

What a wonderful opportunity for British Hams.  

AO-85

I was fortunate enough to participate in the 1943-1955 UTC pass of AO-85 over northern Idaho today and made 5 contacts:  K7JA, W7QL, AC0WN (who was activating a national park- does operating from a repeater in space count??), AA5PK, and  N6NUG.  Thank you the contacts!!
Reports from the internet suggested that AO-85 was a bit deaf, and that 100w is often necessary to quiet the repeater.  I am happy to report that 5w and an arrow antenna did just fine!! 
Now I just need to fine tune the operation as it really requires too many hands- hold the antenna, hold the radio and it's microphone/speaker, hold the notebook and pen and be able to write the call signs and times down while keeping the antenna pointed and rotated in the best orientation and remembering to advance the preprogrammed doppler memories as I go.  It is a bit of a cat herding exercise.
DX engineering tells my my IC-9100 should be arriving back next week sometime so hopefully I can resume using the SSB birds as well.   Fun stuff!
I'm thinking of doing a SOTA expedition tomorrow and am wondering if I should try to catch a satellite pass while doing so.   The HT arrow antenna package is light and would be a trivial addition to the HF rig.  HT is a VX-8GR.

For more information on AO-85 see:  AMSAT AO-85
For more information on SOTA see:  Summits On The Air (SOTA)

AO-85 in all it's glory

73
de AD7QQ

SOTA Activation Tuesday

Kamiak Butte
A brutal glacier-covered, highly technical climb,....  OK, its a nice park with well defined path and sunny beautiful Palouse weather.  But it is a SOTA peak.  Not much mystery to it, This is my 4th activation W7W/WE-022.  Here I am, calling CQ CQ SOTA

My settup is a backpack radio IC-703, antenna AlexLoop, power 13.2V A123 Lithium battery from buddipole. 10 watts power, SSB phone

Four contacts on 20 meters, none on 40 meters.  Next time I should try a weekend, but unfortunately I usually work weekends.  Thank you Gary and Martha Auchard, Thomas Taylor, and Richard Pierce.

W0MNA
W0ERI
W7RV
N6PKT

It was a lovely walk, about 70 F, breezy.
Until next time
73

Memento Mori

Death comes for us all, and one of the tasks that often falls to a ham operator is to assist a widow in the disposition and disposal of the ham radio gear after someone has become a silent key.  Today I will be going through the extensive shortwave radio collection of a co-workers husband who has passed away.   If this is interesting to you look on ebay for the next month or so, or drop me a line in the comments. The proceeds will go to the widow, of course.  This gentleman reviewed SW radios for an online forum and so was sent a very large number of radios for technical review, including several SDR's.

WSPRs in the attic

Here is a picture of the WSPR connections from my attic RPi settup.  This particular incarnation was using Ubuntu-Mate, 5 watts, and the AlexLoop antenna.  Even at 5 watts the AlexLoop would cause interference with my Mac Mini monitor.  Strong magnetic fields....

Fun stuff.  It's amazing how far you can communicate on 5 watts, albeit only a few pieces of digital information

Raspberry Pi Activities

While waiting for the IC-9100 to come back from repairs, I thought I might share a little of some recent Raspberry Pi (RPi) projects.

Project 1)  RPi Tor Router
http://makezine.com/projects/browse-anonymously-with-a-diy-raspberry-pi-vpntor-router/

Works great, appears as an alternate WiFi source with its own password.  When attached all internet traffic goes through the Tor system.  If one uses standard browser settings this doesn't add much security so it is not a "stand alone" security system.  None the less pretty cool.  This version is attached to my main router, and is not for coffee shops, etc.

Project 2)  WSJT-X on RPi

Connected to the radio it acts as a stand alone low power (5V, 2.1 Amp) computer running the Joe Taylor WSJT-X suite.  I'v run it for 4 weeks straight on a cell phone recharger which itself was charged with a solar charger, while controlling my Yaesu FT-450 in WSPR-2 mode in my attic with an AlexLoop antenna.  I've run both the Raspbian linux version and the Ubuntu-Mate version, and both work well on the RPi.  I plan to use this next camping/field day expedition.
WSJT-X:  http://physics.princeton.edu/pulsar/k1jt/wsjtx.html


Project 3)  TurtleCam!!
Turtles and ham radio go together like...... well, they just go together.  There are four tortoises who live in my ham shack/lab in the attic and keep me company.  There is something wise and peaceful about the life of a tortoise:  Eat for an hour, sleep for an hour, court and make love for an hour, repeat.
These activities are most enthusiastically engaged in when large hairy bipeds are not leaning over staring at them so I have a RPi cam sending continuous mp4 video through the wifi system and viewable on the VLC browser on any device, including my cell phone.  Now I can watch them without making them self conscious.  Turtle voyeur, I guess

Project 4)  Goosecam
Ok, so this is essentially the same as turtlecam, but for watching the small flock of geese we keep next to the house and conveniently below the attic window in the hamshack.  We have 4 growing goslings who are very entertaining in that until recently they were small enough to escape the main fencing and wander in the yards eating the sweet grass there while the adult geese go bananas trying to watch them on the other side of the fence.  Actually I was pretty worried, too, as we have couple of eagles nesting nearby in our timber who have already killed 3 chickens until I covered their run and coop with bird netting.  But the goslings have made it through until now they are as large as the eagles (they are the very large Embden geese, the largest meat breed) even though they are still peeping in their high pitched hatchling voices.  So, to help keep an eye on them and just because it was fun I mad a window goosecam.  None of these video streams are ported to the outside world so they are purely for at home entertainment.

Project 5+)  Other RPI projects not currently in operation:  Apache web server on an RPi,  VPN through RPi,   wifi accessable backup external HD through RPi with some old recycled hard drives,  WSPR transmitter at 200 milliwatts on an RPi, Kali Linux on RPi, etc

So, there it is.  There are a lot of microcircuit ham and non ham projects out there and fortunately one does not need a lot of linux or python programming skills.  I'm amazed how quickly I've been able to pick up the basics, considering I'm not a computer guy.  (I'm a physician with degrees in biology and english literature).  If I can do this stuff, anyone can.

One more set of projects:  Putting various flavors of Linux on anything that can't get away.  I had an old iMac G4 pre Intel machine that wasn't much use for anything, so I put Ubuntu on it.  Now it plays Pandora for me in the background  to provide mood music for the me and tortoises, as well as a few other Linux things.  It can run fldigi and WSJT-X but I don't use it for that.

Lots of fun, if only there were more hours in the day......
73
de AD7QQ sk