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Photo taken at: Caplansky’s Deli
Author: scruss
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FIXME: not quite right morse tree
It’s not quite right yet, but I’ve never worked with Graphviz before this evening. Strongly influenced by the graphic on learnmorsecode.com. The wikipedia one is the wrong way round.
Source: morse.gv
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One year of amateur radio: what works
So I’ve just got my digital mode setup working again. It seems that somewhere, somehow, a driver for the SignaLink USB decided to stop working, and at best I got no signal on transmit and a very very quiet one on receive. Now my mind’s back in radio mode, I realise there’s a ton of stuff I’ve bought and found to be of variable utility. This is the good stuff:
- Rigblaster Pro: this audio interface is far larger and far more expensive than it needs to be, but I got it used for a good price. Coupled with a $3 (!) USB sound card, it makes a sensitive and controllable sound device. I think I now prefer serial PTT-controlled audio interfaces to the SignaLink’s vox-style “Make a noise and I’ll transmit it” mode. It means you won’t accidentally tx system noises. That’s worth having another USB cable lurking about.
- LDG autotuner: because of the wild and pointless diversity in radio interfacing, LDG makes a bunch of autotuners for specific radio models. Mine just works, and will tune my mini-G5RV from 10 to 80(ish) metres.
- Big external meter: a cheap LDG meter is way better than the fiddly bar graph on the front of my FT-857D. I have it set up for signal on receive, and perhaps slightly unusually, AGC on transmit. Since I have a tuner and run almost entirely digital modes, it’s important that my signal doesn’t distort, so seeing AGC and being able to tweak it is important.
- Heil Pro-Micro headset: this is comfy, and keeps the family sane. I have the footswitch too, which really helps to run nets.
- Quarter-wave dual-bander HT antenna: The rubber ducks that all my HTs have are a bit rubbish. A simple replacement antenna allows me to talk through fairly distant repeaters from my sheltered back garden.
- WinKeyer USB: I’m just starting morse. The WinKeyer kit was so well put together it was a delight to build, and seems to be an utterly sound keyer.
- Fldigi: the digital mode program. Reliable, full-featured and free. It basically runs all the time on my shack computer.
- Chirp: I can program all my HTs and my HF rig with this. It’s truly great, and miles better than proprietary programming software.
- PSKReporter: a few minutes after calling CQ, I can see where in the world I’ve been heard. This automatic reverse-beaconing site is magic, and I’m amazed that a lot of digital users don’t even know it’s there.
My one annoyance about having a Linux-based shack is that ham radio is still very stuck in using serial ports. None of my computers have hard-wired RS232 ports, so I rely on USB serial adapters. These mostly work well, but Linux has a habit of shuffling the allocations around, so what was /dev/ttyUSB0 controlling your rig today might be ttyUSB1 tomorrow. You can get around this (if the software supports it) buy using long serial device names from /dev/serial/by-id/, which don’t change. They don’t change, that is, unless you have two Prolific serial interfaces that don’t have serial numbers set, so I can only have one attached at a time. Annoying.
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facebook paranoia
(idea and script by Catherine Raine. animation by me.)
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peaksaver plus, dammit
Toronto Hydro’s just announced peaksaver PLUS, where you get a free Blueline Power Cost Monitor. Dammit! If only I hadn’t already bought one …
(and no, I haven’t yet got the Arduino wireless monitor running, which was actually the whole reason I got into ham radio.)
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… with Bright & Lion
(source photo by Jeff Friesen for Canadian Geographic article Blacksmith’s back.) -
confuzzled: fldigi seems to be interfering with itself …
Fldigi used to work fine, but recent updates may have caused me to drop off the face of the (radio) earth. What it seems to be doing — and I don’t find this at all plausible — is causing interference with its own audio stream when its window has focus, but receiving perfectly when the program window is hidden. As Fldigi is a highly interactive program, this is not much use.Here’s an audio sample showing what I mean: fldigi-psk14070-VA3PID-201206092107z. It’s about 45 seconds long, a sample of the 20m PSK31 band this afternoon, and comprises:- 0-15 seconds: fldigi’s window is in focus. None of the traces in the waterfall resolve to meaningful text.
- 15-30 seconds: I changed focus to another program. The waterfall traces snap into focus; QSOs become readable. The conversation at 2383 Hz goes from line noise to a very clear “… 73 73 Jim and thanks for ans[w]ering the cq …â€
- 30-45 seconds: fldigi’s window is back in focus, and all decoding is cut off.
I’m running fldigi 3.21.43-1~kamal~precise from the Ubuntu Amateur Radio Software Updates repo. Hardware is a Thinkpad R51 (a bit old), latest Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, a FT-857D into a Signalink USB, and the audio’s being handled by PortAudio. I’m stumped!Update: It was a volume thing. Linux had decided that I didn’t need my main system volume above 10%, so fldigi was picking up noise only.
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not overthinking Raspberry Pi enclosures one bit …
I was half way through marking out the Raspberry Pi‘s shipping box to cut out as an enclosure …
… when I spotted a SparkFun box from an Arduino shield. Aha! Nice thick corrugated card that was reasonably easy to cut with a very sharp knife.
<voice_of_experience>NB: At this point it would have been much wiser to have inserted a memory card before laying this out.</voice_of_experience>
You’re going to have to cut out slots for connectors on the side of the lid. I marked out the path of the lid by closing the box and shading the path that went by the hole I’d cut. Basically, any cardboard you see passing by the hole has to be cut out.
Now with memory card — and you can see I was a bit off.
The pain of misalignment, as seen by the HDMI plug. Knives out!
It’s finally all snugged into the box. It’s not going to move about with all the connectors holding it in place.
Don’t forget the cutout for the video cable in the box flap. I only caught this at the very last moment.
The Raspberry Pi does run faintly warm in the box. I suspect with the warmth, and all the little cutouts, this will shortly become an A-1 Special spider habitat.
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!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Raspberry Pi is in the house.
