John’s Blog

Airmail is “a message program specifically designed for connectioto a HF radio mailbox station.” it is “a 32-bit program which runs under Windows-95, 98, NT, 2000 or XP”. For the last few weeks I’ve been testing it on Ubuntu using Wine. My Linux laptop is re-cycled, so it didn’t come with an OS. So I installed Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Desktop Edition. After installing my APRS application of choice, Xastir (from source of course). I happened to read somewhere that Airmail seemed to work reasonably well with Wine. So I tried that as well.

After installing Wine (apt-get install wine), I downloaded airmail, and one double click later it was installing. Better than that, I’ve had it running since (needed no reboots!) I’ve tested the VHF Packet Module, POP/SMTP Client, POP/SMTP server, Telnet Client, and all seems to be working as it should. There is one quirk I’ve found.

There is an option in the mail client to “Check Spelling as you type” and this is enabled by default. With this enabled, text in the ‘body’ of a message appears white on a white background (and is thus invisible). Once disabled it works fine. It took me a while to find the solution and this question has appeared a few times on the airmail list, and the simple fix is to select “Tools” then “Options”, then the “Spelling” tab which is the 8th from the left, and make sure there is no ‘tic’ in the  “Check Spelling as you type” box.

If this works for you, send me a mail, ei7ig at winlink dot org

Looking much better, heck I might even get it finished before we run out of summer!

Eamonn seems to be enjoying his holidays. With R$15 all-you-can-eat dinners and R$1 for a beer, I’m not surprised. I, on the other hand have been so busy recently it just was not funny.

AREN has been soaking up my spare (ha!) time, with meetings, documentation, and other stuff that comes with trying to organise volunteers. AREN was also involved in recent exercises with other Voluntary Emergency Services in South Tipp,

and last weekend AREN members aided the Glen of Aherlow Fáilte Society with communications for the Glen of Aherlow Walking Festival, as the weather was forecast to be good, numbers were quite high. Communications from both sides of the mountain were provided and everything seemed to go without a hitch (other than the torrential shower just before walkers got to the buses on Saturday afternoon). Bernard, EI8FDB, has a few pics up on flickr taken during the event. Finally though, things are slowly getting under control (even on the DIY Front!) AND we found that shim6 bug I was talking about, so I can make some headway in work.

Now, as to the title of the post (Thanks Seamus!). I’ve been collecting bits and pieces for a while (2 years or so), batteries, solar panels, charge controllers etc. I finally got the panels installed, (sub optimally unfortunately, but wife friendly) two weeks ago. I let the batteries charge up fully, then I switched off my 13.8Volt PSU, and switched on the (slightly adjusted) 24v-12V DC DC converter. That was the 27th of May. Since then I’ve had my radio gear running from it just the battery bank and the panels (some of it 24×7). At this moment in time (approx 11 days later), the panels have put 204Ah into the battery bank, the DC-DC converter has consumed 350Ah.

Miguel was asking me to work this out during the week, so here goes (its late, and I’m tired so I could easily be way off here)

554 * 24 (volts) = 13.296 (KWh)

13.296.5 /11 * 365 = 441.18kWh for the year.

My last bill says a unit costs 15.02 cent (incl vat), so I should ’save’ about €66.26 on the ESB Bill over the course of 12 months. Or to put it another way, it will never pay for itself, economically speaking.

I’m still experimenting, and will probably add more panels (and more ‘load), but so far, I’m happy as a pig in the proverbial with it. The problems will arise however as winter descends (and that €66.26 total will be in doubt). In those (in)famous words, A lot done, more to do.

I’ve been reading Jeff’s weblog for quite a while.  I tend to agree with him pretty much all of the time when he comments on the Amateur Radio hobby, not because I want to, but more because he is spot on.  His latest post should be required reading for any club setting up for Field Day (but we know it won’t) in order get clubs thinking about how best to present the hobby to others.

I mentioned SHIM6 way back in November 2006, when I was working on a project where we were doing an ‘initial look’ at SHIM6.  Well now I’m back looking at it again for a different project. So I  have been putting together a testbed here in  TSSG in order that we can complete a fuller analysis of  Sébastien’s implementation.

Unfortunately I’ve not really got ‘decent’ results yet due to a ‘comedy’ of failures of older hardware that I have re-tasked for the job, and there’s one pesky bug that we haven’t quite found yet that is disrupting things, but hopefully I’ll have more ‘interesting’ results in the relatively near future.

So far (pesky bug allowing), the fail-over aspect seems to work quite well, which is very very cool when you see it in operation.

John, EI8JA, and Nicky, EI3JB are driving back from Belarus after visiting with Chernobyl Aid, Ireland. EI8JA has brought an APRS Tracker with him (a Kenwood TH-D7).

Safe driving fellas.

From the ARRL NEWS:

“On Monday, May 12 at 0628 UTC, a magnitude 7.8 earthquake hit Sichuan, China. The Chinese Radio Sports Association, the Chinese IARU Member-Society, has designated the following frequencies for emergency services involved in the rescue: 14.270, 7.050 and 7.060 MHz. The ARRL encourages US amateurs to be aware of the emergency operations on those three frequencies.”

Mine was cold, very cold. Friday morning I posted to a mailing list in work that I was going to set up a station in the car-park, a few colleagues braved the elements and helped me set up a station (thanks lads).

I decided to do it the hard way and enlist help in putting an 80m dipole together, while I put the VHF/UHF antenna together and on the pole. When we got the pole up, my radio, the FT-857 was not happy with a very high reflected power level (SWR).

It turned out that the antenna was about 30 feet to short. So down it came. All was well on the second attempt and I was happy when John, EI9JO returned to my call. I worked several other stations nationally (on 80meters using Near Vertical Incidence Skywave Techniques) some through the South East Repeater Network (part of which is maintained by SEARG), and some stations in Europe using PSK on 30meters.

It was cold, but it was fun.

Finally, some fine weather has coincided with me being at home. Its amazing how much (or how little) you can get done when its not raining.

Which is it? Personally, I think they are fantastic.  The are a lot nicer looking than some of the other structures visible from the same spot, and far more functional.  What really surprised me though was how quiet they are in operation.  The traffic moving along the road from Kilmeaden to Portlaw was easily able to drown out what I think was the noise from them.

Last Monday, Tipperary Amateur Radio Group were on top of Slievanamon (the Mountain pictured behind the wind turbines), participating in the Spring Leg of the Irish Radio Transmitters Society’s 2 Meters Counties Contest.  After some generator trouble, we got going and spend an enjoyable few hours up there (pictures), making approximately 57 unique contacts in 24 counties. It was great to see so much activity on the band.

Last week I was in Innsbruck, Austria, helping Miguel at the Tridentcom conference.  There was lots to take in and lots of folks to meet, too much in fact. I briefly managed to get outside for a look around and take some pictures on Tuesday evening.  The rest of the time was spent either attending technical sessions, or continuing technical discussions afterwards.

Getting set up for the contest was a technical challenge of a different kind (one could consider it therapy almost!).