AmateurRadio.com

Kit Hall GM4EMX has sent details about a new unattended APRS iGate that will be located at his QTH in Aberdeen. The callsign will be MB7UAB.

Kit told me something I didn’t know about the allocation of callsigns for APRS stations in the UK.

• All APRS station callsigns start with MB7U (for Unconnected, I would guess.)
• A single letter following the U denotes a digipeater (e.g. our local digi MB7UQ)
• Two letters following the U denote an iGate.

I hope Kit’s new iGate will soon spark some activity in the Aberdeen area which up until now has been pretty much an APRS desert.

I never did find out what was causing Google Chrome to crash so much on my computer. However, after several months of using Chrome I found Firefox rather slow and clunky. So I had a look round to see if there were any other browsers. It turned out that there were more alternatives than I ever imagined.

The first alternative browser I found was one called Avant. This is a powerful browser with a lot of configurability, developed by a Chinese programmer. It boasts the ability to render web pages using your choice of the Internet Explorer, Firefox or Chrome rendering engines, which is probably handy if you’re a website developer. I set it to use Chrome and it displayed the pages that had give me trouble with nary a murmur. But I found the user interface rather heavy after the minimalist approach of Google Chrome. So I kept it on my hard drive but carried on looking.

The next candidate I stumbled across was SRWare Iron. It almost counts as two browsers in one, as it installed two shortcuts on my desktop, one named SRWare Iron and one named Chromium, both pointing to the same executable. This turns out to be a browser built from the same open source code as Google’s Chrome by a German company. Germans seem to be a bit sensitive about privacy, so the main difference with this SRWare browser is that it does not send information about your browsing habits back to Google. What, you didn’t know Google Chrome did that? Neither did I until I discovered this program, though I thought I opted out of this during Chrome’s installation.

Apparently you can opt out of all the Google tracking if you choose the appropriate settings in Chrome, but most users won’t do this. So Iron / Chromium could be said to be a better version of Chrome than Google’s, certainly from the privacy point of view. Chrome extensions like AdBlock Plus work as with the real thing. Chromium even supports the ability to log in to your Google account to save and restore your bookmarks and other settings, which was very handy.  Try it, you’ll never notice the difference.

I’m happy with Chromium / Iron as my default web browser now. So far, it hasn’t crashed on me. But I also discovered another Chrome clone. It’s called Comodo Dragon and it’s made by the Comodo security company. Dragon is also built from the Chrome open source code and omits the Google tracking code, but it     has some extra security features added by Comodo. So it looks like an even better option if you are really privacy-conscious.

I’ve not been doing much radio the last couple of weeks. I haven’t been able to raise much enthusiasm. No doubt for those of you with jobs, being able to play radio all day would be a blissful situation. But it’s not much fun being in this small, sweaty shack in this hot, sunny weather. I’d really like to be able to get out and about in the beautiful Lakeland countryside, further than I can reach on my own two feet. And my hopes of doing that took a bit of a blow yesterday.

I did continue trying to get Google Chrome to run on my shack computer. For a short time I thought I had succeeded. I spotted that Microsoft .Net 3.5 was installed twice. I uninstalled both copies and Chrome appeared to be stable after that. Then I spotted Windows Update installing Net 3.5 again, and before I could stop it Chrome immediately crashed. I tried removing Net 3.5 again after disabling automatic updates, but this time it didn’t help. I could crash Chrome every single time I opened this post from PD0AC’s blog. Usually Chrome would just vanish from the screen, but other times I got blue-screen or black-screen error messages and once Windows XP spontaneously rebooted. So I have given up.

Goodbye Chrome. It was fun while it lasted. But in the last day or so Google Chrome has become so crash-prone that it is unusable. Suggested solutions amounted to disabling plugins and add-ons but my installation was pretty basic apart from AdBlock. Nevertheless I took the step of uninstalling Chrome completely and then reinstalling again. But it still crashes. Just trying to sign in to Yahoo is enough to crash it.

So it’s back to Firefox. I don’t have time for flaky browsers.

I’m still getting the repercussions from the lapse in attention which resulted in LinkedIn sending invitations to anyone who has ever emailed me. Most people have just deleted or ignored them. A few were concerned that the email might have been a virus and contacted me to ask if I really had sent it. But now LinkedIn is emailing everyone who didn’t reply with a message saying I’m still waiting for them to accept the invitation.

A few people have been annoyed by these emails and have asked me to stop sending them. Unfortunately the deed was done a few weeks ago and I have no idea how to put a stop to it. If I had known that it was going to cause this much hassle I wouldn’t have even considered accepting someone’s invitation but hindsight is a wonderful thing that I unfortunately don’t possess and now there is no undoing it.

Last week when I posted about using the new dual-mode version of WSJT-X I mentioned a utility I had used to put my Elecraft K3 into split mode before starting WSJT-X and returning it to normal operation after finishing. I’ve been asked to share information about it, so here you are.

The utility is called KRun, from K-Run. K for Elecraft radios (K2, K3 etc.) and Run because you use it to run another program. It was written to use with my Elecraft transceivers but I see no reason why it should not work with other radios that use a similar CAT command syntax such as Kenwoods. Don’t ask me if it can  be used with your Yaesu or Icom radios because I know nothing at all about their command format.

If you run the utility it puts up a window listing its command line parameters.

These command line parameters are what tells KRun what you want it to do, so you’ll need to know how to create a shortcut containing command line parameters, or use a batch file. You’ll also need to know what CAT commands to use, which will require a degree of familiarity with the Programmer’s Reference manual for your radio.

The parameters are:

• –com=n where n specifies the serial port used by your radio
• –baud=x where x os the baud rate to use
• –cmd=string specifying the string of CAT commands to send at startup
• –wait=s where s is an optional delay in seconds to give the commands time to execute
• –-run=”path” the path of the program (e.g. WSJTX) that you want to run
• –arg=”args” optional command line parameters for the program specified above
• –ucmd=string optional CAT commands to send on closing

An example invocation is:

C:\Ham\krun\krun.exe –com=3 –cmd=FT1; –run=C:\Ham\WSJT-X2\wsjtx.exe –ucmd=FR0;

where:

• C:\Ham\krun\krun.exe is the location on my computer of the KRun utility
•  –com=3 specifies the com port to use
• –cmd=FT1; is the CAT command to set my K3 into split mode (with terminating semicolon)
• –-run=C:\Ham\WSJT-X2\wsjtx.exe is the location on my computer of WSJT-X
• –ucmd=FR0; is the CAT command to cancel split mode (with terminating semicolon)

To create a shortcut to do this, first create a shortcut to KRun itself, then edit the Target to add the command line parameters as given above.

You can download KRun as a zip file which contains KRun.exe, the utility itself, and WSJTX, a shortcut configured as described above. If you try to use the provided shortcut instead of creating one from scratch yourself you will need to change the program paths to suit your own system.

So there you are. It works for me so hopefully it will work for you. If it doesn’t then a better solution would be to persuade K1JT to add these CAT commands to WSJT-X!

My Motorola Droid has been sent away for repair (requiring a part from China, a two week wait and a cost of over £50.) As I am therefore without a phone, I thought that I would try to install XDAndroid on my old HTC Touch Pro. I tried it once before about 3 years ago and it worked well enough to convince me that Android was a better phone operating system than Windows Mobile 6.1, but not well enough to be usable as an everyday phone.

This time I hoped that there would have been some updates to make Android more stable. The installation process seemed easier than I remembered. I thought I would document it, not just for others but for my own benefit in case I want to repeat the procedure for a third time.

You will need a blank microSD card. 4GB is plenty big enough. Then download the XDAndroid package from the repository at http://htcandroid.xland.cz/. I chose GBX0C_Full_Bundle_2012.04.24.zip because it was the newest.

Unzip the package to a temporary folder. The result is a folder named after the bundle,containing the files. Copy all the files (but not the folder itself) to the root directory of the microSD card.

The next step is to identify your model of phone. There is a long string of letters and numbers under the battery near the serial number stickers in tiny print. It will be 4 letters and a number. Mine said RAPH100: Raphael is the code name for the Touch Pro.

Having determined the code name, look in the files you unzipped for a folder named Startups. It contains several folders with names to match the phone. In the RAPH folder was another folder named RAPH100. That folder contains a file named startup.txt. Copy this to the root directory of the microSD card along with the other files. Now you can put the microSD card in the phone, replace the battery and switch it on.

Using the WinMo file manager look in the root of the storage card. There should be a file named Haret.exe. This is a Windows program. Run it. You should see a window that says “Booting Linux” which quickly changes to a console screen with tiny writing scrolling up the screen (I needed the extra strength reading glasses I use for fine electronic work.)

Watch the boot process carefully. It should stop at one point and ask you to perform the screen calibration. When I did this before, I recall that the the script displayed boxes on the screen that I had to tap with the stylus. This time there were no boxes displayed, so I had to guess the positions. The first time I guessed wrong: the result was an installation of Android that was insensitive to my touches.

I tried again after watching a YouTube video of the process which showed the screen calibration and saw that the tap points were: top left, top right, screen centre, bottom left and bottom right. After you have tapped the five points the boot process then carries on for several more minutes after which you should see an Android opening screen. Swipe the lock to the right and away you go!

In Windows Mobile you can create a shortcut to the program Haret.exe in your Start Menu which will make it easier to start Android next time. Do be certain that you create a shortcut not a copy because Haret has to be run from the root of the microSD card.

This version of XDAndroid seems a bit more stable than the one I installed three years ago. It’s good enough  for an emergency phone, which this is, but it runs slowly and functions like Bluetooth and GPS don’t work reliably. Development of this Android port ceased a year or so ago so there won’t be any updates. Interest in running Android on HTC Windows Mobile devices ebbed away as the users got themselves real Android phones. But it will do for now. It whiled away an afternoon and resulted in something I can use until my Droid returns from repair.