AmateurRadio.com

Or….how I almost ruined my own birthday present.

I had it planned so well: on Friday night I put in all the resistors and capacitors on the Opentracker+ PCB. On Saturday I soldered them on, then put in the other components and soldered them on too. Did a pretty good job, with neat soldering joints. Then last were the two DB-9 connectors. Piece of cake, until I decided to hook the cables up: Bugger! I had switched the male and female DB-9 connectors, so I couldn’t hook up anything!

An hour, a meter of soldering wick and some strong words spoken to myself later they were off. Have I ever mentioned that I don’t like double sided PCBs? No? Well, here it is: I DON’T LIKE DOUBLE SIDED PCBs!!! From a designers point of view I can understand that double sided or multi-layered PCBs are easier to work with and much more efficient. But from a tinker’s point of view they are horrible if you want to (ex)change some components. I noticed that too with the Hi-Per Mite PCB which I made last time.

And yes, I did damage the PCB a bit when removing the connectors and moreover, Murphy paid a visit because it was the most important connection on the data side of the board. After I had figured that one out I carefully soldered a by-pass and I had communication going on between the tracker and my PC. (The Opentracker software is running under Wine on Linux and had no problems with my KeySpan USB-to-serial adapter). The new Baofeng UV-5R was connected to the laptop running Xastir and my other HT, a Kenwood TH-F7E was connected to the tracker. And guess what? It worked! The GPS module found a satellite signal and tracker happily broadcast it to the world, telling it where BX2ABT was located at Sunday afternoon. It was a small world, because I was only running 50 milli-Watts, so the only one who heard it was myself.

But that doesn’t matter. The first steps of BX2ABT on the APRS path are a success and soon Taiwan will have another APRS beacon to track.

I’ve always wanted to operate my radio on Solar Power. This was a fun to do project. I can’t wait to bring it to a Field Day Event.

I bought the aluminum from Metals Depot in Kentucky. (link attached)  They have lots of aluminum shapes and parts to choose from. The parts arrived via UPS. It nice to have a good source like this for ham radio projects.http://www.metalsdepot.com/

HQRP is a good company to buy solar panel parts and controlers from. The QRP part of their name is just coincidental to this being a QRP project.  http://hqrp.com/

de AA1IK

Ernest Gregoire

72

Baofeng UV-3R Mark II

So, as some of you may have guessed, I like to tinker.  For some reason I’m never satisfied with things the way they are when I buy gadgets.  I have an Acer NetBook running Mac OS X, an old Windows Mobile phone running Android Froyo, and a $50 CVS 7″ WinCE NetBook running Debian Linux.  If there’s a mod, I want to know about it.  I had been reading about the Baofeng UV-3R and its capabilities before I ordered the his and hers models and made sure I ordered a programming cable too, so that I could attempt the 220 mod that’s been talked about.  I ordered the cable from someone different than the radios, so as of Thursday it had not arrived yet.  Could I wait?  Of course not.

I also own a Radio Shack Pro-137 scanner.  This is a 1000-channel model that was marketed as a racing scanner.  You can usually pick them up on the cheap because of the racing moniker.  In reality, these are great all-around scanners, with a stalker function that helps when testing commercial radios.  I have a programming cable for the pro-137 that I used, along with ARC software and a RadioReference account, to load all of the local frequencies I wanted.  I was thinking that day, after dealing with several other forms of USB-to-serial adapters that these cables are not all that different.  Just the pins are different.  The scanner uses a 3-conductor 3.5mm plug, and the Baofeng uses a 4-conductor one.

I examined the pinouts for both radios, and realized that the ground and first ring are the same, but the third ring on the scanner’s plug corresponds to the fourth ring on the Baofeng, so it was probably not going to work.  I know this because when you plug standard stereo headphones into the UV-3R, you short

Radio Sack 20-047

out pins 3 and 4 in the radio, causing the radio to transmit.  When using headphones though, if you pull the plug out just a little (about a mm), you get one ear (left) of sound.  I wondered if this would work with the programming cable.  I started the software. and hit the button to download the radio memories onto my computer.  After a couple of tries I found the sweet spot.  About a mm out there is a slight detent you can feel.  That is where you need to be.  It works!  I will post the results of my experimenting with the software and the mod later.  If any of you have one of these cables laying around, it will work.  The stock drivers in Vista and Win7 will even work!  Some Radio Shack’s have these on closeout still.  Stock number 20-047.

The funny thing is this:  Guess what was waiting in the mail when I got home?

–Neil  W2NDG

Yesterday it was my birthday
I hung one more year on the line
I should be depressed
My life’s a mess
But I’m having a good time.

Paul Simon – Have a Good Time

It’s become a tradition that I play this song on May 31st. I did so every year, since I discovered the great Paul Simon. Just a reflection on my own life and every year the song seems to describe exactly how my life is going: it’s a mess, but I’m having a good time.

I make my own good time and so I was good to myself this year. I ordered an Argents Data Systems APRS kit, because I’ve been longing to do something with APRS for a long time now. I’ve already had some success with Xastir and SoundModem decoding APRS signals on my laptop, so I’m good to go now.

My wife was good to me, too, because she brought a Baofeng UV-5R back from China. Even cheaper than the export model, with a cute Chinese lady inside and a lousy Chinese manual. In China they use simplified characters, but also the use and translation of foreign phrases and words is different than in Taiwan. So over here in Taiwan we translate “menu” as 功能表 or “Function List”. Makes sense, right? In China they translate it literally: 菜單 or “Dish/Vegetable List”, like in the different dishes listed on the menu of a restaurant.

Enough has already been written on the Baofeng UV-5R. I can only add the following: “What an ugly looking thing!” The designer should be subjected to some serious Chinese torture. Not that we Westerners don’t mess up every now and then. When having the HT in my hand I constantly had to think of this beauty made by the French truck maker Renault.Maybe theses things are for “manly men” and I’m not man enough to appreciate this kind of design.

Anyway, I am also going to make my foray into the SDR world, because my lovely wife also brought back an DVB-T USB Television stick with a RealTek RTL2832U inside. There has been a lot of talk about these sticks lately and for only US$11 is it worth a try. I’ll keep you posted, but for now I only tried the TV reception (great) and DAB radio stations (non what-so-ever in Taiwan! It seems FM radio is here to stay for a long time).

Together with the other projects that are under way I will have a busy summer holiday.

I finally managed to record some video, with my Canon SX-230, of the Hi-Per Mite Active Audio CW Filter. I had to delay filming by a week due to sinusitis, but this turned out for the best since the WPX yielded enough signals to show what this filter can do. I am more than happy with it and it is going to be a permanent part of my set up. Thanks to Larry (W2LJ) for mentioning this great filter here on this site. The only thing left is to find a case to build it in. This coming Saturday we are going up north to Taipei, so ample opportunity to get one. Enjoy the video.

Dustin, KC5FML from McKinney, Texas is the winner
of our TYT TH-UV3R giveaway from Import Communications!

Congratulations, Dustin!

There are lots of scams on the Internet and I’m usually pretty good at catching them right away. This one, however, was a little trickier and I wanted to take a minute to spread the word about it so that you don’t fall prey.

I received an e-mail notifying me that I had received a Twitter direct message (though Twitter’s user-to-user messaging system).

A crazy Tweet about ME?!  It sounded scandalous! I immediately clicked through the link in the notification to see what the ruckus could be.  But wait…

OK, now I was starting to get a little suspicious. I don’t normally stay logged into my Twitter account, but I’ve never had to sign in to view a Tweet. A little bit of a closer look revealed this:

Sure enough, the URL was “tvviiter.com” — a common “phishing” scam where the bad guys try to trick you into entering your username and password into an otherwise authentic-looking login screen.

Disaster averted!

So what happened here?  Most likely the victim who sent me the direct message in this case, clicked on a similar link at some point and had their username and password stolen.  The scammers then logged into their account, Tweeted out a spam message to the person’s followers offering whatever male enhancement product of the day, and then tried to trick more folks into giving their info by sending out direct messages through the victim’s account.

Unfortunately, unlike most “phishing” scams that are obvious forgeries, these appear to the recipient as legitimate Twitter direct messages. The key tip-off, however, is the fact that the login URL is not “twitter.com” but a spoofed misspelling of the domain name.

The moral of this story… make sure you know “where you are” when you enter your username and password!  A hacked Twitter account is a lot less of a big deal than a hacked bank account.