AmateurRadio.com

Two months ago I got a new Dell Inspiron laptop to use for my work. I have been very pleased with the computer which is quite fast and has a good keyboard and a very nice screen. However this afternoon I switched it on to do a bit of work and was typing away when the hard drive started making a noise like a cat with indigestion – which anyone who has ever done tech support will recognize as the sound of a hard drive attempting to read a bad sector.

Windows froze, there was no way out but to long-press the power switch, losing the work I had been doing. On start-up, Windows insisted on doing a disk check and printed up a lot of messages that appeared to be to do with errors on the hard drive. Eventually I was able to restart, Windows booted up and it seems to be working normally again. But my confidence in the system’s reliability has taken a blow. In my experience hard drives don’t malfunction once and then run perfectly for ever after. But there’s no sign of any fault now, so I have little option but to wait until the next time it starts making funny noises. 🙁

Finished Warbler in box

A few weeks ago I finished the box to mount the Warbler.  The connectors are all soldered directly to the pcb board so the alignment of holes had to be done carefully.  When doing such layout and drilling I am always grateful of the ‘O’level in metalwork that I finished back in high school thirty years ago now.  (As a sidenote I am currently reading ‘Shop Class as Soulcraft’ by Matthew Crawford which covers the recent decline of school shop classes).

The box is aluminium (showing my British origin with the spelling) and made by Hammond.  To give it a nice finish I spray painted it with a couple of coats of  Rustoleum Universal hammered spray paint and it came out rather well.

The painted surface showing the 'hammered' finish.

The box size is 4.5″×3.5″ so it makes quite a nice compact unit.

I need to look at the final output power of my Warbler as I think it is a little low, but it is performing well and I have made 80m PSK31 contacts out in Wisconsin, Illinois and North Carolina. As previously reported I have also used the Warbler for an Olivia contact.  A great kit and I am looking forward to using it over the Winter when 80m conditions should be better than they are now.  Unfortunately, it looks like Small Wonder Labs have dropped it from their current product line.

I was really pleased last night to hear from Matt Thomas, W1MST who is the Editor at AmateurRadio.com. Matt was kind enough to say that he’d been reading this blog for a while and that he would like to syndicate the posts onto his site.

Naturally, I’m delighted – thank you Matt for your kindness and confidence and I hope that readers will find my posts of interest.

Funnily enough, yesterday, I produced a word cloud based on the last six months of my posts on this site, which gives you an idea of where the emphasis lies at the moment. That’s not to say, of course, that it won’t veer off to somethng very different – as it tends to follow whatever I’m interested in amateur radio wise at the time.

A few days ago I came across a forum thread discussing ham radio applications for smartphones in which someone claimed that they were using an HTC Touch Pro (the phone I have) dual booting into Windows Mobile and Google Android. I was interested, but imagined that achieving it would require the ability to follow exactly a lengthy sequence of obscure commands with a high probability of turning the phone into a brick. However I was unable to resist looking into it further and discovered that it should be easier than that. It should be simply a matter of extracting an image of the HTC Android port on to an SD card, copying a configuration file that matches your model of phone into the root folder and then running a program (under Windows Mobile) that reboots the phone into Android. Unfortunately I don’t have an SD card of the type used by the Touch Pro so I haven’t been able to try it yet.

I originally bought a smartphone running Windows Mobile specifically because it would run Lynn KJ4ERJ’s APRSISCE, which is undoubtedly the best APRS client on any smartphone by several hundred miles. However, for me that is really about the only good reason for using that platform. I don’t need the ability to sync with Outlook or use Pocket Office as I don’t use any Microsoft applications on my PCs, and I find Windows Mobile to be too much like Windows itself – complicated to use – and not enough like a phone – easy to make phone calls and text messages. Plus, the fact that running APRSISCE all the time drains the battery in a couple of hours leaving you without a working phone has been a big disincentive to using it in the way I originally envisaged.

Whilst Windows Mobile 6.x is an undoubtedly powerful platform, as you can tell from the range of full-featured applications (not just “apps”) available for it, it is also a dead end. I was surprised to find that Windows Mobile currently has just 5% of the market. Microsoft is hoping to reclaim some of its market share with the upcoming Windows Mobile 7. Personally I think it’s too late and Microsoft has missed the boat on this one. I think Microsoft has an over-inflated opinion of the Windows “brand”. People use Windows on PCs because they don’t have much of an alternative, not because they think it’s great. Smartphone users have lots of choices. People love Google because they are always giving us stuff for free, while Microsoft always makes you pay (and then keeps checking your receipt afterwards). So I think Windows Mobile 7 is doomed even if Microsoft hadn’t decided to make it incompatible with earlier versions so that it won’t run any legacy applications – including APRSISCE.

I really wished in the end I had bought an Android phone. Now this dual boot trick will allow me to try the Google OS out and see whether it is really is as good as the hype. More when I receive the SD card I ordered and am able to try it.

(Update: Just checked the status of my order placed on Wednesday with option for first class next day delivery and it is still shown as Pending. Grr! Clearly it wasn’t a good idea to order from MyMemory.)

We are very pleased to announce the winner of a
Wouxun Dual-Band HT
from Wouxun.us!

Thanks to Ed at Wouxun.us for sponsoring this month’s drawing.
We had over 750 entries!

We’re giving away another great prize in October.
Stay tuned and get ready to enter.

OK, on to what you’ve all been waiting for!

The winner of our September 2010 prize giveaway is…

Read the rest of this entry »

Reading through the Southgate ARC blog this morning, I came across this interesting post from Geoff Emery, VK4ZPP.

It was funny, because this very morning, JackFM were playing the Buggles track, ‘Video killed the Radio star’ from 1979 (we hear the playback and it seems so long ago). And I was thinking, we probably really did think that video WOULD kill radio. But here I am, 31 years later (gulp), listening to more broadcast radio than I have in years – and seeing a really vibrant and varied radio scene (though as an industry it’s fair to say that it has its’ own challenges). And of course, “internet broadcasting” has become part of radio, as we would have called it in 1979.

So it’ll be interesting to see whether the predictions of doom for amateur radio ring true. My guess and earnest wish is that as a hobby, it will evolve. It may(will) not evolve to everyone’s satisfaction and how many times have we heard the phrase “but it’s not amateur radio” muttered?

The truth is that the hobby MUST evolve to survive. It cannot survive as it was, for all sorts of reasons. That doesn’t invalidate the pleasure that people gain from taking part in the facets of amateur radio that have existed “for ever” – not at all.

Geoff’s choice of title made me think about about the parallels with the music broadcasting world. The need and desire to broadcast will not go away – only the methods will change. And so, I suspect will it be with amateur radio – the underlying principles will remain, but the methods will evolve.

And the other thing is that moaning and complaining about it won’t stop “progress” either. Just get on with enjoying what you do – engaging with other people and showing them what a great hobby this is; past, present and future.

I’m Tim Kirby, G4VXE and that’s what I think, how about you?

Driving home last night, I was talking to Andy, G0UWS (who incidentally is now on Twitter) who was telling me and Richard, G4ERP that he was planning to be out on the 144MHZ UK Activity Contest that evening.

After we’d eaten and I’d attended to the dishwasher, I popped upstairs and had a quick listen to 144MHz SSB. Sure enough I managed to work Andy who was a great signal, along with a number of local stations. Conditions didn’t seem that great. I came back to the rig a little later on, around 21z when the GB3VHF beacon seemed a lot louder than it had been earlier.

I was able to work a few more people in the East and South East – it’s always good to work into the Suffolk/Norfolk area as well as some of the Cray Valley guys like M0RCV and G0VJG/P to the south-east of London.

Richard, GD8EXI was an intriguing signal. I could barely hear him beaming direct path, but his signal peaked up to the south-east! I didn’t bother to call him, but I strongly suspect I would have been able to work him.

Around that time, I noticed that the PI7CIS beacon was coming through nicely on 2m, so I went over to 70cms to listen for it there. Sure enough it was somewhat above average, though not startling. I tried a couple of CW CQ calls on 432.200 beaming towards the Netherlands, but no luck on this occasion.

All in all, an interesting evening. And thanks to Andy, G0UWS, for without the ‘prompt’ during our earlier FM QSO, I might not have checked the bands.